My Architect

My Architect is a documentary that recounts the different aspects of a particular man’s life: Louis Kahn. Lou Kahn’s son Nathaniel attempts to reconstruct his father’s life and who his father was based on the memories of others, along with some of his own memories. Memory plays a major role in memoir, even though My Architect is a “narrative of filiation” (53) as Rocio G. Davis describes in his article on the documentary. While memory is valuable in some cases, relying on memory alone is dangerous, especially in Nathaniel’s case. Nathaniel relies on the memories of others multiple times throughout the documentary, only to be disappointed.

The first major instance in which Nathaniel relies on memory is when he expects the man who found his father dying in Penn Station, Katz, to recount what had happened that day. Katz’s recollection of the event falls short of Nathaniel’s expectations and does not give much insight on Lou’s death.

The next instance in which Nathaniel relies on memory and is disappointed as a result is when he speaks to Teddy Kolleck, the former mayor of Jerusalem. Kolleck and Kahn had worked on a Synogague project together and Nathaniel wanted to know more about his father. Kolleck however, acknowledges that in his old age, he has lost his memory and only “remembers single items” (Kolleck in My Architect). Thus again, Nathaniel fails to gain insight on what he set out to learn about his father.

Davis talks about the way that Nathaniel goes about learning about his father in the article Documentary Constructions of Filial Memory in Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect and Nicolás Entel’s My Father, Pablo Escobar. Nathaniel’s view of his father is constructed by old images and postcards from his father, newspaper stories, and multiple interviews with his father’s lovers and professional colleagues. Ultimately, Nathaniel is “cling[ing] to the bits of personal memory they might possess or turn to the forms of supplementary narratives that other family members can contribute to the creation of as coherent and complete a portrait of the father as possible” (53). He reconstructs his father in order to gain a holistic view of his father.