ANNE TYNG (1920–2012)

Anne Tyng, the architectural theorist, has died. Tyng, ninety-one, was a renowned geometric designer and famously worked, and had a daughter with, architect Louis I. Kahn. Tyng wrote extensively on geometric architecture as well as natural and numerical systems in urban design. The New York Times_’ Robin Pogrebin reports that Tyng first gained wide recognition for the “Tyng Toy”––a kit of wooden interlocking pieces that could form a variety of objects such as a chair or table. She was born in Jiangxi, China, in 1920 to Episcopal missionaries. She was also one of the first women admitted to Harvard’s Graduate School for Design in 1942, where she studied under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. She was recently commissioned to do an installation for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Graham Foundation in Chicago, which embodied her ideas about design, for the exhibition “Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry.”