Anne Griswold Tyng (1920–2011)

Anne Griswold Tyng was born in Lushan, Jiangxi Province, China, to Episcopal missionaries from prominent families in Boston, Massachusetts. She was fascinated by geometry and mathematical forms at an early age. By the time she entered Radcliffe College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1942, she had decided on a career as an architect. At Harvard University, where she was among the first group of women to graduate from the Graduate School of Design, she studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, earning a master's degree in architecture in 1944. After briefly working for industrial design firms, she landed a job as the only woman architect at the firm of Stonorov and Kahn in Philadelphia. In 1949, she became the only woman in the USA to apply for and receive an architecture license. She became a pioneering architect whose ideas influenced the works of her boss Louis I. Kahn. When he opened a solo practice as an architect, she went with him. They had a 15-year professional and romantic relationship, and had a daughter together in 1954. Their letters from this period have been published. She left Kahn's office in 1964, and spent spent many years teaching architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where she obtained her Ph.D. She appeared in Nathaniel Kahn's 2003 documentary about his father, My Architect. The Institute of Contemporary Art held a retrospective exhibition of her work in 2010.