discipline
MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI: We are at the beginning of the 75th anniversary celebrations of the GSD, and who better to start us off than Anne Tyng? Anne has always been a pioneer. She was here at Harvard in the early 1940s. She was part of the first class at the GSD that admitted women. Needless to say, there weren’t a lot of women at that time doing the kinds of things that she was doing.
city tower
An unbuilt project by Louis Kahn and Anne Tyng for a futurist City Tower in the late 1950s, later exhibited at MoMA.
It is very interesting to see how, early on, she was drawn to issues related to geometry, the role of the body, consciousness, the subconscious—she was thinking about architecture in a very holistic fashion. The way in which geometry, specifically, and triangulation in geometry was developed was something unique, and was of course explored in her own work and also in the work that she did together with Louis Kahn in subsequent years. When Kahn received the adulation and recognition that he deserved, it was also due to a lot of things that they had done together. I hope that tonight is at least a tiny moment of true recognition for all the things that she has achieved. ANNE TYNG: There has been a tremendous amount of change in
architecture, which should be very exciting and challenging right now. Geometry is available for any kind of building at any scale. It is just threedimensional form. But I think there is—as you relate the infinitely small to the very large—that potential of achieving some kind of breakthrough in terms of expressing a more active architecture. I think we may be getting to a point where the shift in architecture may be toward animate form, as opposed to inanimate. IMAGES
The geometries that Louis had me doing were done in an office that was very informal. If there were no projects to do, you could come in and produce your own work. The Bucks County School was the first attempt to use geometry in layers. The three pieces come to a tetrahedral column where it travels to the ground to a point. These layers diminish as they travel from the center of the overall triangle where each of them would form one building made of three classrooms. It grows its own support out of the same geometry. Usually these geometries would have been considered separate.
Top: Anne Tyng sitting in her furniture design in 1945. Left: Mohsen Mostafavi and Anne Tyng in conversation at the GSD. ANNE TYNG (1920-2011)
Known for her collaboration with Louis Kahn, Anne Tyng was an architect and professor. She studied under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer as one of the first women to graduate from the GSD (’44). Furthermore, she was the only woman to undertake the architecture licensing exam in 1949. She earned her Ph.D. and taught at the University of Pennsylvania.
The City Tower Project was never a job. It was just something that I think needed to be explored. In it, each level is identical, but they rotate in plan as you go up, so it seems to animate the structure to some degree. It appears as though the building might be in motion, if you have enough imagination for that.
with mohsen
Beaux Arts Complexity to Bauhaus Simplicity
mostafavi CONJECTURE
ANNE TYNG in conversation
The Museum of Modern Art was going to have an exhibit, and I never got an invitation to the opening, so I asked around, and the secretary said, “ Well maybe you’d better speak to Louis [Kahn].” He actually took my name off. So I went into his office and I said, “ Wouldn’t it be better if you called them, than if I called them?” and he did and straightened it out. But I think we are getting past that. I think we are in a phase where the feminine principle is more dominant, and there are many women doing things that they never did before, or given positions that they were never given before. They had earned it before, but never got it.
ANNE TYNG mohsen MOSTAFAVI
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