Yoshio Taniguchi, 1937–2024

In December 1997, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) made the surprise announcement that Yoshio Taniguchi would design the museum's planned expansion, having bested Herzog & de Meuron and Bernard Tschumi in the second stage of an international competition. The first stage of the competition also included Steven Holl, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, and other architects considerably more well known at the time than Taniguchi, but his selection for the high-profile commission made him a familiar name overnight. Although the announcement came two months after Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao opened to much fanfare, instead of veering toward a similarly sculptural proposal, as with Herzog & de Meuron's pyramidal design, MoMA doubled down on modernist simplicity, finding the ideal candidate in Taniguchi.

As Taniguchi and Associates was working on the MoMA competition in late 1997, construction was underway on The Gallery of Horyuji Treasures at the Tokyo National Museum. Glass facades on the outside ring a windowless gallery for the storage and preservation of fragile historical artifacts. In his words, Taniguchi designed the building as “an environment characterized by tranquility, order, and dignity.” The building, completed in 1999, both captured the ability of Taniguchi to design and craft minimalist environments suitable for the display of art and presaged the expanded MoMA, which would open five years later. That minimalism is enshrined in a much repeated quote ascribed to Taniguchi in regard to the MoMA project: “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.” His words or not, the MoMA that reopened in 2004 was more elegant and tranquil than what came before, but also more popular, meaning its minimalism was offset by the crowds drawn to the considerably larger institution.

Other notable museums attributed to Taniguchi are many — Ken Domon Museum of Photography (1983), Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (1991), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (1995), and D.T. Suzuki Museum (2011), to name just a few — but another one that should be discussed in the context of his passing is the Yoshiro and Yoshio Taniguchi Museum of Architecture, which opened in Kanazawa in 2019. As the name indicates, the museum was designed by Yoshio Taniguchi and presents, in part, the work of his father, Yoshiro Taniguchi (1904-1979), who was also an architect (and writer) and was born in Kanazawa. The museum sits on the site of Yoshiro's former residence, which he donated to the city for a cultural venue. Yoshio's design of the museum resembles his other museums in terms of form, materials, and simplicity, but as the photo at top attests, the minimalist building houses reproductions of relatively traditional spaces designed by his father, in addition to galleries for exhibitions. This, one of Yoshio Taniguchi's last works, if not his last, neatly summarizes a career designing buildings that were unabashedly modern yet highly respectful of function and context.