Gallery of the Horyuji Treasures, Tokyo. Photo © Tohiharu Kitajima courtesy MoMA
Prime Time Arrives for MoMA's Mysterious Yoshio Taniguchi
Bloomberg, November 15, 2004
In 1997, after highly public soul searching, the Museum of Modern Art selected an architect almost no one had heard of for its massive expansion.
This Saturday, the public will judge for itself whether the museum spent its $425 million well. That's when the doors open on the new granite-and-glass shrine to the world's greatest 20th-century art.
Even to aficionados, the selection of the Tokyo-based Yoshio Taniguchi seemed odd. Whatever had impressed the museum's staff and trustees did not seem to emerge from photos very occasionally seen in the international architecture magazines.
He was the least famous of the ten architects MoMA considered. (They included New York architects Bernard Tschumi, Steven Holl, Rafael Vinoly, and Tod Williams/Billie Tsien; Rem Koolhaas and Wiel Arets of Holland; the firm of Jacques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron of Switzerland; Dominique Perrault of France; and Toyo Ito of Japan.)
Taniguchi had built relatively few buildings: mostly small museums in far flung Japanese locations that memorialize single artists. (An exhibition of nine of Taniguchi's museum designs will open with the new MoMA.)
Whole Cloth
By now we know the museum chose Taniguchi because his preliminary design skillfully wove together the museum's disparate parts, the souvenirs of a long growth process that began on 53rd street in 1939.
Terence Riley, the chief curator of the Department of Architecture and Design, compared the accomplishment to urban planning, because the architect recognized that the many parts of the museum were like a city, and he had assembled them with such elegance and clarity.
In person, the 67-year-old Taniguchi is tall and patrician, imposing yet reserved. His face is broad and he pulls back longish grey hair. Though he has worked exclusively in Japan until now, he's familiar with America. His Masters degree in architecture comes from Harvard. He's taught there and at UCLA.
He was not unfriendly during a visit to his Tokyo office last year, but he doesn't like to talk about his architecture. He hopes it speaks for itself.
Trash 'Museum'
His projects are formal, austere, authoritatively executed -- and need to be appreciated in person. A garbage recycling plant that had to be placed in a prominent site in Hiroshima exudes a cool industrial reserve on the outside.
Tanigushi carved a tall public passage through the building with high glass walls so that people could view the trash-handling experience as if they were in a museum.
To me, the power of his work is elusive: it's hard to nail down one gesture and say ``that is where his genius lies.''
Influenced by traditional Japanese shrines, Taniguchi orchestrates a processional approach. In his museums, you pass across a number of thresholds that help you leave behind the day-to-day world and subtly prepare you for the experience of art. At the Gallery of the Horyuji Treasures (1999), Tokyo, visitors stroll around a calming plane of water, pass under a great, hovering roof and enter a soaring, contemplative entrance hall.
All this occurs before you see a single work of art.
Taniguchi causes a gradual unfolding of experiences, so that there is always an element of surprise. A carefully framed view will suddenly appear. A grand vista will open out from a small room.
Somber Formality
His architecture does not upstage the art. Instead, his exquisite sense of proportion unerringly guides the eye. He wraps galleries in a subtle, somber formality by confidently juggling weight, texture, and the surface of materials.
To some observers, the choice of Taniguchi seemed out of step seven years ago. As MoMA was making its selection, the Getty Center had just been completed -- Richard Meier's Xanadu for art on a hilltop in Los Angeles.
Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao had also just opened to instant acclaim. The entrepreneurial approach of the Guggenheim's director, Thomas Krens, was on the ascendant. Dramatic, crowd-pleasing ``destination'' architecture seemed to be the wave of the future.
Things did not go easy for MoMA or for Taniguchi. The museum struggled to raise a total of $858 million (to acquire the land, build the building, fund MoMA QNS, and add to the endowment). The fund-raising environment worsened after the 9/11 terror attacks; the museum briefly considered stopping the project. The continuing contribution chill is responsible for the highly controversial decision to charge a whopping $20 admission.
New York Contractors
The power of Taniguchi's architecture depends considerably on the superb craftsmanship obtainable in Japan. The best work of large-scale contractors in New York falls far short. To keep the budget under control, Taniguchi was prevented from having the hands-on control he is used to. In Japan, the architect is permitted to make adjustments as construction proceeds; in New York, he didn't get that power.
When I saw him in Tokyo last year, he fretted as the building rose, worried that without his frequent presence the design might not be fully realized.
Over the years of MoMA¬¼s design and construction, Krens' grand plans for a world Guggenheim empire imploded (taking an extravagant Gehry design for Lower Manhattan with it). The Whitney Museum shelved a tortured, angular tower addition by Rem Koolhaas (only now revived, more modestly, with Renzo Piano as the architect). Arts projects nationwide have been canceled or scaled back.
Will MoMa's building be too grand? Many of its works were conjured up instinctively by artists caught up in the upheavals of their time. Taniguchi's formality may unintentionally embalm the great energy of modern and contemporary art.
What is no longer in doubt is that this ambitious new MoMA is already a landmark -- the most important building to be built in New York in decades.