Anne Tyng and Her Remarkable House

2018-02-26T18:54:00-05:00

She believed that the five Platonic solids were the most basic archetypes upon which all organic structures, micro- and macrocosmic, were formed.

A diagram of the addition. Anne Tyng Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania

"She was known as Louis Kahn's muse but never really escaped his shadow. What Tyng's only surviving solo project says about her legacy.

The Rome Letters 1953–54 (Rizzoli), Kahn and another architect were working on a “roofless rectangular scheme” for the Bath House but she “almost immediately” came up with a plan involving “four symmetrically arranged squares with hipped roofs.” She wrote that the design was inspired by bathhouses she remembered from her childhood in China, where her parents were missionaries. William Whitaker, the curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, who became friends with Tyng later in her life, confirmed that the Bath House was largely Tyng’s work. “That’s Anne’s plan,” he told me."

The third-floor addition on Tyng's house. Anne Tyng Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsy...

Anne Tyng, 91, groundbreaking architect

2012-01-07T11:03:00-05:00

Anne Tyng, a pioneering woman architect whose ideas about geometry influenced Louis Kahn's buildings and who later had a child with him, died Tuesday, Dec. 27, in Greenbrae, Calif. She was 91, said her daughter, Alexandra, who lives outside Philadelphia. Although Ms. Tyng was among the first group of women to graduate from Harvard University's architecture school in 1944, she struggled her entire career to be taken seriously. Firms would not hire her because she was a woman.

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Anne Tyng and Her Remarkable House

Anne Tyng, 91, groundbreaking architect