Going into watching My Architect, I didn’t know anything about the documentary. I went into it blindly. I saw some things from the summary, but I tried not to let that influence my experience of watching it for the first time. Normally, I would watch something with captions, just in case I would miss something. Watching this documentary without captions was difficult for me. It took longer than it should since I rewatched some parts multiple times.
There were moments throughout this film that spoke to me. And reading Rocio G. Davis’s article, “Documentary Constructions of Filial Memory in Nathaniel’s Kahn’s My Architect and Nicolas Entel’s My Father, Pablo Escobar” finding some of those quotes there meant that it spoke to other people as well.
Louis I. Kahn had believed that “how accidentally our existences are really and how full of influences by circumstances” (12:42-12:54). It was so important that it was mentioned twice. People are products of circumstances. We may be able to work for what we want, but certain things impact it, in order for it to happen. Everything is a chain reaction and a domino effect. One thing happen and it leads to something else and it continues.
One person’s life could impact so many people. Lou was a complex person. There was Lou as an architect and Lou as a person. It’s a battle between private versus public life. Even people that claimed that they were friends with Lou and were close with him, didn’t know everything about him. People only knew what he wanted them to know about him.
One of his colleagues had said that, “he was an incredible man that we all supported and forgave for a lot of things because of what he was doing” (25:41-25:48). Genius and madness tends to go hand-in-hand. With one, the other would follow in some form or another. Lou was an artist with architecture. He had the ideas, but getting there may not always be smooth sailing.
Secrets have a way of coming out. Especially when someone is dead. People know more about a person when they are dead than when they are alive. Yet the person is unable to defend themselves since they aren’t there. His work was his life.
He always said that work was the most important thing. That you cannot depend on human relations. That really work was the only thing that you can count on.
(36:41-36:51)
Lou’s main priority in his life was his work. It did not mean that his relationships did not matter. But that his work was above everything else. Which is probably why his two mistresses were someone that he worked with on projects. They both were single mothers in a time when being a single mother was taboo. Yet with their love for him, they never married and raised his children. They both did not resent him, and have such love for him and understood why he couldn’t be with them, no matter how warped it was.
Kahn had a life with his wife and daughter Sue Ann that people know about and his two other mistresses; Ann and his daughter, Alex, and Harriet and his son Nathaniel, that no one really knew about. People didn’t either know that he was married or that he had three families. Lou was such a mystery, but that was the allure about him.
When Nathaniel had interviewed Ann, this is what she believed, that “in spite of everything, Ann has always felt that we’re all connected. And that we are in some strange way, a family” (42:06-42:13). No matter what happens, they were still a family despite everything because of their circumstances. They all lived near one another and had crossed paths one time or another.
It makes Nathaniel “wonder if Lou thought of it that way. Or was each relationship an entirely new beginning?” (42:14-42:20). People really don’t know what Lou thinks since he never shared.
Lou was a nomad through and through. “There was this sense of a nomad in him. As tragic as his death was in a railway station. It was so consistent with his life, you know” (1:19:17-1:19:28). Even his death match with his life. It showed that he was always wandering without a set destination. He crossed out his address on his passport, as if he really never had a home. “Maybe he never felt settled anywhere. He was a wanderer from the beginning” (1:20:28-1:20:33). This was not something new. This was Lou from the very beginning. When his family moved to America, they had moved around 17 times. He was constantly moving around.
The only constant in Lou’s life was his wife Esther. They were together from when he was 28 until he died. I don’t know if he thought of her house as home. But it was certainly his base.
(1:20:52-1:21:05)
Esther was always there for him despite everything. Even when he cheated on her, not once but twice. At some point, she was probably aware of it. It wasn’t as if she was clueless throughout. Lou always comes back to her. She was probably his normal, even when he strayed from her. Considering she tried to convince his mistresses and their children not to come to Lou’s funeral because she didn’t want them there. They went anyway regardless of her wishes, because even though Lou belonged her, he belonged to them too.
We’re a family through choice. If we care about each other, it’s because we decide to. Not because we happen to be related through some fluke of a father that had these children.
(1:26:29-1:26:44)
In the end, everyone found out about one another. They chose to consider each other as family despite everything. They weren’t at fault. It was Lou and he was no longer there to own up to his actions. Esther was the only one in the “family” that was opposed, but she was no longer alive to have a say. Family is not only those by blood, but it could also be those that we choose.
Lou was a myth to Nathaniel. He was there in Nathaniel’s life, yet he also wasn’t at the same time. Since Lou passed when Nathaniel was so young, it is difficult especially since he was in and out of his life. Nathaniel “always believed that in the end, you chosen my mother and me. That was the myth I lived on. But you didn’t really choose any of us, did you?” (1:27:27-1:27:37).
No one really know where Lou was headed when he died. And no one will know. The only person that knows, is gone. So everything is up to interpretation.
Lou had good intentions, but it may not always seem that way.
He had enormous amount of love. He loved everybody. To love everybody, sometimes do not see the very closest ones. And that is inevitable for men of his stature.
(1:48:40-1:48:56)
Since his focus was on his work, his relationships were not the best. His children, wife, and mistresses did not get what they want from him since he had given that part of himself elsewhere. He gives them whatever he could, but that is not enough. When a person gives so much, there are times when there is not enough left to give.
Nathaniel closed out the documentary by saying:
On this journey, my father became real to me. A man, not a myth. Now that I know him a little better, I miss him more than ever. And I really wished things had been different. But he chose the life that he wanted. It’s hard to let go. But after all these years, I think I have found the right time and place to say goodbye.
(1:50:08-1:50:34)
He was able to get some sort of closure about his father. It may not be the one he had intended, but there was still some sort of closure at the end of it. Nathaniel was able to find himself by finding out more about Lou. Since Lou died when Nathaniel was only 11 years old, he couldn’t do anything then, but he was able to do something now, or at least the now of when he had made the documentary.
