Yoshio Taniguchi, 1937–2024
By Emily Cheung
Portrait of YOSHIO TANIGUCHI. Courtesy the Asia Society Texas Center, Houston.
Yoshio Taniguchi, the internationally acclaimed Japanese architect who won a major commission for the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died of pneumonia on December 16, according to a statement from his company, Taniguchi & Associates.
Taniguchi was a distinguished architect in Japan, designing notable museums such as the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art in Marugame, Kagawa Prefecture, in 1991 and the Gallery of the Horyuji Treasures at the Tokyo National Museum in 1999. He was still a virtual unknown before being chosen in 1997 to redesign the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—his first winning proposal and work outside Japan. The oldest of the shortlisted designers—among them were internationally renowned architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, and Steven Holl—Taniguchi won the multistage selection process with his exceptionally elegant design for the new space. His addition to MoMA opened to the public in 2004, along with an inaugural exhibition dedicated to presenting Taniguchi’s distinctly modern museum design.
Born in Tokyo in 1937, he was the son of the famous architect Yoshiro Taniguchi, a contemporary of postwar modernist Kunio Maekawa. Between 1964 and 1972, the younger Taniguchi worked for Kenzo Tange, one of the most significant Japanese architects of the 20th century, after meeting him at Harvard University, where he earned a master’s degree in architecture in 1964. Taniguchi became the first Japanese architect to receive a license upon completing an architectural education abroad.
In his own practice, Taniguchi combined modernist compositions and Japanese design traditions while striving for extreme perfection. Entrusted with several commissions on behalf of Japan’s royal family and having designed various religious structures, Taniguchi created timeless, craftsmanlike designs that are considered successors to the Katsura Imperial Villa, one of the finest examples of Japanese architecture. American landscape architect Peter Walker, with whom he collaborated on several projects like the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in 1995, once remarked that Taniguchi is “one of the few architects practicing today who believes that the greatest quality architecture can possess is stillness.”
After MoMA’s expansion in 2004, Taniguchi also won a USD 48.4 million commission to design the Asia Society Texas Center in Houston. In 2005, he was awarded Japan’s highest cultural honor, the Praemium Imperiale prize for architecture, and he was the co-recipient of the second annual Isamu Noguchi Award in 2015, presented by the Noguchi Museum in New York. Highly acknowledged by his peers, Taniguchi was named an honorary member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (2007), the Japan Institute of Architects (2015), and the Architectural Institute of Japan (2020).
Emily Cheung is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.
