Archinect - News

Two new documentaries shed light on the life of children of star architects at the Architecture and Design Film Festival

2024-09-24T11:07:00-04:00

According to Kyle Bergman, the founder and director of the Architecture and Design Film Festival, “Kids who grow up with architects as parents mostly fall into two groups. Some want to become architects and some want to run away, to get as far away from architecture as possible. But then there’s this middle ground, people who are intrigued by what their parents do but want to do their own thing.” That third group is where the future documentarians come from, Bergman said.

Christopher Hawthorne writes in preview for this month's Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York, where Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's son Jim will premiere his gleaning biographical treatment Stardust: The Story of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Nathaniel Kahn’s equally elucidatory My Architect has been hugely popular, even garnering an Academy Award nomination. Another documentary about the life of Israeli architect Ada Karmi-Melamede made by her daughter Yael (who gave up a career in architecture to pursue filmmaking) closes the festival.

The four-day event begins tomorrow, September 25th, and runs through Saturday, September 28th. The full schedule of screenings can be found here.

Harriet Pattison, landscape architect and longtime Louis Kahn collaborator, dies at 94

2023-10-10T18:47:00-04:00

Harriet Pattison, a noted American landscape architect who worked closely with her romantic partner Louis Kahn, passed away in Philadelphia last week, according to their son, filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn. She was 94.

Pattison enjoyed a career that spanned more than thirty years, working predominantly in Maine and Pennsylvania before she pursued her own path following the death of Kahn in 1974. Pattison studied landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania after working briefly in Dan Kiley’s Vermont-based practice. She would later go on to work alongside Kahn on the Kimbell Art Museum and Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park projects through a position with George Erwin Patton. Pattison was also inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2016.

Pattison was instrumental in creating the landscape architecture at Louis Kahn's design for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress (Public Domain)

Patti...

'My Dad, the Starchitect': an emerging documentary subgenre

2017-10-16T14:21:00-04:00

In an emerging subgenre of architectural documentary, Nathaniel Kahn, Tomas Koolhaas, and Eric Saarinen take a personal look at their mythologized fathers. [...] Whether a film deals in the social or monumental legacy of an architect, the idea of the genius—which has been so unevenly applied—should come under scrutiny. As the children of architects have conferred through these films, nobody can be all things to all people.

In her piece for CityLab, Daisy Alioto looks at three recent examples of iconic architects having their life's work documented in film by their sons: Rem Koolhaas in REM, produced by Tomas Koolhaas; Eero Saarinen in Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future, by Eric Saarinen; and Louis Kahn in My Architect, a film by Nathaniel Kahn.

In case you missed it, listen to our One-to-One podcast interview with Tomas Koolhaas.