Why have so many children of architects made films about their parents?
To a list that includes Eric Saarinen, son of Eero; Tomas Koolhaas, son of Rem; and most famously Nathaniel Kahn, son of Louis, we can now add Jim Venturi, whose lively, affecting and long-gestating first film, “Stardust: The Story of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” will open the 2024 Architecture and Design Film Festival’s New York run on Sept. 25. Closing the festival — as a reminder that it’s not just the sons who go this cinematic route — will be “Ada– My Mother the Architect,” a documentary by Yael Melamede about Ada Karmi-Melamede, who designed the Supreme Court building in Jerusalem, among other notable projects in Israel.
The directors of these films may hope to put a tangible mark on the world the way their parents did with their buildings. Or to take some measure of the architectural personality, which can sometimes (not always! but not rarely!) concern itself more passionately with the arrangement of windows and staircases, or the whims of potential clients and turncoat critics, than with getting a small child off to school in the morning.
Or it may be something simpler: that the particular qualities of architecture as a creative pursuit (as opposed to, say, novel-writing) lend themselves to the screen, big or small. This can be as true in psychological terms as visual ones. The building, looming in front of the viewer, becomes a stand-in for the distant, distracted or intimidatingly brilliant father or mother. The director can scrutinize its facade, lingering over it with the camera, for some sign of explanation — or confession — not always forthcoming from the parents themselves.