Anne Tyng
| Anne Tyng | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 14, 1920 Lushan, Jiangxi, China |
| Died | December 27, 2011 (aged 91) Greenbrae, California, USA |
| Alma mater | Radcliffe College, Harvard University |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Practice | Stonorov and Kahn |
| Projects | Trenton Bathhouse, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Yale Art Gallery |
Anne Griswold Tyng (July 14, 1920 – December 27, 2011) was an architect and professor. She is best known for having collaborated with Louis I. Kahn at his practice in Philadelphia, for 29 years. She served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 27 years, teaching classes in morphology. She was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and Academician of the National Academy of Design.
Tyng's parents, Ethel Atkinson (née Arens) and Walworth Tyng, were from old New England families and were living as Episcopalian missionaries in China when Tyng was born in 1920, in Lushan, Jiangxi province.
As a young woman, Tyng showed her developed sense of mathematics and design. Her invention of the Tyng Toy, at the age of 27, illustrated her mastery of form. A construction set for children, the Tyng Toy allowed a small selection of plywood pieces to be combined into a wide variety of toys and pieces of furniture, ranging from a stool to a rocking horse.
Tyng received her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1942. Later, she studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at the architecture school at Harvard University. In 1944, she was among the school's first female graduates. Tyng was the only woman to enter the architecture licensing exam in 1949 and, at the test, one of the male proctors turned his back on her and refused to cooperate.
She obtained her Ph.D at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. The school's Architectural Archive holds her collected papers.
Tyng was a theorist known for her passion for mathematics and her pioneering work in space frame architecture, in which interlocking geometric patterns are used to create light-filled spaces. She was particularly interested in platonic solids and in Jungian thought. Her Ph.D. thesis, titled Simultaneousness, Randomness and Order, pursued her interests in hierarchical symmetry and organic form. For her work in this field, she became the first woman receive a grant from the Graham Foundation, in 1965. Designing an addition to her parents' farmhouse in Maryland, she was also the first architect to frame a traditional peaked-roof house with fully triangulated three-dimensional truss.
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