--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2004/11/24/lessons_from_harvard_days_have_served_momas_architect_well/
Lessons from Harvard days have served MoMA's architect well
By Christine Temin, Globe Staff | November 24, 2004
"Architecture should speak for itself," Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect of the new Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, said last week. He was the final speaker at a press conference in MoMA's new sixth-floor galleries. Journalists from all over the world were there, in such numbers that those in the back of the hangar-sized space watched the proceedings on a live video feed.
ADVERTISEMENT
MoMA is the architect's first project outside Japan -- but not his last. He was just awarded a commission for a Houston museum. In Japan he has designed dozens of buildings, nine museums among them. During MoMA's opening festivities over the past couple of weeks, he has been the most feted man in Manhattan, although his design has both critics and champions. The former see his austere building as an inflated version of the old MoMA. The latter see it as a fabulous showcase for art of a quality that could never be upstaged by architecture, so why try? Taniguchi's MoMA is a deferential gesture to Cezanne, Picasso, Pollock, and the other luminaries in the collections.
Architecture is in his blood -- specifically the kind of clean, pure high modernism of the old and new MoMAs. His father and grandfather were both in the profession. His father designed a palace for Japan's crown prince. And in the year that Taniguchi was born, 1937, his father designed a new home for the family. "It was all white, in the International style," Taniguchi recalled this summer while showing a visitor some of his buildings in Japan. "My father used the house as a lab, to test lighting for projects," something he does himself. "Japanese architecture is a zigzag, the opposite of Palladian symmetry," he added. "The sliding screens in Japanese houses can create layers of indirect light," the sort of lighting he also uses in museums.
What has not been noted much about him is his Harvard/Boston connection. (Also largely overlooked in the cork-popping over the MoMA is that initially, MoMA and Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art were sister institutions, both with Harvard roots.)
Taniguchi came to Harvard's Graduate School of Design in the fall of 1960. "I was kind of lonely," he recalled. "A foreign student then was rare. I was the only person in the class who didn't speak English. Some students had fathers who had fought Japan in the war. That was still an issue then. I felt I was representing Japan. I felt I had to behave perfectly, but I didn't understand how.
"Our first assignment was to analyze a city called Lincoln, outside Boston," he said. "It was so beautiful there. We were supposed to study the materials, colors, and textures." Instead he returned to school with a lot of lyrical sketches, not at all what the assignment called for. Continued...
1 2 Next
- - -
Subscribers to Design List are required to list their actual names
during the subscription process. Names of known organizations are
accepted at the discretion of the list owner. All other listings of
subscribers are deleted from the list.
- - -
The Design-L list for art and architecture, since 1992...
To subscribe, send mailto:design-l-subscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To signoff, send mailto:design-l-unsubscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Visit archives: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html
