---
title: "The Power of Reality"
canonical: "https://banuucak.com/en/gercekligin-gucu/"
date: "2016-03-20"
author: "Banu Uçak"
description: "Watching My Architect again, I am moved less by Kahn's buildings than by the depth of the lives around him, and by a reality that outlasts a human life."
categories: ["essays"]
lang: "en"
---

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/073a8-1hlbxolyn1bw7ujvdv3ou5a.CiZ2gYSD_1YaghQ.webp "Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng, 'The Rome Letters 1953-1954', Anne Grisworld Tyng")

This evening, years later, I watched "My Architect" again. It is true that one does not bathe twice in the same water. After all these years the film left in me more than the pleasure of seeing some of the most affecting buildings in the world. Kahn, a talent rarely equalled, has only thirteen buildings, most of them built after the age of sixty. This man of 160 centimetres, with a character society would hardly accept and a face one would not look at, as Philip Johnson tried politely to put it, had three children by three different women. More than his sensational life, his tragicomic death, his debts, even his architecture, what moved me most was the depth and the reality of the relationships he made, almost a torment. The women whose lives he made unbearable, the children he hardly fathered, the architects he drove without pause in inhuman conditions, his clients, his rivals: they still carry his effect upon them, and his love in their hearts. Clearly there are a thousand and one ways to live a life, against every social norm. And nothing that is real is defeated in the face of time. The life of reality is longer than the life of humankind. I do not easily let go of anything that leaves a crumb of feeling in me. I am determined to spend the evening with the letters Kahn wrote through the whole of 1954 to Anne Tyng, the colleague he worked with, his lover, and the mother of his second child. I acquired the book years ago. On this visit too I will very likely find more than a sorrowful love. Life, what a beautiful thing you are, and what a cruel one.