Yoshio Taniguchi, a Japanese architect who gained international fame in 1997 when he was chosen to renovate and expand New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a project that cost $850 million and was completed in 2004, died on Dec. 16. He was 87.
The cause was pneumonia, his company, Taniguchi & Associates, said in a statement. The statement did not say where he died.
Mr. Taniguchi was a surprise choice for the MoMA commission. The museum had asked 10 architects to participate in a multistage selection process. The others — including Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl and Bernard Tschumi — were fairly young, somewhat radical and veterans of architecture competitions.
At 60, Mr. Taniguchi was the oldest of the 10, and he had no previous competition experience. He was also little known outside Japan, where he had designed a number of museums that were beautiful, but small and understated.
In an interview, Peter Walker, the American landscape architect who worked with him on several of those projects, said, “Taniguchi is one of the few architects practicing today who believes that the greatest quality architecture can possess is stillness.”
Members of the selection committee visited Mr. Taniguchi’s museums, some of them quite far from Japan’s capital. Ronald S. Lauder, then MoMA’s chairman, once joked that it was easy to reach Mr. Taniguchi’s buildings from New York: “All you have to do is get to Tokyo and you’re halfway there.”
What the committee members saw in Japan were geometrically precise buildings with walls that looked to be as thin as paper and ceilings that appeared to float. Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic of The New York Times, described Mr. Taniguchi’s work as a series of “refined architectural abstractions that are so tightly composed they can seem on the verge of snapping.”
The museum named Mr. Taniguchi, Mr. Tschumi and Herzog & de Meuron as finalists and asked them to prepare preliminary designs. Mr. Taniguchi focused on details of museum operations.
The author Suzannah Lessard wrote that the information he requested “was so technical in nature, so ‘nuts and bolts,’ that those who knew of it concluded that he was not likely to come up with a submission that would be aesthetically interesting.”
But The Times’s Herbert Muschamp wrote that in his scheme Mr. Taniguchi had “managed to get his mind, and his design, around a tangle of functional and philosophical challenges: space planning, circulation, zoning restrictions, urban context and conceptual issues like the relationship of contemporary to modern art. And he has made it seem as easy as falling off a log. The result is drop-dead elegant.”
What followed was a period of about three years of design refinement and another three years of construction, during which Mr. Taniguchi sometimes seemed out of his element. Unlike his wife, Kumi Taniguchi, who represented several French luxury brands in Japan, he was shy around reporters. And Mr. Taniguchi, who had never employed more than 15 people, had to work with the New York-based architect of record, the much larger firm Kohn Pedersen Fox.
The result of their efforts was a museum with almost twice as much gallery space as before. Its dramatic features included a lobby that stretched from 53rd to 54th Street and a 110-foot-high atrium.
The building, to which a large education wing had been added, now bracketed a rectangular open space — the museum’s refurbished sculpture garden. In 2004, Mr. Taniguchi told New York magazine: “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.”
Mr. Ouroussoff described the expanded museum as “a serene composition that weaves art, architecture and the city into a transcendent aesthetic experience.” He called it “one of the most exquisite works of architecture to rise in this city in at least a generation.”
But there were dissenters. “Common complaints” about the redesign, the Times culture reporter Robin Pogrebin later wrote, were that it “appears cold and closed off to the general public; its lobby is chaotic and overcrowded; and it takes too long to reach the art.”
Within a decade, MoMA began planning for another major renovation, this one by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Ms. Pogrebrin wrote that the planned renovation sought “to address some of the criticisms leveled at the museum” in the wake of Mr. Taniguchi’s renovation.
But Glenn Lowry, the museum’s director during both projects, said in an email in 2021 that the recent renovation was a direct result of “the success of Yoshio’s remaking of the Museum, which led to our attendance doubling in a little less than a decade.” He added that Elizabeth Diller, the partner in charge of the 2019 renovation, “understood the strengths of Yoshio’s work — clarity of design, attention to details and lighting, superb galleries,” and extended them into the new parts of the museum.
Yoshio Taniguchi was born in Tokyo on Oct. 17, 1937. His father, Yoshiro Taniguchi, was a prominent architect known for designing the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (1969) and the city’s glamorous Hotel Okura (1962), which was partly demolished in 2015. The elder Mr. Taniguchi was also known for a somewhat eccentric late-in-life project: When the fast pace of postwar reconstruction threatened a number of buildings from the Meiji era (1868 to 1912), he arranged to move some of the best ones to an open-air architecture park, the Meiji Mura Museum, outside Nagoya.
Initially hoping to steer clear of his father’s profession, Mr. Taniguchi studied mechanical engineering at Keio University in Tokyo, graduating in 1960. But he then enrolled at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he became one of the first Japanese architects trained outside Japan.
After graduating in 1964, he worked briefly for Walter Gropius, the German émigré architect, in Cambridge, Mass. From 1964 to 1972, Mr. Taniguchi worked in the Tokyo office of Kenzo Tange, one of the most important Japanese architects of the second half of the 20th century.
He opened his own office in Tokyo in 1975 and soon was designing residential and commercial buildings and a series of small museums. His Gallery of Horyuji Treasures, part of the Tokyo National Museum, is an elegant white cube under a dramatic cantilevered roof. Similar cantilevers later framed the MoMA sculpture garden.
His wife is his only immediate survivor.
One of Mr. Taniguchi’s most unusual buildings was a giant municipal incinerator plant in Hiroshima. Completed in 2004, the plant was comparable in size and complexity to the simultaneous MoMA expansion. Both were designed to dazzle architecture buffs with their extraordinarily refined details.
Mr. Taniguchi referred to the Hiroshima project as “my museum of garbage.” And it was a museum, of sorts. Hiroshima’s longtime mayor, Takashi Hiraoka, thought that if people could see how much trash they produced, they might produce less. So he decided that visitors should be able to watch the building’s operations through glass walls. And for that, he figured, why not hire Japan’s pre-eminent museum architect?
Mr. Taniguchi also designed Tokyo Sea Life Park, an aquarium constructed on a landfill on the edge of Tokyo Bay.
After MoMA, Mr. Taniguchi designed one other building in the U.S., the $48 million Asia Society Texas Center in Houston, completed in 2011. Lisa Gray, writing in The Houston Chronicle, said that to get the building’s limestone facade just right, Mr. Taniguchi had workers at a quarry in Germany cut 470 gigantic blocks, of which he accepted only 50. The 50 were then sliced into slabs about an inch thick. Mr. Taniguchi rejected 90 percent of the slabs.
Why such perfectionism? Mr. Taniguchi, who had no children, told Ms. Lessard that his buildings were his children. As for MoMA, the effort was in part repayment for the education he had received in the United States. “This,” he told Ms. Lessard, “is my opportunity to give back to America.”
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