My Architect: A Film by Nathaniel Kahn + A Book By Louis Kahn

MY ARCHITECT

A FILM BY NATHANIEL KAHN

+

CONVERSATIONS WITH STUDENTS

A BOOK BY LOUIS KAHN

A young man sets out in search of a dead father who by chance is a famous architect. He ends up visiting buildings designed by his father in search of a platonic ideal. And in the process he discovers a flawed human being who designed beautiful, yet flawed, buildings.

We start off with a question about the complexities of humanity ….

How can an architect who is unable to let go of his designs – to the extent that he lost many commissions as clients got tired of waiting around for him to perfect his ideas – simply let go of 2 of his 3 children and almost never see them?

We follow with another question about architecture and film-making ….

The architecture of Kahn the father starts with the premise of a Platonic ideal – or maybe the Aristotelian understanding of form as the essence of matter – “Designs derive their imagery from order. Imagery is the memory – the form”. It seeks to find the essence of what a building wants to be. Kahn the son is a filmmaker who finds beauty in human frailty. Is integrity in creativity about what is ideal –or is it about the real?

Then a final question about the architecture of Louis Kahn….

An architect’s architecture .. loved by architects as a lucid reflection of a design process, by owners as a maker of a symbol – a monument – not as loved by some of the users. Why?

And we watch a great film and some beautiful architecture.

” When you are designing in brick you must ask the brick what it wants, or what it can do. And if you ask brick what it wants it will say, ‘I like an arch,’ and then you say, but arches are difficult to make they are expensive. I think you can use concrete across your opening as well. But the brick says, ‘I know you’re right, but if you ask me what I like, I like an arch.”

Louis Kahn

In F+B+T (Film, book & talk), guest curators are asked to put together an evening in which we screen a film and discuss a book – any film,any book, as long as they are related to place or space. The first F+B+T is curated by the MEGAWRA team Mohammed ‘Abdel Gawwad, Abla el-Bahrawy and May al-Ibrashy.

The film is in English – The discussion will be in Arabic.