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Chapter One

Stillness and Plenitude

--The Architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi

Fumihiko Maki

Twenty-four years ago Yoshio Taniguchi published his first project after opening his own office. A small house in a Tokyo suburb, it was completed a year later. House at Yukigaya is a court house with a two-story-high wall that encloses a variety of spaces. I remember it quite well, in part because I contributed a short piece to an architectural journal in which I described my impressions of the building. Entering the vestibule by way of a courtyard set in a corner of a square box, one encountered a series of spaces that gradually ascended in a spiral toward the living room in the depths of the house on the second floor. The walls and floor of the courtyard were completely covered with white tiles approximately 15 centimeters square, and this generated a floating quality. The eye was drawn from the courtyard to the blue sky framed by the courtyard, and it was almost as if one were being lifted heavenward. I recall this spatial experience as if it were yesterday. Although subsequent buildings have varied in scale and function, his goal has consistently been to provide visitors with a fresh, variegated experience by means of carefully devised spatial stratagems within a framework created from simple elements.

House at Yukigaya dates from 1975, but 37 years have in fact passed since he first received training as an architect. In that time, architecture throughout the world, including Japan, has changed in diverse ways, and radical changes have also occurred in the environment in which architecture is practiced. That he has been able to pursue and fulfill his own set objectives and to elaborate his own chosen themes to the point where no one today can dispute the excellence of his work is a tremendous achievement precisely because of the rapidly changing nature of the times. It testifies to his strength of spirit. On one recent occasion he wrote about the morality of design. The phrase has a somewhat old-fashioned ring, but at a time when a blithe disregard for the moral implications of design is leading to the production and consumption of many works of architecture, his words have weight.

Taniguchi has rarely discussed in print the philosophy and method behind his design, preferring instead to offer terse, quite sachlich explanations concerning just-completed works. One exception was the essay "Concerning Design," published in Shinkenchiku upon the completion (in 1978) of the Shiseido Art Museum, in which he discussed a series of past works. "When drawings of the main buildings I have designed in the last five years are juxtaposed, the fact that they all involve the pursuit of certain configurations is obvious to anyone. They are the result of combining simple but contradictory figures, namely centripetal and centrifugal forms, and space and mass " (my italics).

In the January 1980 issue of JA he also made the following statement in explaining the Shiseido Art Museum. "Responding to given site and design conditions is one of the most basic problems in architectural design. And the most basic factor determining the composition of space is the decision made on such things as materials, lighting, colors and proportion ..." Although in subsequent works the space created by the figures increases in complexity, those two statements taken together summarize the basic stratagem of his design approach. I would like to examine in more detail the question of how he came to develop such a stratagem and to locate his design approach in the broader context of architectural thought.

About 17 years ago, Richard Padovan contributed to a British magazine an interesting essay entitled "The Pavilion and the Court." Padovan discussed how the architectural movement known as De Stijl, which was founded in 1917, influenced not only van Doesburg, who was one of its founders, but other architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Rietveld, and how they subsequently interpreted its theory, especially how they attempted in the design of houses to use a De Stijl-type approach to effect a dialectical development from the two basic residential forms that had evolved in the course of Europe's long history, namely the pavilion and the court house. He takes note of the fact that in the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Savoye, which coincidentally were both built in 1929, the architects, following different design processes, developed in the case of Mies a centripetal space in a centrifugal arrangement of walls and in the case of Le Corbusier a centrifugal spatial movement in a centripetal enclosure. (It is also interesting, though perhaps not directly relevant to the subject of this essay, that Padovan quotes the late Peter Smithson as stating that the completion of these two buildings heralded the end of the heroic period in Europe and that the two architects, taking different paths, subsequently focused their attention on the eternal qualities and the existentialist values of architecture.)

In the De Stijl manifesto, van Doesburg of course advocated the independence of the basic architectural elements, namely walls, floors and ceilings, and their free movement and organization, including their mutual intervention. The attempt to endow space with a centrifugal quality was an effort to do away with the hitherto accepted notion of architecture as a closed box.

The pavilion is situated in the countryside and integrated with its surrounding landscape by virtue of the centrifugal character of its space. The court house is situated in the city and integrated with the mesocosmos created by the city by virtue of its centripetality. As Taniguchi himself acknowledges in the above-quoted passage, the use of centrifugal and centripetal qualities, separately or in tandem, is basic to the spatial dynamic of practically all his works, and the figures they give rise to form the framework of his architecture. The Shiseido Art Museum is the result of the skillful integration in plan of the two concepts of the pavilion and the court.

It may be worthwhile with the help of Padovan's text to continue a bit further with a discussion of Mies, with whom Taniguchi appears to have much affinity, and the path that led Mies to the Barcelona Pavilion. The proposal for a Brick Country House, published by Mies in 1923, can be said to be the first modernist work in Europe. There, the freely extended walls and slab endow space with fluidity. Yet at the same time, the neoplasticist tendency that Mies revealed at the time also exerted a strong influence on the composition. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who had a notable influence on Mies, designed in the house in Charlottenhof a complex composed of several pavilions arranged asymmetrically and freely linked by terraces and pergolas. Padovan points out that its influence appeared before the Brick Country House in the Kröller House and concludes that that led, six years after the Brick Country House, to the Barcelona Pavilion. I am probably not alone in sensing a strong affinity between the two houses by Mies and the Ken Domon Museum of Photography (1983) and the recently completed Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (1995). In particular, the Kröller House, with its pool of water in front of the building and asymmetrical masses arranged between trees and linked by pergolas, has the same organizational principle as that of the two works by Taniguchi.

I have not alluded to these works in order to suggest that Taniguchi used them as a model. The design process is inherently complex and the architect himself has difficulty explaining a great deal about it. There is nothing more annoying for the architect than to have someone suddenly point out a similar work and to declare that to have been his original inspiration. The wellspring of an architect's ideas lies in the depths of his consciousness, where the diverse experiences he has accumulated, sometimes unconsciously, as well as factors of environment and genes are at work, and personal history is the text in which these are woven together. Architecture is not just something that the architect happens to hit upon on a given occasion. It is the consequence of all these factors connecting and relating to one another, at times naturally, and other times accidentally. This is true of all architects and all works of architecture. Whether or not the work that is the product of that process can stand up to careful analysis and appraisal is another matter entirely. Here, I would like to examine what this similarity in the works of Taniguchi and Mies signifies.

Taniguchi is one of the first architects of the postwar generation to receive his architectural education outside Japan. Naturally, being the son of Yoshiro Taniguchi (1904-1979), he was exposed from an early age to architecture, both traditional and modern.

Yet he majored in mechanical engineering at Keio University (one of the oldest academic institutions in Japan), and it was only in the three and a half years he then spent in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University that he received a true architectural education. As he himself remarks, modernism was at a dead end at the beginning of the 1960s. A feeling of being in a dead-end situation prevailed, not just in the United States but in Europe as well, and it was to lead, in the years after Taniguchi's graduation, to worldwide student unrest. He states that in the oppressive atmosphere that is characteristic of periods of transition, he came to believe that only through forging creative relationships to the city could architecture develop new possibilities and that he developed a strong interest in urban design. The early 1960s were a time when Josep Lluis Sert, having taken over from Gropius at the beginning of the 1950s, was in the process of consolidating a new regime in GSD at Harvard. At the time, Harvard and Penn were the universities with the strongest urban design programs. Sert had the benefit of an international network that had developed around CIAM in Europe. Sert himself had studied as a youth in Le Corbusier's atelier and, being a Catalan, possessed a Mediterranean sensibility. It is a fact that such tendencies were frequently reflected in his educational policies. However, it would be a mistake to think that all who studied at GSD at the time shared his thinking. No single architect can change overnight the architectural department of a great educational institution like Harvard, whatever may be the case at other universities. Around that time, many of the great postwar scholars of Europe were gathered in the humanities department, which formed the core of Harvard, and in the Department of Art History and the Fogg Museum, which were closely tied to architecture, the focus, in keeping with tradition, was clearly on European art. With respect to architectural history, both Giedion and Sekler belonged to the tradition of the German school of history. This diversity of thought and opinion made Harvard what it was.

I do not know what sort of influence this essentially European education exerted on Taniguchi during the nearly four years he spent at Harvard. However, the way in which his works have subsequently evolved and the rigorous nature of his details make it clear that his thinking and the products of his practice are by no means Mediterranean but Germanic in character. It would only be natural if his knowledge and interest in the engineering aspect of architecture played a part in this formal rigor and clarity, and it may also be imagined that the interest shown by his father in his youth in early European modernism might have plantedia seed that has borne fruit in the son. His works reveal the use of primary elements such as wall, slab, and podium, which I will discuss later, to develop diverse masses and voids. The deployment of these spaces is characterized by rhythm, flow, repose, and the upward and downward movement and bending of the line of vision. Behind the skillful dramatization of experience that is appealing to the senses, for example the way in which the next space is anticipated and signaled, are quite traditional Japanese protocols. However, this Japanese aspect is only apparent in the way response is made to the context, in the sense of the given or reconstructed topography and program. It is also the product of twenty years of experience.

In his case the wall is quite abstract at an early, conceptual stage of design. A wall for Tadao Ando, by contrast, is a priori a concrete wall, and the design process must accommodate the characteristics that are unique to a concrete wall. Taniguchi, on the other hand, chooses what the wall ought to be like from the given conditions of the context. The qualities of the surface are determined from the required function of course but also from the available technology. Hence the porcelain tile of the House at Yukigaya and the Akita Municipal Library, the luster tile of the Shiseido Art Museum, the ribbed aluminum of the Higashiyama Kaii Gallery of the Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, the glass of the Tokyo Kasai Rinkai Park View Point Visitors Center and the combination of translucent glass and slate of the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art. Only a highly abstract concept of the wall makes possible the variegated nature of their designs. Just as Mies exchanged the brick walls of the Brick Country House for marble in the Barcelona Pavilion, Taniguchi changes materials and structural systems. In the visitors center in Kasai Rinkai Park the question was how to express a homogeneity of surface. From that came the structural system, which determined the proportion of the members and the method of construction. I believe the question of whether or not the resulting arrangement of the window framing is Japanese or reminiscent of his father's work in character is not very important. What is far more important is the fact that he gives priority to such a concept, that is, that he sets for himself a design problem, in this case the creation between the framing and the glass of a balanced, homogeneous quality.

In situating a building on a given site, Taniguchi first determines to what extent that site can be converted into the new place he seeks to form and then takes steps accordingly. Next, through a dialogue between that newly born place and architecture, and using centrifugal and centripetal qualities as a vector, he creates individual spaces. As has already been stated, there is a constant shifting of the viewpoint in space. By means of this endless shifting of the center, architecture is made the aggregate of spatial, that is, visual experiences. Such a method of design has long characterized the generation of traditional Japanese spaces. His attempt to establish a new place might be called an attempt to establish za (i.e. to indicate a seat or place for a thing, a personage or an activity). The establishment of za , which is the method the Japanese have historically used in site planning, is analyzed in detail in a book entitled Nihon no Toshi Kukan (Urban Spaces of Japan). Za was a concept created to relate, in actual fact or on a symbolic plane, diverse heterogeneous elements existing inside and outside a certain domain. Various independent elements are, for example, enclosed, connected, supported or subordinated by za .

What most distinguishes Taniguchi's architecture is the concept of za and the richness of the sequential spatial experience developed within that concept.

Today, Japanese cities, both central districts and the suburbs, seem terribly impoverished by comparison to, say, European cities. Under these circumstances, the bold establishment of za , when successful, can be an effective stratagem. Za can also be said to be a means of actualizing the latent energy of a site that is at first glance impoverished and unattractive. Taniguchi has demonstrated that admirably in the Ken Domon Museum of Photography and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art.

At Tokyo Sea Life Park, the za he created is a water basin, which borrows the scenery of Tokyo Bay. There is both a centripetal force drawing the visitor toward the hexagonal glass tower and a centrifugal force extending from the water basin out toward the sea. From the brightly lit glass tower, the visitor descends into a dark space and after diverse experiences is presented in the restaurant with a place that is engaged in a dialogue with the shore. That is the story line that unfolds in this aquarium. Once, for the purpose of a lecture series overseas, I asked several architects for slides showing from the same angle a site before and after the construction of a building each had designed. The two photographs published here show conditions before and after the construction of Tokyo Sea Life Park.

The podium can be traced back to the Barcelona Pavilion, where Mies employed it in order to synthesize the design's centrifugal and centripetal tendencies. The podium, the walls freely installed on top of the podium, the columns that are independent of the walls, the roof, and the fireplace that provides the focal point for the space--it was only by layering these elements while maintaining their separate identities that Mies succeeded in creating this pavilion and giving expression to centrifugal and centripetal qualities. Here, the architecture transcends historical patterns and has been assembled through a highly intellectualized process. Yet in other, regional societies, similar architectural forms may already exist as part of historical tradition.

Take for example the staggered floor plan that the Japanese liken to the formation of a flock of wild geese. It is a feature of the Japanese shoin -style residence and is a means of giving to the route leading from the vestibule to the inner chamber a strong diagonal axiality and depth.

In Europe, such a staggered floor plan is found for the first time in Schinkel's villa for Prince Wilhelm, which was begun in 1835 in a suburb of Potsdam. This may be the first modernist work of architecture as far as the floor plan is concerned. The plan represents a rejection of symmetry and hierarchy of spatial units and the acceptance of the independence of elements. As important, however, was the architect's intent to provide better views and lighting for more rooms. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in The Culture of Cities , the pursuit of "pleasure" by the privileged classes gave birth to the planning approach on which modernism is based.

Here is a form that, on the one hand, was employed in a world that valued sensibility, and in that world, the meaning that the form once possessed eventually disappeared. In a culture that by contrast sprang from reason and was hostile to sensibility, the rationale for that form was continually questioned.

In examining these diverse historical phenomena, something fundamental about Taniguchi's architecture gradually emerges. It might be summarized as follows. His architecture takes as its starting point the abstract, figurative ideas embraced by Schinkel and Mies, but in the process of actualizing them in spatial compositions a traditional Japanese sensibility is demonstrated.

To understand Taniguchi's work, it is necessary to consider his strong interest in materials and materiality. For the last twenty years, he has shown equal interest in tile, metal, stone and glass. He has shown the potential of materials to create a world that is at times stoic and at other times hedonistic. By hedonistic I am not referring of course to that excessive, hodgepodge quality associated with postmodernism.

To understand his interest in materials, it may be helpful to return once more to the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies.

I happened to visit the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion late in the fall of 1994. It was early afternoon on a clear day, and the strong sunlight endowed the elegant structure with a particularly crisp, sharp-edged quality. From the east, the pavilion was more extended longitudinally--perhaps I ought to say more imposing--than I had imagined. However, what was most impressive was the materiality of the travertine that covered the podium and the external walls. As the document concerning the reconstruction explains in detail, the matter over which Mies took the greatest pains in designing this building was the selection of the three varieties of marble, including the travertine, and the technical problems of their construction. It goes without saying that those who were in charge of the reconstruction were fully aware of the care Mies had taken and took ample time and care in searching for and assembling marble that was close to the original. As a result, the structure, though a reconstruction, provides the same rich visual and tactile experience as the original pavilion. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that the impression of richness is not simply the effect of the color or texture of the travertine. For example, travertine is lavishly used in Lincoln Center in New York but the stone there has none of the sensuous quality displayed by that in the Barcelona Pavilion. In Barcelona, the large units of marble, each 2.2 meters wide and 1.1 meters high, and the geometrical rigor with which the units were treated revealed to the world of the time an entirely new modernity. Seventy years later, even in a reconstructed state, the pavilion still makes a powerful impression. The report describes how in the construction of the original pavilion endless adjustments were made, such as shifting the dimensions of the floor marble by a few millimeters so as to match the joints created by the 2.2 meter by 1.1 meter marble units on the walls. Such accounts show that Mies considered the large travertine panels to be the thing that was to breathe life into the pavilion.

From time to time Taniguchi and I discuss many design aspects of architecture. I recall how on one occasion he declared that, "When a project has an ample budget, I am interested now in using bigger units of materials." Like Mies, he is no doubt aware that in a large, thoroughly minimalist building--for example, the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art--the richness of form is heavily dependent on the materiality of the outer skin. Such an interest is apparent in his treatment of Vermont slate, which is used throughout this museum, and of translucent glass, which has been used before, in the museum for Marugame. This slate is employed in the United States and Canada in small units as roofing material. To assemble units of the size, volume and uniform quality found in the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Taniguchi began with extensive research on currently available slate throughout the world, and it required much labor (and expense) to select, gather, work, finish and construct. Yet he showed a craftsman's passion for all such processes and spared no effort.

A material acquires materiality only through the cumulative effect of labor, passion, detail and method of construction. The simpler the effect sought, the more complex the process can become. If one examines the psychological factors at work, one comes to realize that stoicism and hedonism are in fact opposite sides of the same coin.

As I have already stated, Taniguchi's interest in the Tokyo Kasai Rinkai Park View Point Visitors Center lay in the structural framing that forms the cage. Flat-rolled steel is used. As Toshihiko Kimura, the structural engineer for the project, explains, the excess welding material that protruded where the flat bars are joined was removed with a grinder. A staggering number of joints were each finished by hand. Such scrupulously performed tasks in the end account for the power of Taniguchi's architecture. There is certainly little about his work that is formally spectacular in the ways that are in fashion in the 1990s. Yet at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, with its translucent glass, dark green Vermont slate and pale silver canopy of honeycombed aluminum, the combination of different materials, colors and textures creates an indelible impression on all who experience it.

What then of the social value of his architecture? In the essay "Concerning Design," from which I quoted earlier, he recalls the time he spent in Kenzo Tange's office Urtec after his experience at Harvard. There, he had opportunities not only to work on redevelopment projects for Skopje and San Francisco but to come into contact with the old, traditional cities of Europe and the history behind their cityscapes. He discusses the radical changes Japanese cities were undergoing in the early 1970s when he opened his own office and how he gradually came to the conclusion that the optimistic view he had developed at the university, that is, the belief in the solidarity of architecture and the city, was not applicable, at least to Japan, as long as the urban environment was being constructed for the sake of consumption. According to him, he had no choice but to create a microcosm or to express his own ideal urban image by his work amid the confused environment. This helps to explain the process by which he arrived at the above-mentioned concept of the pavilion and the court and the method he adopted that makes use of the concept of za and sequential space. In his case, skepticism about the city led to the creation of self-sufficient worlds. How the boundary between the outside and his own world is constructed then becomes an important issue. If one looks at his projects, the works that are situated in the countryside or in an extensive natural environment are notable for the superb ways in which this boundary is established.

The question is the approach he takes when the given environment is in the middle of the city or when there is inadequate space for creating a boundary. An instructive example is the museum in Marugame. The site faces to the south an open space in front of a railway station. Marugame is a small city of 70,000 in Shikoku and does not offer a substantive historical context. Taniguchi first created a large overhang and composed an elevation featuring a tile mural. This museum has a permanent exhibit of works by the late Gen'ichiro Inokuma, a well-known Japanese artist who was born in Marugame. The mural on the facade is a relief by the artist. By creating a za slightly raised above the sidewalk, Taniguchi introduced a new boundary. As in a traditional Japanese estate, the entrance is quite low-keyed, but a public mall composed of facilities independent of the museum proper such as the library, auditorium and cafe leads into the depths of the building. The mall is linked to the interior spaces of the museum on various levels. This clearly reveals his intention to use public spaces accessible to the city to form a boundary. No matter what site conditions he is given, Taniguchi always attempts to create by some means a special zone. We both happened to participate as architects in the design of the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University, and for the high school buildings, he made full use of a narrow site by adopting the idea of a court house. People are drawn into the courtyard through an opening and then led directly to the classroom building, gymnasium and faculty building.

In the recently completed Tsukuba City Theater and Gymnasium for Tsukuba Science City or the nearly completed Tokyo National Museum, The Gallery of Horyuji Treasures in the Ueno district of Tokyo, he creates in front a colonnade almost as tall as the building itself. The columns of this colonnade have quite slender proportions and are quite different from the concrete pilotis that were a common feature in many postwar works of modern architecture. That is, for him the colonnade is a covered intermediate space or boundary. There is the promise of a variegated development of space on the other side of that boundary. Thus, in these works the wall surface is serene and unassertive. Here too the boundary found in traditional Japanese architecture has been realized by him in his own distinctive way, and not everything is revealed from the first.

However, in the recently completed visitors center in Kasai Rinkai Park, he suggests, by means of a transparent cage that offers the sharpest possible contrast to such closed schema, a relationship between the inside and the outside, and between the self and others. In this building, one can see the movement of people through a curtain wall that is as delicate as a reed blind. The sight of people gathering, dispersing and generally moving about is itself an expressive aspect of the architecture. If his intention is to provide contrast to the aquarium several hundred meters away, where the sight of fish moving about is the attraction, by here showcasing human movement, one must say it is a very witty idea. In the evening, the movement of people behind the transparent glass takes on the air of fantasy, like a scene out of a film by the late Federico Fellini.

The themes I have discussed are tied to the issue of public character in contemporary architecture. In old historic cities, there were established norms, and all the architect had to do was to abide by those norms. Such standards do not exist in the contemporary city or countryside, and I believe the architect himself on his own responsibility must create and express them. That too is a theme that tests the architect's imagination.

Here I would like to touch on his proposal for the new complex for the Museum of Modern Art, which was chosen in an international limited competition.

MoMA, as everyone knows, has been a dominant force in the art world, serving as the world's temple to modern art for seventy years. The history of the ways in which it has selected architects for the various phases of its construction during those years is interesting. The present site of MoMA directly west of Fifth Avenue between 53rd and 54th streets was provided by the Rockefellers because Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was a key figure in the establishment of the museum. The two architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone were selected by the museum. It is of course well known that Philip Johnson, who was involved in the design of the second-phase expansion and the sculpture garden, served as the architectural curator of the institution and was closely connected to the Rockefellers. The first and second phases of MoMA construction took place before and after World War II, and their designs were imbued with the spirit of modernism in an understated way. In particular, the first-phase treatment of the roof and the outdoor garden continues to retain a freshness over time. The architecture of these two periods can be said to have been selected through the patronage of the client. The architect for the third phase, completed in 1984, was chosen through the interview method, which was beginning to be adopted by large public institutions in the United States at the time. This method provides an opportunity for the client to view firsthand the works of several candidates and to select one through interviews. Using this method, MoMA selected Cesar Pelli from a group of finalists. The Getty Center, which was completed last year and has been the subject of much discussion, is the result of perhaps the most elaborate exercise of this method.

However, it is not possible with this approach to know what sort of image that architect may have of the architecture in question at the time of selection. However, with an open competition, where experts in architecture choose what they consider the best proposal, the jury does not always pick a proposal the client wants. Then too the selected architect is often someone about whom little or nothing is known.

In selecting the architect for the new complex, MoMA adopted a method that would assure a convincing choice both with respect to the architect and the image of the building ultimately to be constructed. I will not go into the details of the process of selection, which is already well known, but it is safe to say that in the end MoMA was entirely satisfied with the architect Yoshio Taniguchi, his approach to the design of the new museum and the image he proposed to create in the given place.

First, ten architects on the leading edge of architecture today who were seemingly more than capable of meeting the expectations of MoMA were selected. Among them Taniguchi was the oldest and had no previous experience in competitions, either domestic or foreign. Moreover, unlike many of the others, he was not avant-garde. His presence among the ten selected candidates was in large measure accounted for by his achievement in creating superb works, especially a number of superb art museums, in Japan over the last twenty years. In designing a proposal for the two stages of the competition he took precisely the approach he always adopts when given an actual commission, namely the careful study and analysis of the given program, constraints and context of place and the thoughtful consideration of, and response to, the results of that study and analysis. Thus the strategy he followed from the start was to take into full account the demands of the client, while offering, in his capacity as a professional architect cognizant of matters lay persons may have difficulty imagining, a number of bold proposals regarding matters such as the interpretation of the program, the quality of space, the exterior appearance and the introduction of natural light that at times took the client by surprise.

That seems to have been precisely what MoMA was hoping for. During the period of about a year in which the two-stage proposals were made, the jurors were able to visit a number of his representative works. They learned what kind of an architect he was, how he went about his work during not only the design period but the construction process and how he brought that work to completion. More importantly, they were able to gain firsthand experience of his buildings.

He has stated that for the next six to ten years planning MoMA will be like solving a puzzle. Unlike a situation in which one is making an architectural statement in the middle of the plains without any constraints, planning will have to be based on reason and experience. However, Taniguchi's proposal also reinforced the impression the jurors had already received of his sensibility from visiting a number of his buildings. There are aspects of his architecture that are difficult to grasp for anyone who has not first seen his buildings such as the selection of materials, the deployment of spaces with changing vistas and scales, and the introduction of natural light, but having seen his work, the jurors found his proposal persuasive. I believe the biggest reason he won the competition over the other candidates was that he was able to present a proposal that built on what he had already achieved, which enabled the jurors to recall and overlap some of their formal spatial experiences from their previous visits to Taniguchi's museums.

Naturally, he has merely reached the starting point of a long process of design, and there is no telling what the final result will be like. The same concept and drawings can be used to produce any number of buildings, each different in quality. That the results will more than meet MoMA's expectations, however, is not difficult to imagine for anyone who knows his sincerity, ability and extensive experience in designing museums. No doubt the jurors selected Taniguchi and his proposal because they too had that confidence in him.

Over the last twenty years, Taniguchi has designed important buildings such as art museums, libraries and an aquarium, yet his output has been by no means large. With a small office that has always had a staff of between ten and fifteen, he has created his works with a consistency of idea and approach, not only planning, designing and supervising the construction, but at times designing the landscaping and the graphics. As the locations of the works suggest, many projects were by no means convenient for an office based in Tokyo. Nevertheless, he has always believed in working on-the-spot every step of the way. That is, he has committed himself to the completion of every stage of the process, down to the design of the smallest detail. In this, Shinsuke Takamiya, who was his partner during the early atelier days and who has continued to be his right-hand man, has consistently contributed to the high quality of the design produced by the office.

Taniguchi's craftsman's attitude is something that comes naturally to him. For him, design is a labor of love. To that extent he has always tried to minimize interference and demands made on him by the media, cutting down as much as possible on activities such as lecturing, participating in symposia, writing, exhibiting and serving on juries. His attitude has always been that his designs say all there is for him to say. Certainly such activities contribute to the formation of a broader architectural culture, one that meets the demands of today's society, but seeing the excessive demands made on architects and the way their words are simply consumed daily by the media, one cannot help but respect Taniguchi's attitude. The landscape designer Peter Walker, who has collaborated with him on several projects including the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, has this to say about Taniguchi: "Taniguchi is one of the few architects practicing what Luis Barragán preached, namely the idea that the greatest quality architecture can possess is stillness." Stillness does indeed characterize not only the spaces he creates but his daily actions and speech.

Recently on a certain occasion some young European architects were heard to say that there was nothing in the ideas and designs of Le Corbusier or Mies to interest them. Certainly, to be avant-garde is to reject the past. Yet architectural culture as a whole is not a rocket shot toward the future with the avant-garde serving as the warhead. Instead the culture of architecture can be likened to the movement of waves on a great sea. The different waves collide and interfere with one another, with some disappearing and others merging to form a bigger wave. Every day we too experience and participate in the several waves that began in the early years of the twentieth century. I believe that the architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi can be seen as an attempt to reconsider from a Japanese standpoint one of the most fundamental of those waves and to create from that the best possible work.

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Architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi

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