Anne Tyng
(1920–2011) Philadelphia, United States
Anne Tyng (1920–2011) was among the first women to receive a master’s of architecture from Harvard University. Starting in 1947, she worked closely with Louis I. Kahn and was instrumental in the design of the Trenton Bath House and Yale University Art Gallery, among other projects. She devoted her career to achieving a synthesis of geometric order, architecture, and human consciousness. After 1968, she focused her attention on research, earning a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania where she taught for almost thirty years.
2025 Biennial Project
Project Overview
The Anatomy of Form
In 1965, architect Anne Tyng developed the unpublished manuscript Anatomy of Form: The Divine Proportion in the Platonic Solids, a life-long project exploring hierarchies of symmetry—symmetries within symmetries—and the search for architectural revelation in the consistency and beauty of underlying form. Her work positioned geometry as both rational and poetic, a means of uncovering universal principles of order. A portion of this research appeared in 1969 as Geometric Extensions of Consciousness in the Italian architectural journal Zodiak #19. Tyng was at the forefront of experimentation in the field, anticipating later explorations of complex geometry in design, and her essay is her most comprehensive statement of geometry as a universal forming system, providing extensive illustrations and examples that link psyche and matter, natural and built forms, complementary archetypes of creativity, probability and perception, and historic cycles of consciousness and rebirth.
Venue
View moreGraham Foundation
Address
4 W. Burton Pl., Chicago, IL 60610
Neighborhood
Gold Coast
Description
Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.
