Anyone studying architecture in the 1980s or 1990s would know about this, the National Parliament Building of Bangladesh, in Dhaka. It was designed, along with other structures in the capitol complex, by American architect Louis Kahn, who died nearly 8 years before the building was open to the public in February 1982. The above photo of a child contemplating the building and its reflection captures the wonder and mystery of the story filmed by Nathaniel Kahn, shown with his father below. Nathaniel began filming in 1999, a quarter century after his father's death. He'd been only 11 when this happened.
In the documentary that follows, the.younger Kahn seaches for clues to his father's determination to make architectural statements of startllng clarity, at the same time he was concealing the fact that he had started two new families outside his marriage with women working in his office, during the period that included projects like the Richards Medical Center, completed in 1960 on the University of Philadelphis campus...
The younger Kahn interviews medical staff working at the RIchards Center in an attempt to understand his dad's work, and doesn't shrink from revealing that an almost mystical concern with form and light had shortchanged the staff of adequately-sized labs and a responsive climate control system. In a parallel way, Kahn's children by architect Anne Tyng and landscape architect Harriet Pattison (Nathaniel's mother) had to be content with fleeting contacts with their dad on weekends or secretive, late night visits.
The timing of the younger Kahn's documentary allows him to interview architects who worked with Kahn, like Anne Tyng, Moshe Safdie, and Jack MacAllister, and those who watched his career develop, like I.M. Pei, who comments that a career known for 3 or 4 masterpieces is more worthwhile than one credited with 50 or 60 buildings. When Nathaniel interviews his own mother, landscape architect Harriet Pattison reveals what a different world women in architecture faced in the 50s and 60s, and how difficult it was for them to get credit for work that was their own.
During this period when Louis Kahn was living three parallel lives, he was producing some of his most enduring work. The Salk Institute constructed from 1962-'65 in La Jolla, California, provides ocean views for all its staff offices, as well as more generous lab spaces than the Richards Center. It's known for its user-friendly spaces as well as its clarity of form. The linear fountain at the center of the court points at the Pacific beyond. Director Kahn films children exploring his father's work during several sequences, perhaps because it wasn't something he was able to do as a child...
And there's a deft exploration of Kahn's use of light, which is often treated like a building material of its own...
An interview with architectural historian Vincent Scully features a walk through Yale University's Institute for British Art, opened in 1977 and Kahn's final building in the United States, which offers another display of monumental forms in carefully-controlled light.
Carefully-controlled light was part of the assignment when Kahn received the commission for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas in 1966. The building, with its half-ovoid vaulted display spaces, opened in autumn of 1972...
The use of reflecting pools presages Kahn's later work in Bangladesh.
Inside the vaulted spaces of the Kimbell, glare from natural sunlight is controlled by the use of reflectors below the skylights which repeat the curve of the vault in reverse.
Kahn's got a chance to deal with the elemental nature of water in a direct way with his design for Robert Boudreau's concert barge, Point Counterpoint II, which was launched after Kahn's death, but in time for the American Bicentennial in 1976...
The campus of the Indian School of Management in Ahmedabad, India was completed to Kahn's design in 1974, while he was also working on the capitol complex for Dhaka, Bangladesh. The elemental brick forms feature arches and punched openings that shade recessed and often invisible window glazing, in a way predictive of the Dhaka project.
DIrector Kahn interviews Indian architect B.V. Doshi, who worked with Louis Kahn, on the campus. He emphasizes that Kahn thought about light, form and space in a philosophical rather than material way, as part of a kind of mystical quest.
In the film's final sequence, the film shows images of the Bangladesh capitol complex on the artificial lake in Dhaka. The cinematography and images reinforce the sense of wonder and mystery that runs through the story, and through Louis Kahn's work. The cylindrical forms of humble brick and circular arches shading inset windows and passageways connect the portions of the capitol complex shown below to the country's past, and the water surrounding the buildings helps to cool them as well as relate them to the climate of seasonal monsoons. The omnipresent water at Dhaka seems a kind of summation to Kahn's lifelong concern with the reflective element as a theme. By this time in the film, Nathaniel Kahn has already revealed it at the Salk Institute and Kimbell Museum, and of course in that eccentric concert boat...
The repeated form of the arch is also an inescapable theme at Dhaka, and in the cylindrical structures above, the circle of bricks above the half-moon arches continues below them and across the face of the cylinder, conveying a sense of primordial, symbolic intent echoed again by the powerful, cryptic cutouts in the Assembly Building below. Earlier in the film, Jack MacAllister, supervising architect of the Salk Institute project, notes that Kahn often adopted a given inconvenience of a project (like those monsoons) and made it an asset (as in this artificial lake). Another example of this is the necessity of many small concrete pours because the walls were poured in small batches delivered by hand. Kahn decided to create recesses between the poured areas, and insert marble in these reveals; the resulting grid pattern is visible in the shots below.
These buildings almost seem like monuments made by a more advanced civilization on a parallel earth. During the Bangladesh war of independence lasting from March to December of 1971, Pakistani pilots never bombed Kahn's Dhaka complex, then under construction, because from their aerial vantage points it looked like a series of ancient ruins. Director Kahn's filming of this sequence makes it easy to understand that.
Touring the interior of the Assembly Building with director Kahn, Bangladeshi architect Shamsul Wares, who had worked with Louis Kahn on the building, is disappointed to learn that the complex will only occupy 10 minutes of time in the film. He makes it clear that these are more than buildings to him and to his fellow citizens, and that in designing these buildings, Kahn was making a gift of democracy to a young nation.
Shamsul notes that he is aware that in his obsession with bringing these and other buildings to life, Kahn had shortchanged his son and other loved ones of attention, and notes with sadness that society may have gained what the family lost. During the Dhaka sequence, we see some of society's gain in an interview with workers exercising in the plaza near the Assembly building. Because this film was completed over two decades ago, we do not learn that security concerns have recently caused the government to restrict public access to the Assembly and the spaces around it...
In an era when democracy seems threatened on all continents, viewing these monumental works of architecture constructed in the same way they were designed, by hand, over 23 years, creates a powerful picture of what people will do to achieve a dream. That, in itself, can foster a sense of hope. "My Architect" is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Image Credits
All images are from "My Architect", released in 2003 and subject to copyright by Louis Kahn Project, Inc.
