Anatomy of Form

Figure: The Super Pythagorean Theorem.

Anne Griswold Tyng, USA 1950

Anne Griswold Tyng, was an architect who devoted her career to achieving a synthesis of geometric order and human consciousness within architecture. She got her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe College in 1942 and went on to study architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, as part of the school’s first class to admit women. After graduating and working for a couple of New York firms, she was hired by Kahn’s studio and in 1949 she became a licensed architect, the only woman accredited by the state of Pennsylvania that year. Later, she left Kahn’s studio, went back to UPenn to keep pursuing her Phd degree in architecture, and became a professor there for 27 years, where her courses were an extension of her writing and research focusing on geometric order and human scale in architecture.38

Since the 1950s, when she worked closely with Louis I. Kahn and independently pioneered habitable space-frame architecture, Tyng applied natural and numeric systems to built forms of all scales, from urban plans to domestic spaces. Her work has pushed the spatial potential of architecture, and is still relevant to contemporary architects transforming complex geometry into new building forms. In 1965 she was one of the first women to receive a fellowship from the Graham Foundation Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for her project “Anatomy of Form: The Divine Proportion in the Platonic Solids”. In her research she developed a theory of hierarchies of symmetry—symmetries within symmetries—and a search for architectural insight and revelation in the consistency and beauty of all underlying form.39

In her essay Urban Space Systems as Living Form she stated “The organic principles of asymmetry, of growth and proportion, the gradual intensification of form within the

building up of hierarchies within hierarchies, the inclusion of existing or ‘old’ forms in new forms, the interlacing of complexity within overall simplicity, the space system of a higher order which can correlate other space systems—all can provide new ways of binding the whole into a unity of moving growing form—a balanced creative image as tension between known and unknown for the spatial synthesis of collective life. “40 Her essays compiled her comprehensive statements about geometry. She believed that geometry functioned as a universal forming system in which natural and built forms are linked, as well as probability and perception. Tyng also wrote extensively on the subject of creative conflicts between men and women emphasizing her own transition from a muse to heroine in search of an independent visible identity.41

Suggested readings:

Saffron, Inga (January 7, 2012). “Anne Tyng, 91, groundbreaking architect”. Philly.com. Retrieved January 8, 2012.

Whitaker, William. “Anne Griswold Tyng: 1920–2011”. Domus. Retrieved October 26, 2020.

Tyng, Anne Griswold, “Simultaneous Randomness And Order: The Fibonacci-Divine Proportion As A Universal Forming Principle.” (1975).

Anne Tyng, A Life Chronology By: Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia & William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania

Anne Tyng. Urban Space Systems as Living Form, Architecture Canada 45 (nos. 11-12, and vol. 46, no. 1).

Berkeley, Ellen Perry; McQuaid, Matilda. Architecture : a place for women. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989

Figure 1 (top): Pascal Triangle and its diagonal summations. Figure 2 (middle): The Super Pythagorean Theorem. Figure 3 (bottom): Four poster house diagram

Figure 4 (top): Proposed City Tower, Louis I. Kahn and Anne G. Tyng Associated Architects Figure 5 (bottom): Hypothesis of vertical growth of the geometric system