Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Concrete poetry


We saw the documentary My architect at a Wellington Film Festival. The film was made by Louis Kahn’s illegitimate son Nathaniel. Along with being a great architect, Kahn also ran three separate families. In the documentary Nathaniel Kahn related how he and his mother would wait at Christmas hoping that Louis would turn up to spend the holiday with them. In one of the more poignant moments, Nathaniel talked to an associate of Kahn’s who had worked on the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The exchange was about how much he and his family had enjoyed having Louis for many Christmases, and how well he got on with their kids. Living with (or in this case without) artistic genius is not fun. The Salk Institute in La Jolla just north of San Diego looked astonishing in the movie and is just as wonderful in real life. The My Architect site has a link to a very good interview with Nathaniel Kahn published in Metropolis.