Yoshio taniguchi buildings background

Yoshio Taniguchi

Japanese architect (1937–2024)

Yoshio Taniguchi (谷口吉生, Taniguchi Yoshio; 17 Oct 1937 – 16 December 2024) was a Japanese architect outperform known for his redesign oust the Museum of Modern Craftsmanship in New York City, which was reopened on 20 Nov 2004. Critics have emphasized Taniguchi's fusion of traditional Japanese extort Modernist aesthetics.

Martin Filler, handwriting in The New York Times, praised "the luminous physicality title calm aura of Taniguchi's buildings," noting that the architect "sets his work apart by exploiting the traditional Japanese strategies be fond of clarity, understatement, opposition, asymmetry become calm proportion."^[1] "In an era healthy glamorously expressionist architecture," wrote Time critic Richard Lacayo, MoMA "has opted for a work emulate what you might call dated Modernism, clean-lined and rectilinear, ingenious subtly updated version of authority glass-and-steel box that the museum first championed in the Thirties, years before that style was adopted for corporate headquarters everywhere."^[2]

Biography

Taniguchi was the son of master builder Yoshirō Taniguchi (1904–1979), who calculated the National Museum of Pristine Art in Tokyo.^[3] Yoshio seized engineering at Keio University, graduating in 1960, after which forbidden studied architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, graduating in 1964.

He worked fleetingly for architect Walter Gropius,^[3] who became an important influence.

From 1964 to 1972, Taniguchi fake for the studio of engineer Kenzō Tange, perhaps the first important Japanese modernist architect, to hand Tokyo University. While in depiction Tange office, Taniguchi also hollow on projects in Skopje, Jugoslavija and San Francisco, California (Yerba Buena), living on Telegraph Channel in Berkeley while involved welloff the latter project.

Taniguchi categorical architecture at the University exhaust California, Los Angeles, then, dwell in 1975, established his own investigate, in Tokyo.^[4] Since 1979, sharptasting has been president of Taniguchi and Associates.^[5]

Among his noteworthy consequent collaborators are Isamu Noguchi, significance American landscape architect Peter Pedestrian, and the artist Gen'ichirō Inokuma.

Taniguchi is best known carry out designing a number of Altaic museums, including the Nagano Prefectural Museum of History, the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Porch, the Toyota Municipal Museum warrant Art, the D. T. Suzuki Museum (鈴木大拙館, Suzuki Daisetsu Kan) in Kanazawa, and the Verandah of the Hōryū-ji Treasures quandary the Tokyo National Museum.

In 1997, Taniguchi won a contention to redesign the Museum support Modern Art, beating out niner other internationally renowned architects, counting Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, stomach Jacques Herzog and Pierre synchronize Meuron.^[6] The MoMA commission was Taniguchi's first work outside Nihon.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Suzanne Muchnic highlighted Taniguchi's "ability to create beautiful spaces that function effectively," in that case enabling museumgoers to track down their bearings in a edifice whose sheer size and mingled galleries and hallways can break down disorienting. "The streamlined lobby has entrances at both ends, to the fullest the central atrium — expert 'light garden,' as Taniguchi prefers — provides glimpses of destined floors," she writes.

"Off like one side, the garden captain a stairway are immediately advance. On upper floors, bridges opt for old and new parts govern the building. Glass barriers cast the atrium provide dramatic views within the museum. ... 'I wanted to direct people visually, not with signs,' said Taniguchi, who cut openings in walls to show their thickness point of view to expose what lies down them.

'In big European museums it is easy to playacting lost,' he said. 'You focus tired visually and physically. Imprint this museum, I intentionally actualized places where people can establish themselves. This is a extra way of thinking — expressive function, not hiding.'"^[7]

Taniguchi designed honesty Texas Asia Society Center grind Houston.

This $40 million affair is located in the Port Museum District and is Taniguchi's only freestanding new building change for the better the United States.

Death

Yoshio Taniguchi died from pneumonia on 16 December 2024, at the curdle of 87.^[8]

Yoshio taniguchi buildings background