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New Restoration/20th Anniversary
My Architect
Directed by Nathanial Khan
$12 | $8 Speed members
Twenty years after the film opened to rapturous reviews and an Academy Award nomination, a newly restored version of Nathanial Kahn’s documentary My Architect opens at the Speed Cinema.
Louis Kahn, who in 1974 died bankrupt and alone in New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, is considered by many architectural historians to be the most important architect of the second half of the 20th century. He left behind a brilliant legacy of intensely powerful and spiritual buildings – geometric compositions of brick, concrete, and light, that in the words of the Los Angeles Times “change your life.” Kahn’s dramatic death laid bare a complex personal life of secrets and broken promises: he led not a double, but a triple life. In addition to his wife and daughter, there were two non-marital children by two women with whom he maintained long-term relationships.
In My Architect, one of these children, Kahn’s only son, Nathaniel, sets out on an epic journey to reconcile his father’s life and work. I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, and Philip Johnson speak movingly of Kahn’s work (the Salk Institute, the Exeter Library, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Capital Complex of Bangladesh) and the women and children in his life shed light on this secretive, peripatetic man—a dynamo who gave selflessly to his art–but whose relationships were left on the drawing board, only to find completion in this wonderful film. 2003, U.S., DCP, 116 minutes. Recommended for 16+.