Remembering Yoshio Taniguchi (1937–2024)

“The Sculpture Garden is Central Park, and around it is a city with buildings of various functions and purpose. MoMA is a microcosm of Manhattan.” —Yoshio Taniguchi¹

I first met Yoshio Taniguchi in 1998, when Terry Riley (then MoMA’s chief curator of Architecture and Design), Ronald Lauder (then chair of our board), and I flew to Tokyo to interview several architects for the Museum’s 2004 expansion. We joined Yoshio at one of his favorite sushi bars. He came with his friend Issey Miyake. I vividly remember Issey telling Ronald that he was working on a new perfume that was going to take the market by surprise, and Ronald staring down at Issey, who was considerably shorter than him, and saying, “I will make you a deal: You stay out of scents and I will stay out of fashion!” We all laughed hard, and thus began a long and warm friendship with Yoshio and Issey.

As we traveled around Japan looking at Yoshio’s museums in Tokyo, Toyota, Kanazawa, and elsewhere, it became clear that he was not only exceptionally talented, but that he understood the complex relationships between space, light, materials, and form necessary to make a great museum. No matter how you felt when you entered one of his buildings, like the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures in Tokyo or the museum of contemporary art in Marugame, the elegance of the architecture, the soft light filtered through diffused screens and skylights, and the balance of finely calibrated spaces encouraged you to slow down and gain a sense of inner peace. Using a relatively limited palette of concrete, glass, and steel, with wooden floors and touches throughout, each of his museums was exquisitely proportioned, finely detailed, and scaled precisely to the works of art on display.

As one of the first Asian students to study at Harvard after the Second World War, he quickly learned the language of midcentury North American and European architecture. But he never forgot his roots in Japan, where his father was one of the most important architects of his generation. His work ultimately found a unique way to infuse the strategies of international modernism with a Japanese sensibility. His architecture was at once striking and bold, yet minimalist in its detailing.

Yoshio knew that to make a great building you had to understand its inner workings, so that all the details worked together. What was invisible to the eye was as important to him as what was visible. He often referred to his buildings as bodies and his work as homeopathic. His designs always started with a diagnosis of the problem at hand, and then moved methodically to solutions that were as elegant as they were subtle. For Yoshio, a successful building was one where the architecture disappeared. By which he meant: where all the details were in such balance and harmony, where the proportions of every room aligned with the overall proportions of the building, that what you experienced was the ephemeral effects of space and light as they came together to create a sense of tranquility. He believed deeply that only when your mind and body were at ease could you “feel” a work of art and its emotive power.

Glenn D. Lowry and Yoshio Taniguchi at the construction site of The Museum of Modern Art, June 9, 2004

MoMA’s 2004 expansion: foreground, the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building (left), the Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Building (right), the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building, 2004, architect Yoshio Taniguchi; background, Museum Tower, 1982, architect César Pelli & Associates; foreground, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, designed 1953, architect Philip Johnson

At The Museum of Modern Art, we asked Yoshio to completely redesign our campus, to create soaring public spaces where none existed, to reflect the Museum’s commitment to both its collection and the education and research that went into exhibitions and programs for the public, and to disentangle the web of offices and backroom spaces that had accreted over eight previous building projects. His solution was a masterful balancing of new and renovated galleries, with an education and research wing to the east of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which he restored to its original dimensions. Giant porticoes frame the wings and embrace the Garden so that it nests at the center, emphasizing its importance to the overall experience of the Museum.

Yoshio knew that we would ultimately expand again to the west, and so he organized all of the back-of-house spaces and elevators so that this could easily be achieved. At the time he did this he had no idea that we would realize the next project in 15 years with Diller, Scofidio+Renfro. The success of their work grows directly out of the planning that Yoshio did, and his understanding that the Museum he designed for us had to be adaptable to the future as much as serving the present.

His building transformed MoMA and launched it into the 21st century with a sense of purpose and confidence. The galleries Yoshio created—with walls that seem to float, hiding the air returns that usually mar a space; the continuous views onto the Sculpture Garden; the atrium that provides a point of focus to the gallery core; and the transparent facades that allow light into the galleries and visitors to orient themselves to the street—are among the Museum’s details that I admire most.