Tyng Toy, 1949. Resonances from an unknown American pioneer

Abstract

Anne Griswold Tyng (1920-2011), one of the first women who studied architecture at the GSD in Harvard, and coauthor with Louis I. Kahn of the City Tower Project –among other works–, designed —and patented in 1949— a small plywood toy, which in diverse arrangements can be assembled in many different ways. The project, known as the Tyng Toy, anticipates Tyng’s future thought and research on geometry as “forming principles” and condenses the concerns of the epoch and the new dream of American architecture after World War II. The toy manifests a particular vision of the architect’s role as social educator and transformer of the environment and, beyond the dominant needs of reconstruction of that time, transcends the imperatives of the moment to speak about a different need, parallel and universal: to rebuild the ludic, imaginary, educative and design universe of the human being. The small five-pieces-set, plywood toy, as a symbolic metaphor, tells us about a realm which is also ours: complex and ramified, pedagogical and opened, and in its approach, synthetic and intense, gathers universal, deep resonances.