Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry
@ Graham Foundation
4 W Burton Pl, Chicago, IL 60610
Opening Friday, April 15th, from 6PM - 8PM
On view through Saturday, June 18th
This exhibition presents the work of the visionary architect and theorist Anne Tyng. Since the 1950s, when she worked closely with Louis I. Kahn and independently pioneered habitable space-frame architecture, Tyng has applied natural and numeric systems to built forms on all scales, from urban plans to domestic spaces. This exhibition features room size models of the five platonic solids (the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron). Identified in ancient times, the platonic solids are the only regular equilateral and equiangular polyhedra. These forms can be found in nature, such as in the structure of crystals. The installation, together with archival material, illustrates the synthesis of Tyng’s life-long research on advanced geometry and how she derives her own built forms through the symmetries, orders, and dynamic progressions by which one form in geometry becomes another.
Demonstrating this vision at work is a selection of drawings, models, and other documentation of past projects, including: City Tower (with Kahn, 1952-1957); Urban Hierarchy (1970); and the Four-Poster House (1971-1974). There are also examples of Tyng’s publications and research, which investigate Jungian cycles, city squares, and the cosmos. Throughout, geometry is both rational and expressive, as much a means of contemplation as of calculation and construction.
In 1965, Anne Tyng was one of the first women to receive a fellowship from the Graham Foundation 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. A portion of this research was published in the article Geometric Extensions of Consciousness in the Italian architectural journal Zodiak #19 in1969.
“Tyng’s ideas, supported by the Graham Foundation over 45 years ago, resonate deeply with contemporary architects who are working with complex geometry as a source for new forms in building,” notes Sarah Herda, Director of the Graham Foundation. “She was at the forefront of experimentation in the field, and this exhibition introduces her work to new generations who are also working to push the spatial potential of architecture.”
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