Posts Tagged ‘Anne Tyng’

In Search of Anne Tyng

March 25 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

David and I weren’t sure we were going to be able to get on the bus. We had waited too long to reserve our spots for the Tyng Tour, an ICA field trip to look at houses architect Anne Tyng worked on in and around Philadelphia. I had seen the models, drawings, and photographs in ICA’s exhibition Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry—which anyone who hasn’t visited should run out and see this weekend before it closes on Sunday, March 27. But I had never been inside a building she’d designed, or even stood outside one. I was willing to tag along in the Volvo behind the bus, but luckily for us one couple didn’t show up. We were in.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning as we drove along the Schuylkill River out of the city, then through the hilly fields of Valley Forge Park toward the Wharton Esherick studio in Paoli. Esherick, the extraordinary sculptor and wood craftsman, died in 1970, and his daughter and son-in-law, Ruth and Bob Bascom, have made his studio/home into a museum. What had been his workshop they turned into a house for themselves, not open to the public, but through their generosity open today to us.

Bob Bascom chatting with Tyng tourers in Esherick's former studio. Photo: Chris Taylor

The house is extraordinary. The ceilings rise and angle, and the beams “chase each other around,” in Bob Bascom’s words. Colored glass bottles line the sills of the enormous windows that look out over the countryside. Masks and paintings and Esherick wooden trays hang on the blue walls, and a couple of chairs are lashed to the ceiling. You can see old tool marks on the floors. The wood to build the place and its furnishings came from the local forest; Esherick is reputed to have said, “If I can’t make something beautiful out of what grows in my own backyard, I should quit.”

Bathroom in the Esherick studio. Photo: David H. Cohen

“The roof is three hexagons,” Mr. Bascom, an architect himself, told us. “The hexagons gave flexibility to how to put the building on the site. And each hexagon is the upper half of a dodecahedron.” That sounds like Anne Tyng, who saw the world through geometry, and particularly through the five Platonic solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron.

Now Bill Whitaker, Penn’s Architectural Archivist and a co-curator, with ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner and architect Srdjan Weiss, of the Anne Tyng show, talks. “A lot has been said about Wharton Esherick and Lou Kahn,” he says.

Stop a moment. I would have liked to write this piece without mentioning Lou Kahn, who is so often spoken of by way of explaining Anne Tyng: who she is, what she did, what her work means. The show at ICA, however, is about her: her work, her intellectual passion for geometry and architecture, her vision. But Tyng did not build a lot of houses, and many of the ones she did work on were collaborations with Kahn whose office employed her and who is the architect of record. That is the situation with three of the four buildings we will see today: the Esherick workshop, the Erdman Hall dormitory at Bryn Mawr College, and a private home. Only the final house, in Fitler Square, was designed by Tyng alone.

An hour later, we stand in the cold bright day in front of Erdman Hall, a warren of square forms connected at the corners. At the core of each square is a public space—a cube—with bedrooms around the edges. The design of Erdman Hall is based on Anne’s ideas about geometry, but the plan she herself drew for the building ultimately wasn’t used. “This is a sad period in Lou and Anne’s relationship,” Bill says. “There are some real tensions between them artistically…Lou is working in one part of the office, and Anne is working in another.”

The group outside Erdman Hall. Photo: Jenna Weiss

We don’t go in. This is a dormitory after all, young women are living in there. They come and go in twos and threes, ignoring us. Probably groups stand out here all the time, looking. What do these girls know about this building, about the people who designed it? What would they think of Anne Tyng, graduate of a sister school, who forged an extraordinary life for herself through the force of her will and vision, decades before feminism or employment discrimination protections or the pill?

(The next day, by fate or coincidence, I will run into a woman who lived in Erdman Hall as a student a decade ago. It was cold, she’ll say. Her room was in the basement. She’ll tell me Kahn was famously reputed to have said that the slate and concrete materials might be cold, but the bodies of the young women living there would warm the rooms.)

The next stop on the Tyng tour is warmer, a family home on a bluff in a nearby suburb. The original owner, who commissioned the house in 1958, still lives here, and she shows us around. “Anne Tyng and Lou Kahn were both short,” she says as we duck through the front door. “The problem here is that it’s hard for tall people.”

This house, like Erdman Hall, is made up of cubes arranged in a kind of L. The ceilings of the crowded dining room rise from the four walls toward the middle, forming half an octagon. The big windows look out over a creek. “There isn’t a lot of space here, but it’s nice space,” the owner says. “We have thirteen doors to the outside! When we change the locks, we have to change all thirteen of them. We had three designs for this house, and we built the third. We couldn’t afford the first two. Lou Kahn gave a lecture afterwards saying he would never again build a house where price was an object.”

Kahn didn’t come by much after the building started on the site. He wasn’t much interested in the realization of the project—it was the design that obsessed him. But Tyng came. And later, after Kahn had died, she came again and built an addition for the family: a final square. The Tyng wing.

Tyng tourers in front of our bus. Photo: Chris Taylor

The last stop on the tour is Anne Tyng’s own house, the one she lived in with her daughter Alex beginning in 1955. It’s a cramped Philadelphia row house, on the top of which Tyng designed an airy aerie under the mansard roof, with a seating area and a sleeping loft with triangular windows. It’s stunningly beautiful. I sit on one of the built-in seats and listen as Bill Whitaker points out the details: how the bevels on the edge of the windows “make the room feel quite open, because the corners disappear”; how the heating registers are cleverly placed and hidden; how the ends of the central closet drop down, one to reveal an ironing board and another a double mirror. “She looked for a cabinet maker who was willing to build a house like a cabinet,” he says, as we take turns climbing the steps to peer at the high bed, and ask questions of the current owner, and rest gratefully in the late afternoon light. Bill points out where Tyng had her drafting table, where she found space for a tiny bathroom, how every detail was lovingly considered. This space isn’t cold in any way. It feels personal, assured, particular, alive. I don’t know what its geometry is—what Platonic solids shape the space I’m sitting in—but for the moment I don’t care. It’s peaceful and yet vibrant up here among the tree tops, a space unlike any I’ve been in before.

And now I remember something Bob Bascom said hours ago: “I got into architecture because it’s the only profession people go to when they’re happy. You go to a dentist when your tooth hurts, you go to a lawyer when you’re in trouble. But you go to an architect when you want to build something, and you have a little money in your pocket.”

Anne Tyng's house. Photo: David H. Cohen

Anne Tyng never had much money in her pocket. She became an architect when the profession was entirely dominated by men. She made a house and a life for herself and her daughter in this city at mid-century, and pursued her intellectual passion as far as it would take her. She designed buildings, made calculations, wrote papers, taught students, raised her child, ate yogurt, mentored aspiring architects. And when she got tired, she climbed up the ladder to the loft she’d designed for herself and dreamed, perhaps, Platonic dreams of tetrahedrons and cubes.

* * *

Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry closes at ICA THIS SUNDAY, March 27. Don’t miss it.

If you’re in Chicago, you can see the show at the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, between April 15 and June 18.

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Art, Math, Cosmology

February 4 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

We’re upstairs in ICA’s second-floor gallery and Ingrid says, “You know how in architect’s models they always have these tiny plastic people? Well we are the tiny people in this model of Anne Tyng’s new project.”

URBAN HIERARCHY (1969-71; unbuilt), model. Courtesy of the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Anne G. Tyng

ICA’s new exhibition, Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, opened last month, and it looks magnificent. I’ve written before about the huge plywood helixes the architect designed for the show, how they circle gracefully down from the high ceiling, and about the enormous shapes—tetrahedron, cube, dodecahedron—big enough to stand in. But I hadn’t quite made the leap Ingrid is making: that the whole installation is an architect’s model that has tasted the right side of the mushroom.

This is the docent walkthrough, the time when the people who will give tours to the public get the ur-tour from the curators. ICA’s Senior Curator, Ingrid Schaffner, organized the Anne Tyng exhibition, along with consulting curator and architect Srdjan Weiss—who translated Tyng’s extensive diagrams and exacting calculations into these fine built forms we’re standing in the midst of—and William Whitaker, the curator of Penn’s architectural archives which collaborated with ICA on the project and lent the drawings, models, letters, and plans. (It seems like there should be a joke in here: how many curators does it take to change a light bulb? But I don’t know what the punch line is.) Ingrid knows what she’d like the docents to emphasize, and sometimes what she’d like them to leave out, and this is the moment for her to make her pitch. You can see her delight in how well the installation turned out as she points out the shadows the helixes cast on the walls: “I like to encourage people to look at these things as a sculpture in the space,” she says.

Photo: J. Katz

Ingrid points out the two C-shaped tables on which the models of Tyng’s projects sit, explaining that these are bigger versions of Tyng’s actual desk (putting them into the show was Srdjan’s idea). She takes us through the models: the Buck’s county elementary school, the four-poster house, the famous City Tower project, saying, “She’s thinking in the most literal way about how architecture fits into the cosmos.” Then she shows us the drawings of the house Tyng designed for her parents in Eastern Maryland, a house that survived many a hurricane before fire finally took it. The structure—the space frame—is radical, but the expression is vernacular, so the house fits in with the local cottages and barns. “I think it’s important to point visitors to the drawing,” Ingrid says. “It’s a kind of incredible minimalist drawing, and it’s also an engineering drawing.” As architecture itself is half art, half math. Or maybe in Tyng’s case, a third each art, math, and cosmology.

“I think, in all the years I’ve been at ICA, this is the best use of the space,” one of the docents says, looking up into the open spiraling helix. We all nod, converts to the religion of geometry.

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Inhabiting Geometry

January 2 2011

Photo: J. Katz

post by Rachel Pastan

Paul and two guys from the crew are 35 feet up on the Genie lift, examining the first couple of loops of an airy helix.

“I think it looks cool,” Paul says. “But I think he’s going to want it tighter.” He turns a switch and the Genie squeals, lowering them to the floor.

Weeks from now, when the exhibition Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry opens, the helix, made of crisscrossed pieces of Luan plywood, will fill that part of the gallery, looping down to meet up with its geometric forbearers: a cube, a triangular pyramid, a dodecahedron, and a couple of others. These shapes too will be big—big enough to stand in, to walk around in, to experience and explore. Big enough, as the show’s name implies, to inhabit if ICA were open 24/7, which we’re not. You’re welcome to spend the day in there, but we’ll ask you to leave at closing time.

One feels that Anne Tyng, who designed this installation and whose work the exhibition explores, does actually inhabit geometry. Or maybe it inhabits her. I’ve written before in this space about how Tyng’s love of architecture goes back to her childhood in China where her parents were missionaries, how she takes a sensual delight in form. She writes of the “magic revelation in my first creation of space for human use,” and of her “passionate search for essences of form and space.” Now ninety, having worked as an architect for thirty years and taught architecture for nearly another thirty, Tyng’s passion for form is literally taking shape in ICA’s gallery. Architect and professor Srdjan Weiss and his assistant Kristen Smith have been working with Tyng to realize her vision, and now ICA’s crew is bolting together thin strips of wood, dangling wires from wall and ceiling, and erecting octahedrons the size of minivans.

I love this moment in the museum, when everyday an exhibition comes a little further to life. When music is playing on speakers in the background and all kinds of bric-a-brac washes up on long tables as on a beach: scissors, work gloves, plans, newspapers, a camera, a pile of white art handling gloves, a notebook, time sheets, books, balls of wire, balls of yarn. Today the gallery floor is marked with angular spirals laid out in blue tape, as though an English garden maze is being planned. More blue tape brightens the walls at eye level, mysterious figures scribbled on it. The room smells of paint.

Photo: Paul Swenbeck

I imagine Anne Tyng enjoyed moments like these all her life—moments when her plans and renderings began to take shape on building sites. You can see some of her buildings rise from the ground in photographs that will also be part of the exhibition. Darcey, ICA’s registrar, showed me the working checklist this morning. I was excited to see plans and pictures of the buildings I’ve read about, particularly the Four-Poster House in which the bed serves as the central organizing form and metaphor.

The plans and photos come from Penn’s Architectural Archive, which is co-presenting the show with ICA. Yesterday Ingrid, who is organizing the show, came back from the Archives with articles about Tyng’s early life and career. “Petite Blonde Succeeds As Architect in Phila” a headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Women’s section proclaims in May of 1950. How’s that for news! “Just under five feet,” the article explains, Anne Tyng “has the look of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ but don’t be misled by the façade for she has the astuteness of a woman who knows every facet of architecture.”

Is that use of the word “façade” an intentional joke? Did articles about architects in the men’s sections include their height?

A more interesting question: could Tyng, exploring secret passages in her childhood home in Jiangxi, China, imagine what the future held in store for her?

Well, maybe she could. She was always a visionary.

* * *
Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, opens at ICA on January 13 and runs through March 20. The exhibition is organized by ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner; consulting curator Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, Assistant Professor, Tyler Architecture, Temple University; and William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. The exhibition is a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Architectural Archives.

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ICA Mosaic

August 6 2010

ICA intern Charlotte Ickes with some of the many boxes she readied for the archives this summer. Photo: Carina Romano

post by Rachel Pastan

On days the museum is closed but the offices are open, you have to ring the doorbell if you want to get in. Some days it rings all day long, that bell: the mailman, the UPS guy, the FedEx guy, and the many interns who do so much of the heavy lifting here at ICA. Mostly they’re Penn grad students and undergrads, and they do everything from research to filing to helping plan and run events. They work in every department. Some of them have been here for years and know everything! If they all decided not to show up for work tomorrow, I suppose we wouldn’t actually close, but it would be a slow, dull, unproductive day.

Last week we had a lunch to thank them (that probably sounds fancier than it was—Mexican food around the conference room table), and I asked them to tell me something interesting they had done or learned about ICA this summer. Taken together, their answers make a nice snapshot of what goes on here—a kind of mosaic. Here are a few.

Sam (spent the summer resizing, organizing, and in many cases digitizing ICA’s old exhibition images for easy access): It’s interesting to see how many people you have to contact for a single show—artists, lenders, scholars, conservators. One exhibition will generate letters to maybe a hundred people! Also, I can now name every ICA show for the last ten years.

(***Actually, I didn’t write down what these people said word for word. Any errors, confusions, inelegant phrasings, embarrassing exclamation points, or slanderous remarks are entirely my own.)

Sara (going into her senior year at Penn; just elected head of her campus sketch comedy group): I’ve been sorting through the education files to get them ready for the archives, and I found a bunch of material on the controversy about ICA’s Robert Mapplethorpe show back in the eighties. I had no idea ICA was so involved in that! There were all kinds of petitions and statements from Penn in defense of the First Amendment.

Rachel (a graduate student at Penn’s School of Design and a competitive fencer): I’ve been going through the prints ICA offers for sale on the website, doing research about the artists and finding out how much their comparable work sells for. So far I’m at letter G.

Grace (writing her thesis at Penn on the representation of performance art in museums; has been reorganizing the ICA library): Sometimes great old letters fall out of books. And I got to pick the band for the ICA Free For All on September 29!

Lily (a rising senior at Moore College of Art majoring in curatorial studies and getting ready to start a zine): I learned how to make labels for the printer.

(I know Lily did lots of other stuff, too. But actually, if you can master labels on our printer, you can master the universe.)

Charlotte (a grad student at Penn writing her Masters thesis on two portraits of Pocahantas): For Summer Studio with Anthony Campuzano, I helped run the artists’ statement workshop, but it rained and hardly anyone showed up. I spent two hours working with this one guy! But I think we made his statement a little better. Also I spent a week with Anne Tyng [architect and subject of an upcoming ICA exhibition].

One of the interns who wasn’t at lunch was Carina Romano, a young professional photographer who spent the summer working in ICA’s marketing department, and who helped me out a lot with this blog. I don’t know what she’d say she did or learned this summer, but she certainly spruced up the look of Miranda. Thanks, Carina! Thank you Sara, Annika, Lily, Rashana, Sam! Thanks Grace, Rachel, Charlotte, Pericles, Seghen, Kristen! I hope you had fun, made an enduring connection to ICA, and got some good stories to entertain your friends.

Maybe consider sharing a story in the comments field below? Just between us?

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Anne Tyng, Platonic Solids, and Penelope’s Bed

July 22 2010

Photo: Chris Taylor

post by Rachel Pastan

Anne Tyng’s love of form had its roots in her childhood. The architect, now ninety, writes of “the sensual delight of feeling elemental forms of rocks, water and earth under my bare feet.” Born in 1920 in China to missionary parents, at sixteen Tyng toured the world and discovered its monuments: “the pyramids, temples and mosques, the castles and cathedrals.”1 At twenty-two she enrolled in the first Harvard Graduate School of Design class to admit women (though she says they were warned they would lower the standards), where she studied under Gropius and Breuer. Later she moved to Philadelphia and worked with Louis Kahn before teaching for almost thirty years at the University of Pennsylvania. In January, ICA will present a show of Tyng’s work and ideas.

Anne Tyng is retired now and lives in California, but she spent a week at ICA last month talking about plans for the exhibition. ICA’s architecture shows (Fertilizers, Holiday Home, etc.) tend to find a way to immerse the viewer—literally—in the forms and ideas being presented. The Anne Tyng exhibition will be no exception. Tyng is designing an installation that expresses and externalizes her thinking about three-dimensional forms: how buildings can and should grow out of basic geometries, and how these geometries are connected, in her view, to the human psyche and spirit.

All her working life, Tyng has been fascinated by the Platonic solids, those three-dimensional shapes with equal sides and equal angles (cube, dodecahedron, etc.) that the Greeks discovered, da Vinci drew, and Kepler wrongly but beautifully theorized formed the layers of the solar system. These five shapes are the driving forms behind Tyng’s architecture and form the spaces inside which she envisions life being lived: “living spaces were hollowed out of a consistent geometry as in a bee’s honeycomb.” For the ICA exhibition, the plan is to construct giant Platonic solids that the visitor can walk inside of! These will be connected to helical and spiral extensions, showing how one form is transformed into another. There will also be photographs and architectural plans and models, including an amazing three-foot-high facsimile of Tyng and Kahn’s design for City Tower (1952-6), which was never built.

The Tyng work I’m most excited about, though, is the “Four-Poster House” she designed for a site in Mt. Desert Island, Maine. For this house, the four-poster marital bed becomes the guiding geometry—as well as the metaphoric soul—of the building. The bed is built at the top of the house, and each of its posts becomes a column that supports the structure. The forms of the roof, rooms, dormers, deck, and balconies are all related to the form of the bed. At the same time, Tyng is careful to consider the site and the vernacular architecture of the neighborhood, so that the building, while conceptually radical, does not look out of place.

I love this idea, that the whole house grows—as the family does—from the marital bed. It makes me think of Odysseus and Penelope’s bed, that “pact and pledge” that binds them, though they are separated twenty years; that metaphor and reification of their love.

As Odysseus recounts:

An old trunk of olive
grew like a pillar on the building plot,
and I laid out our bedroom round that tree…
hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up
into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve
as a model for the rest.2

Let it serve as a model for the rest. Just so with Tyng, though her bed is at the top of the house in the airy trees, and Odysseus and Penelope’s is on the ground. (You see that we are back with the Greeks, who discovered those Platonic solids.)

Thinking of Penelope, one thinks of patience. Anne Tyng, as I said, is ninety. There has never been a museum exhibition dedicated to her work.

ICA’s Anne Tyng show opens in our upstairs gallery on January 13. After a lifetime of patience, there are only six more months to wait.

* * *

1 This and all other Anne Tyng quotations are from her essay, “Architecture Is My Touchstone,” Radcliffe Quarterly 70 (September 1984).

2 From the Robert Fitzgerald translation of Homer’s Odyssey, published by Anchor Press (New York, 1962).

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