There's an unforgettable moment at the climax of My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn's must-see 2003 documentary. Cloistered in the soaring monumental masonry of the Bangladeshi parliament building that his late father, Louis Kahn, designed, the filmmaker asks a Bangladeshi architect to sum up the building's importance. 

"Do you really think you can capture the quality of this building in terms of space, light, volumes and the layering of spaces?" architect Shamsul Wares asks sceptically. With Wares' help, the chastened director will try. 

When Kahn says he has 10 minutes – tops – an appalled Wares declares, "It's useless." He then launches into a stirring, tearful tribute to what Louis Kahn delivered to the people of Bangladesh: love, respect and sacrifice being perhaps the most unusual elements. How many architects achieve this?

Time may be the real subject of Kahn's documentary; whether it's the lost time of a father-son relationship (Kahn died when his son was 11) or the elusive quest for timelessness in architecture.

For Finnish architectural philosopher Juhani Pallasmaa, the irony of timelessness is that it often relies on history to achieve transcendence.

"The most powerful message of Louis Kahn was to revitalise the Roman tradition in the 20th century," says Pallasmaa, who next week will deliver a lecture, Dwelling in Time, as part of a tour  sponsored by the Australian Institute of Architects. 

"That is what great artists always do; they revitalise certain existing areas of thought and artistic tradition."

A retired architect, professor and author of such books as The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Pallasmaa says: "I often say to students, 'I'm not trying to teach you architecture. It's a sense of self that's important for learning anything important.'

"That's probably why there are very few early geniuses in architecture; most do their best works later in life, like Louis Kahn in Dhaka. A building like that could not be designed by a young mind; it needed a mind that had already lived."

Reading, travelling and sketching are important to an architect's development, but they should also be interested in themselves, he believes. "It's not about self-expression, though; it's about the enigma of defining the architect's position in the world."

Nor is it simply about rehashing historic styles. By subsuming the experience of great architecture and how it acts on the self, an architect can achieve work that contributes to the continuum of history.

"All meaningful art and architecture creates a continuum – or continues something that existed in an assuring way," Pallasmaa says. 

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