Only one prominent architect may have had a more fucked-up death than Antoni Gaudi (he was a bit eccentric and dressed like a bum, so when he was hit by a Barcelona streetcar, people just let him lay there and bleed to death), and that person is the subject of My Architect.  The film is a documentary made by Nathaniel Kahn, who just so happens to be the son of Architect's focus - renowned engineer Louis I. Kahn, who created, among other concrete monstrosities, La Jolla, California's Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and a series of governmental buildings in Bangladesh.

Louis Kahn, who died bankrupt and alone in a Penn Station men's room in 1974, was a short, uncompromising man with Coke-bottle glasses and scars covering his hands and face from a childhood accident in Estonia.  Despite those physical flaws, he was still quite the ladies' man, carrying on two long-term extramarital relationships.  The spawn of one of those philanderings was Nathaniel, who didn't really know his father all that well when he died.  He was only 11 at the time.

Architect is really two films in one.  Nathaniel Kahn's film is both a standard doc in which we are educated about a person we may not know much about, but it's also the story of a son searching for information about what kind of man his deceased father was.  Architect is full of interviews with Kahn's family and co-workers; colleagues to cabbies to the guy who found his body in the crapper.  Other luminaries in the field, like I.M. Pei and Frank O. Gehry, pop up to talk about Kahn's impact and his fusion of modern architecture with that of the heavy stone constructions of ancient Rome.

My favorite, though, was an interview with Kahn's old Philadelphia nemesis, the still-angry Edmund Bacon, who tells a great story about Kahn's proposal to re-zone the city's downtown area to have no roads.  A very interesting documentary, but one without much resolution.

1:56 –