Art historian Vadim Bass comments on the film My Architect.
In 2003 Nathaniel Kahn made a documentary film My Architect about his father, the great American architect Louis Kahn. The film reconstructs the personality of the architect through his architecture and interprets the buildings through the personality of their creator. This process of cinematic reconstruction reveals the world of Kahn’s architectural thinking and imagination, as well as his complicated personality and often traumatic personal relationships.
The “interpretative screening” of the film will omit family episodes and focus on professional ones, with fabulous cinematography of architecture and fascinating questions about modernism versus traditionalism, personal vision versus corporate building industry, American versus European and Jewish identities in the figure of “eternal wanderer” Louis Kahn.
The discussion of the film will address the fundamental question: Why did Louis Kahn become one of the key architects of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s?
My Architect
Director: Nathaniel Kahn. US, 2003. 1h56, 12+