Anne Tyng (1920–2011) was a pioneering American architect and architectural theorist. After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1942 she was among the first women admitted to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she received her master's degree in architecture and studied under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
Following her studies, Tyng worked in the New York offices of the architect Konrad Wachsmann; the industrial design firms of Van Doren, Nowland & Schladermundt; and Knoll Associates. In 1945 she moved to Philadelphia, where she worked at Stonorov & Kahn; her projects there included a redevelopment plan for Philadelphia. She received early recognition for the Tyng Toy, a kit of interlocking wood pieces she designed that could turn into everything from workbenches to wagons.
From 1947 until 1964 she worked closely with the architect Louis I. Kahn and was instrumental in the design of the Trenton Bath House and the Yale University Art Gallery, among other projects. Buckminster Fuller, the architect and futurist, once called her “Kahn’s geometrical strategist.”
After 1968, Tyng focused her attention on research, and in 1975 she earned a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania where she taught for almost thirty years at the School of Design. She wrote extensively about geometry in architecture, exploring ways to apply natural and numeric systems to buildings and urban design. She was also a design studio critic at The Cooper Union in the mid-1970s.
Tyng's influence on Kahn's work was recognized very late in her life. In 2010 she was commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Graham Foundation in Chicago to create “Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry,” an installation and catalog embodying her thinking about geometry.