Kahn collaborator Tyng gets her due in Institute of Contemporary Art exhibit

Louis Kahn was considered a pretty good modern architect in 1945 when Anne Griswold Tyng went to work in his office, then located in the Evening Bulletin building across from Philadelphia's City Hall. By the time they parted company two decades later, Kahn was revered for liberating architecture from its Bauhaus straitjacket and Tyng was known, if she was known at all, as his mistress.

Had they embarked on their storied collaboration today, one imagines Tyng sharing the credit for their breakthrough work, especially the Yale Art Gallery and the Trenton Bath House. They would call their firm something like Kahn & Tyng. And Tyng would surely merit more than the few throwaway lines she gets in today's rapidly expanding library of Kahn books.

The past is past. But, fortunately, enough has changed in the profession that, at 90, Tyng is about to enjoy the first retrospective devoted to her architecture. While the show, "Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry," which opened Thursday at the Institute of Contemporary Art, doesn't completely make up for a lifetime of slights, it goes a long way toward explaining the influence she had on what we still, not quite accurately, call "Kahn's work."

Because architecture is such a collaborative art form, establishing attribution is often difficult, no matter which genders are involved. As big and complicated as buildings are, we like to pretend that they spring full-blown from a single mind. But you only have to examine the evolution of Tyng's sketches in the ICA exhibit to understand that a modern masterpiece such as the Yale gallery wouldn't exist without her contribution.

Historians now agree that Tyng was the first in Kahn's struggling office to become enthralled by space-frame trusses, the first to speak rapturously about incorporating their superstrong tetrahedrons - pyramid shapes - into a building's bones. Kahn was smitten by his 25-year-old assistant's theories, as well as her drop-dead blond looks. Their work became inseparable from their long, passionate affair.