previews

  • Louis I. Kahn and Anne G. Tyng, associated Architects, City Tower, Philadelphia, PA,1956–57, model. Courtesy of the Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

    Louis I. Kahn and Anne G. Tyng, associated Architects, City Tower, Philadelphia, PA,1956–57, model. Courtesy of the Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

    Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry

    Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
    University of Pennsylvania 118 South 36th Street
    January 13–April 20, 2011

    Curated by Ingrid Schaffner

    Best known for her twenty-five-year collaboration with Louis I. Kahn, architect Anne Tyng has received comparatively little recognition for her own rigorously theorized practice. The work of securing her legacy has been limited, for the most part, to setting the record straight on her involvement with several of Kahn’s key projects (notably the unbuilt City Tower, with its novel space-frame construction). But the ICA show foregrounds Tyng’s independent career. Working with consulting curator Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, the ninety-year-old architect has designed inhabitable sculptures for the exhibition that build on her long-standing interest in Platonic solids and geometry. Situating Tyng in relation to contemporary design methods, the curators suggest that her mathematically derived structural and formal experiments anticipated current computational design techniques.

    — Michael Wang