My Architect: A Son’s Journey

Can you get to know someone after he is dead? The answer for Nathaniel Kahn is a resounding yes. He took a film crew along as he made a self-prescribed, quasi-curative, captivating search to understand and bid a final farewell of sorts to his deceased father. Famed architect Louis I. Kahn died face up in a restroom in New York’s Penn Station of a heart attack in March 1974 at the age of 73. He left behind three families: one with his wife of many years and a daughter, and two with women with whom he had long affairs and illegitimate children. All families lived within miles of each other in the Philadelphia area but never crossed paths until his funeral. This conjuring up of the past resulted in an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary and allowed Nathaniel to loosen his father’s knotted legacy of myth, mystery, contradictions, triumphs, failures and uncompromised artistic vision. M.H.