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By Cathleen McGuigan
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Early one evening last spring, on the edge of the Inland Sea in Japan, architect Yoshio Taniguchi was showing off the construction site of a small museum he'd designed. Taniguchi, 67, is silver-haired and tall (too tall to buy Japanese menswear) and, like his serene modernist buildings, has an air of elegance and calm. "A lot of architects design a lot of details," Taniguchi was saying. "I try to conceal details." His brand of modernism doesn't always express its structure; instead, his buildings tend to have a lightness of being, defying the steel, glass, concrete and stone it took to make them. Their exquisite craftsmanship is legendary, and Japanese contractors are proud to oblige him. "In Japan, Taniguchi walks on clouds," says Brian Aamoth, an American architect who's worked with him there. Later, ordering drinks before dinner, Taniguchi talked about how different building methods are in America. But he never really answered the question of why such a famous architect at home had taken so long to design outside Japan. "You are psychoanalyzing me," he said with a slight smile. Then his cocktail arrived. It was a Manhattan.
When Taniguchi was chosen to design the new, vastly expanded Museum of Modern Art seven years ago, a lot of people in the art world scratched their heads. Out of 10 architects invited to compete for this prize commission (all were under 60--MoMA had ruled out the generation of Frank Gehry), Taniguchi was virtually unknown in America, and his scheme for MoMA's midtown Manhattan site seemed so smooth and corporate--so unfashionably tame--it looked like a long shot next to the provocative concepts of such hotshots as Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron. Even Taniguchi didn't think he'd win. Convinced he'd fatally fumbled his key presentation to MoMA's trustees, he headed straight to a neighborhood bar to mourn.
Next month, after nearly four years of construction, MoMA will finally open the doors of his quietly elegant modernist building. The stakes are high--the building alone cost $425 million--and the debate that began with Taniguchi's selection isn't entirely over. It goes to the heart of the museum's identity and signals a shift in contemporary architecture. After years of eye-popping museum design (most famously Gehry's gorgeously curvy Guggenheim Bilbao), Taniguchi's self-effacing building rejects the status of icon, as if to murmur, "Don't mind me--just look at the art." After all, the art is the richest collection of modern masterworks in the world, from Monet's "Water Lilies" to Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" to Andy Warhol's soup cans. Some of MoMA's devout followers believed the museum--the first to create a department of architecture--betrayed its mission by building Taniguchi's scheme rather than something jazzier. But MoMA, 75 years old and hardly a haven for the avant-garde, makes no apology. "It's like having an English suit or an Italian suit," says museum director Glenn Lowry. "Yoshio's building is the English suit--it's not flamboyant but it's perfectly tailored and will be the same in 100 years as it is today."
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Taniguchi likes to say his goal is to make the architecture "disappear." And while we don't believe him literally--his ego is fiercely invested in his design principles and his impeccable details--his understated approach at MoMA is to subtly and meticulously create experiences of shifting spaces, light and views as you move through the museum. He started with a homage, restoring the facades of the original 1939 museum by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone and Philip Johnson's 1964 east wing. He then turned his focus to the famous sculpture garden--"the heart of the museum," he says--and framed it with immaculately cool glass-curtain walls and deep, porchlike overhangs. Then, inside the museum, Taniguchi, in his quiet way, went to town: his new entrance cuts a wide public passage through the city block. From there, you cross a spacious ticket lobby and wham!--you're standing in a gorgeous 110-foot-high atrium, flooded with daylight, looking out at that garden. A wide stairway of green slate--or the escalators tucked in beyond--take you up to the art.
The galleries (now covering 125,000 square feet, up from 85,000 in the old building) are classic white boxes, but they vary in size from large to larger, and are arranged so the visitor can wander at will, rather than being force-marched in one direction. On the second floor, one spectacular gallery sprawls 200 feet without columns--a triumph of engineering and a manifestation of MoMA's new commitment to show large-scale contemporary art, like Richard Serra's sculptures. But the best thing about Taniguchi's scheme may be its urbanity. Not only has he neatly knit his complex design into the tight city site but he gives you frequent glimpses of the street and neighboring rooftops from windowed galleries or the atrium's balconies. His museum is meant to mediate between the chaos of New York and the contemplation of art.
Taniguchi has had a lifelong relationship with Western modernism. His father was an early modern architect in Tokyo, and he remembers the impact of "a very colorful culture" brought by American GIs to Japan after the gray war years: "Lucky Strikes, Coca-Cola, Life magazine, Blondie and Superman!" At 21,Taniguchi went to Harvard's Graduate School of Design, the bastion of the Bauhaus, and then worked for Kenzo Tange, who was Japan's foremost modern architect. During those years, he spent time in New York and of course visited the Museum of Modern Art. "I was more interested in the people than the paintings," he recalls. "I liked watching how they looked at the art and how they moved."
If you go to any of Taniguchi's museums in Japan, you begin to appreciate how MoMA's architect-selection committee must have felt when they first saw his work, as they toured Asia and Europe in trustee Ronald Lauder's private jet. The buildings are incredibly seductive--monumental but spare, with surprising shifts in scale--and beautifully crafted. Take the exquisite Gallery of Horyuji Treasures in Tokyo (1999), a structure of delicacy and strength, with a screen of slender steel louvers masking a soaring glass facade. To approach, you walk on water--across a bridge that just clears a tranquil pool. But to get inside, you have to make a little turn and go through a small, low-ceilinged vestibule--meant to suggest the entrance to a traditional tea ceremony, where you humble yourself by ducking through a small opening. Along with his rigorous passion for modernism, and the influence of such masters as Mies van der Rohe, Taniguchi's buildings are inevitably suffused with Japanese culture.
Taniguchi had big budgets during Japan's boom years in the '80s and '90s: the Horyuji gallery cost twice per square foot what MoMA did, and you can see every yen. Many wondered how the perfection of Taniguchi's design details could be replicated in the United States. As it happens, the supervision and much of the detailing of MoMA was put into the hands of a big New York firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox. Last June, Taniguchi toured the MoMA construction site for the first time in months. "In Japan, I design everything, even the door handles," he said. "I'll be honest with you, many details here are different from mine. But the concept I proposed is here." And Taniguchi got his way on key elements. Check out those glass-curtain walls surrounding the garden. The panes are huge (read: expensive) and the mullions are solid steel but very thin (read: superexpensive). The effect is beautifully crisp. "Yoshio won many battles through sheer obstinacy," says Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture. "He would explain so well why something had to be just so--and sometimes he would win by simply a long silence."
Riley argues that Taniguchi's architecture in fact looks radical these days: "It's all straight lines!" Whether radical or retro, what this master of minimalist beauty has created through his gifts and his tenacity is a design lesson in itself. But the ultimate judgment will have to wait: Taniguchi himself told a MoMA curator who'd complimented him that considering the building without the art in it is like admiring the tea cup without the green tea. Next month the museum will have art on the walls and crowds in the galleries--and then the tea ceremony will begin.
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