Louis I. Kahn

I watched a film, "My Architect." It was a documentary by Nathaniel Kahn, the illegitimate son of Louis I. Kahn, the architect who built the Salk Center in CA, among other fantastic buildings. He was never "popular," but he was a genius and his now regarded as perhaps the most important architect of the latter half of the last century. He reminded me of my teacher Ralph Shapey. Both were from Philadelphia (although Kahn was born in Estonia), Jewish, grew up poor. Each was an iconoclast and idealist in an increasingly commercial world, apolitical but ambitious, a misunderstood genius. They may have known each other, since both taught at University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s. Nathaniel Kahn's mother, a landscape architect who worked for Kahn, never married him. He had three children by three different women. His legitimate daughter, Sue Ann, is a prominent musician here in New York. Nathaniel did not know his father well, and made the film as a way of trying to know him.

It was a surprisingly moving film. I found myself on the verge of tears numerous times. And there is nothing I have seen, in modern architecture, that compares to the majesty and simple power of his buildings. Compared to his buildings, the slick style of Richard Meier and Robert A.M. Stern and Philip Johnson seems shallow. The only architect, for me, who comes close to Kahn is Tadao Ando from Japan. Like in Ralph Shapey's music, these men use the language of high modernism to express eternal truths about beauty and humanity and create work which has stunning spirituality. Now my dream is to go the Salk Center when it is deserted, and sit for a day, watching the light shift as I gaze out at the Pacific.

One of the most disturbing scenes in the film is an interview with a prominent Philadelphia architect and urban planner, last name Bacon, who oversaw some important developments in Center City, a job for which Kahn had made some proposals. Bacon rejected Kahn's work, saying that he did not understand urban architecture. Bacon's work is bland, lifeless, and encourages car traffic. Kahn had proposed a city center that encouraged walking, discouraged driving, and would have made stolid, dull Philadelphia a true center of architectural importance. His ideas were rejected, not only because they were too modern for a city which has been lorded over by dull conservatives, but also (it is implied) because Kahn was a Jew. Watching this bland WASP scoff at the work of a true genius was incredibly sad, but in the end Bacon just seemed like an ignorant, mean-spirited fool.