The 1974 death of architect Louis I. Kahn in New York’s Pennsylvania Station remains an irony and a puzzle. Supporters of urban renewal and architectural preservationists had battled over it. The building’s defenders lost. Kahn died of a heart attack in the men’s restroom of a lesser Penn Station after a returning from his trip to India where he visited one of his nearly finished masterpieces.
He was also heavily in debt and left behind three families.
“Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.”
Kahn was born in 1901 (possibly 1902) on Ösel, an island off Estonia, and the family settled in Philadelphia in 1906. Over the years, Kahn distinguished himself as an artist and pianist, and he helped support his family by playing for silent movies. His classmates often ridiculed him for being Jewish, short, ugly, and scarred—his face and hands had been badly burned in a fire.
In 1920, with scholarship in hand, Kahn studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Master’s degree in four years. He found a job quickly, but was unable to settle into a home life. Between 1930 and 1962, he married, took two lovers, and had a child by each woman.
As Kahn struggled to establish his prominence in American architecture, he failed to find his own style. Kahn worked sometimes around the clock, but his artistic sense—although undeveloped—dominated his business sense and he landed few clients. It wasn’t until a tour of Italy, Greece, and Egypt in 1950 that Kahn realized his own style, inspired by ancient ruins.
“How circumstantial, but how wonderful is the light thrown upon the threshold when the door is opened.”
Kahn immediately began using his new inspiration. The Trenton Bathhouse is clearly inspired by the Egyptian pyramids (several form the roof), although the Yale University Art Gallery was called “brutalist” by critics of Kahn. Jeffry Kieffer, in a July, 2002 article in Architecture Week wrote about the gallery, “The vertical layering of the floors is a sedimentation. We are presented symbolically with an archeological site, a resistance from which something must be excavated or retrieved. This is our relationship to the contents of the Yale Art Gallery—the condition of art in general.”
Kieffer’s description relates another possible influence of the tour besides the visual poetics: that of unearthing, the peeling back of surfaces. Light and the idea of revealing became important in Kahn’s work and his quote became a metaphor for his own stylistic leanings.
In 1959, Dr. Jonas Salk commissioned Kahn to build The Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Visually, this structure at first resembles folded material sliced in two equal parts by a road to nowhere. But “unearth” the details and the road to nowhere becomes a waterway to the sky, uninterrupted, a flow into infinity.
“Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.”
After several more commissions were won and lost, Kahn received the two that would later be considered his masterpieces: The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, and the Capital Complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Sadly, he didn’t live to see the completion of either project.
Work began on these structures in 1962, the same year his son, Nathaniel, was born. The younger Kahn—who relates seeing Louis once a week when he was lucky—released a documentary in 2003 about his father. “My Architect,” is a collage of photos, film clips, study of Kahn’s building, interviews, and narration by a son seeking a man he barely knew. Nathaniel Kahn takes viewers along on his journey of discovery. It’s as if walls, indeed, part and Louis I. Kahn is revealed.
“All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.”
The Bangladeshi project, the final presentation in “My Architect,” is where Nathaniel says he felt like he found his father. In a small boat on his way to Dhaka, Kahn says, “For a moment I felt the way I did as a kid, that maybe he had just disappeared, and that I’d see him again. If he was anywhere, he’d be here.” The scene moves then to the complex, which looks like a city floating in the air about an inch above the water.
“The Parliament Building and Capital Complex took 23-years to build, the same as the Taj Mahal,” Nathaniel narrates as clips of city life in Dhaka flick by. “It was all done by hand. Thousands of workers carrying baskets of concrete on their heads climbing up and down bamboo scaffolding.” It was not finished until nine years after the death of his father. At one point Nathaniel looks up into a bright skylight almost as an offering to Louis.
In the last interview of the video, Nathaniel tells architect Shamsul Wares that he has been shooting pictures there for about five days. Wares responds, “Do you think you can really capture the quality of this building—in terms of space, light, the volumes, and the layering of the spaces….”
“Well, I don’t know, Mr. Wares,” Nathaniel responds. “When you think about this film, I probably have at the most…10 minutes.”
Wares is shocked and offended at the small amount of time allotted to Kahn’s greatest work and tells Nathaniel “the whole thing is very useless. Because you cannot treat this building like this…. He paid his life for this!” Nathaniel Kahn lowers his head then, nodding, accepting the chastisement.
At that moment a fierce competition between Louis Kahn’s creations is revealed—his buildings, his artistic wanderings, and his children. As Wares speaks about how geniuses like Kahn often neglect their families, and how his son will understand, there is a gravity that pulls in favor of Kahn’s children, then switches and rests on the side of the work as the camera weaves around the beautiful features of the complex. Nathaniel Kahn, at the end of his search for his 
father, doesn’t seem to begrudge the buildings the attention they received from Louis at his expense.
“[Y]ou say to Brick, ‘What do you want Brick?’ And Brick says to you ‘I like an Arch.’ And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lentil over you. What do you think of that?’ Brick says, ‘… I like an Arch’”
On March 17, 1974, Louis I. Kahn’s body was removed from Penn Station and taken to a morgue. It took three days for police to identify him—the only ID he carried was a passport, and he had crossed off his address. He had just come from overseas, and it didn’t make sense. Nathaniel’s mother thinks it was because he had decided to leave his wife and live with them. In the documentary, it seems Nathaniel isn’t so sure.
Although Nathaniel doesn’t appear convinced that he will ever find out what his father had intended in his last moments of life, he does show what Louis Khan says about light, layers, and respect for materials also holds for humanity. It is with people as it is with buildings—it’s one thing to know them, but to appreciate them you need to go inside and listen to the silence, respect what they’re made of, and see from where the brightest light comes.
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