Film: Searching for daddy closure

By Robert Chancey

Obituaries are written by admiring strangers and read by morbid snoops. The rudimentary facts of a person's life and death are released, and a reader sorts through dates and accomplishments to qualify the individual's contribution to human history. Memorialized in print, the deceased are prisoners of editorial judgment.

Unfairly or not, the questions answered in a death notice--savage or saint, purveyor of wisdom or manipulator of ignorance, slave to commonality or comrade of originality, and lover of domestic harmony or concubine of marital discord?--consign the soul of the departed to heaven or hell. And then a legacy is erected and dropped into the laps of the descendants in the final paragraph.

But what if a close relative is unnamed in the obituary? Is a person trespassing in the future if he or she has been erased from the past? Must an illegitimate child denounce a father's casual philandering to insert himself into the legitimate history of a family? And does one invigorate or denigrate a life by exposing its unexposed secrets?

These are the provocative questions raised by the arrival of My Architect, an engrossing and poignant documentary about the public career and shadowy life of the renowned architect Louis I. Kahn. Narrated by Kahn's bastard son, Nathaniel, it is an official history told by an unofficial historian and an unobstructed glimpse of a man who bore two children out of wedlock.

While pondering the celebrated triumphs and the aborted projects of a frustratingly uneven career, Nathaniel delves into the familial secrets that were obscured by Kahn's towering reputation and his singular buildings (the capital of Bangladesh, the Yale University Art Gallery and especially the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif.). It is a loving tribute to an inaccessible father, and a moving attempt by a discarded son to reconstruct a paternal identity and a filial bond from the available artifacts--widely admired public places, archival footage and splintered memories.

Because Kahn so assiduously separated his work from his family, Nathaniel weds these realms together to gain a complete measure of his father. He meets relatives who barely knew of his existence, including an uncle who was the officiating rabbi at his father's funeral and his two half-sisters--one, Alex, was also an illegitimate child never embraced by the immediate family.

Initially, the uncle refuses to believe Nathaniel's heritage, and then chides the architect for dying penniless. Later, the three siblings gather at one of their father's great domestic achievements (the Fisher house) and talk of the exclusivity of Kahn's published obituary and his funeral. These unlikely allies converse like a devoted family; they have bonded despite their father's reckless libido and his wavering commitment to their emotional lives.

Nathaniel also chats with contemporaries of his father (Phillip Johnson and I.M. Pei), devotees such as Frank Gehry and his most notable critic, Ed Bacon, a cantankerous city planner from Philadelphia. What emerges from conversations with patrons, students and colleagues--including Nathaniel's mother, a landscape architect at Kahn's firm--is a portrait of the artist as a stubborn, low-level scoundrel and an intractable, high-minded aesthete.

Despite his genetic link, Nathaniel has created a documentary with structural flaws. The film's visual epiphany--a wordless vista of the Pacific Ocean from the Salk Institute--occurs in the first hour, and the touching reunion of the wayward siblings is shown near the end of the film. Nathaniel shot first and forgot to ask (basic editing) questions later.

That is a small matter. Happily, My Architect reaffirms the supremacy of documentaries over the recent malodorous dreck that has been belched out of Hollywood. Truth is stranger than fiction--and far more compelling.