Yoshirō Taniguchi

Taniguchi’s career bridges traditional Japanese building and the shift to western modernism, driven by the Meiji Emperor’s directive to modernize the nation, the tragedies of devastating earthquakes^[2], and the urgent need to re-build Japan after the war^[3]

By the time he entered Tokyo University in 1925, he had already undergone the first cycle of this path, watching the old architectural world of Tokyo which had filled his childhood sketch book give way to the new revivalist style coming from across the ocean including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, or worse, crumble to the ground in a series of terrible earthquakes, culminating with the great Kanto earthquake of 1923.

He searched for a new way of building that would be capable of surviving such devastation, one in which new engineering and construction technologies coming from Europe promised great freedoms and advances, along which with came new styles. But in a country that had set it’s sights on modernization, it was the modern architectural movement, especially the International Style from Germany, which so impressed Taniguchi that he undertook a journey there, invited to design the garden for the Japanese Embassy under the help of notorious German architect Albert Speer. 

In Germany, in addition to the architectural work of Speer, Taniguchi was much impressed by the severe classicism of Karl Friedrick Schinkel, whose somber, elegant, formalism shared a grand and minimalist quality with Speer’s work, all in the service of great monumental projects: museums, halls, monuments.^[4]

With the outbreak of war in Europe, Taniguchi returned to Tokyo on the Yasukuni-maru,^[5] the last ship to sail for Japan from Europe during the war, only to see his own country drawn into the same war he was fleeing, and once again, to see it completely, violently destroyed with a totality greater than all the earthquakes before and after.

This time, well-trained and full of new ideas, Taniguchi could lead the efforts to start again, not only to help build a new city but also to find a bridge to the obliterated culture of his country’s past, its history, its architectural traditions, it’s unique character. And in this endeavor, Taniguchi found the “style” of modern European architecture not quite right for Japan, certainly not for the important cultural buildings he suddenly found himeslf tasked with creating.

In the years from 1947 on, Taniguchi began to find a new direction that drew from all of the diverse influences he had been exposed to: the tradional forms and craft-based aesthetics of old Japanese architecture, the “universal” classicism of ancient Greece that inspired Schinkel, the Germanic reductivism that transformed classicism into a modern idiom through the work of Schinkel into Speer’s awesome expressions of State insititutions, the idealistic pure aesthetics of the International Style as embodied by the radical new projects of Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe, the utopian promise of the democratic transformation of cities through the architecture of the Bauhaus, all coalescing around the most critical question: how to build the large new buildings out of the new materials - steel and concrete - that could make a city, and one in particular that could resist the great earthquakes that had so afflicted Japan.

In a country that had become infatuated with the modern style, Taniguchi began to be the iconoclast. “His work was always in conscious contrast to that of modernists such as Maekawa and Tange, and he continually broadened the possible range of modern architectural vocabulary in Japan.”^[6] Taniguchi’s idea of modernism reflected the Meiji era approach to the traditional culture of Japan by which even Greek classicism could be seen as modern. “Corbusier and the modern architecture influenced Taniguchi, but he is also in sympathy with Classical, particularly Renaissance, architecture.”^[7]

It is for this reason that Taniguchi straddles the spectrum from traditional to modern and makes it difficult to place him specifically at any one point leading some to see him as “a link between the newer school of modern architects and the more conservative school that based its work more directly on Japanese vernacular traditions.”^[8]

Taniguchi’s work took the form largely of projects in the public realm, with a focus on cultural entities which not only had to serve important practical functions but which also were burdened with conveying Japan’s cultural wisdom, both looking back at a lost and tragic history as well as looking to instill new ideals and a promise of the future. There was no better place to do so than in the educational sector and he was embraced by several universities to produce a number of buildings for their newly re-built and growing campuses, as well as many of the museums, theaters, cultural centers, and monuments that would become important parts of the new Tokyo.

In the course of re-building, Taniguchi came to realize the importance of saving the remnants of the great old buildings of Japan, and in 1952, he became an active participant in the burgeoing historical preservation movement, joining Japan’s Cultural Properties Specialists Council as well as the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs.^[9] One of his lesser known but remarkable undertakings was the creation, in 1965, of the Meiji Mura Village^[10], a vast compound in Nagoya dedicated to the re-construction and salvage of the great and typical buildings of the Japan that inspired him, the Meiji era and modern works that uniquely typified the Japanese interpretation of western architecture, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s own Imperial Hotel, consigned to the wrecking ball in 1968 and carefully re-built at Meiji Mura, piece by piece, under Taniguchi’s direction.

Taniguchi is the father of Yoshio Taniguchi who, despite having designed numerous significant buildings in Tokyo, is best known for yet another great monument to modernism, the 2004 re-design of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1932 Hydraulics Laboratory Tokyo Technical Institute, Tokyo

1937 Keio University: Yochisha Elementary School Main Building & Hiyoshi Dormitory, Tokyo

1947 Memorial Hall for Toson Shimazaki, Magome, Gifu

1949 Keio University: Student Hall & Third School Building, Tokyo

1952 Keio University Shin Banraisha, Tokyo

1952 Ishikawa Textile Center, Kanazawa City

1956 Chichibu Cement Factory, Saitama

1958 Tokyo Tech 70th Anniversary Auditorium (Cultural Asset), Tokyo

1958 Komoro City Fujimura Memorial Hall, Nagano

1958 Hara Kei Memorial Museum, Morioka City, Iwate

1959 Ishikawa Traditional Crafts Center, Kanazawa City

1959 Chidorigafuchi War Memorial Rokkakudo, Tokyo

1959 Togu Palace, Tokyo

1962 Hotel Okura, Tokyo

1962 Bunkyo Ogai Memorial Library, Tokyo

1966 Yamatane Art Museum, Tokyo

1966 Imperial Theater, Tokyo

1968 Tokyo National Museum Toyokan Building, Tokyo

1968 San Francisco Peace Pagoda, San Francisco, CA, USA

1969 National Museum of Modern Art (MOMAT), Tokyo

1974 Imperial Guest House, Tokyo - Restoration

1977 Crafts Gallery of National Museum of Modern Art - Restoration

1978 Tamagawa Library, Kanazawa City - Restoration

1983 Reimeikan Museum, Kagoshima - (Posthumous)

Arai, Katsuyoshi in Emanuel, Muriel ED (1980). Contemporary Architects. London, England: The Macmillan Press LTD. ISBN 9781349041862.

Kultermann, Udo (1960). New Japanese Architecture. New York, NY, USA: Praeger. ASIN B0007DNXMW.

Noffsinger, James Philip Ph.D. (1981). Yoshiro Taniguchi: Artist-Architect of Japan. Vance Bibliographies Architecture Series. Monticello, IL, USA: Vance Bibliographies. OL 17843875M.

Sugiyama, Makiko (2006). Banraisha: A Poetic Architecture by Yoshiro Taniguchi and Isamu Noguchi. Tokyo, Japan: Kajima Institute Publishing Company. ISBN 9784306044722.

Taniguchi, Yoshiro (1956). The Shugakuin Imperial Villa. Tokyo, Japan: The Mainichi Newspapers Press. ISBN 9781299031265.

Watanabe, Hiroshi (2001). The Architecture of Tokyo: An Architectural History in 571 Individual Presentations. Fellbach, Germany: Edition Axel Menges. ISBN 9783930698936.

“The Architects: Japan”. The Architectural Review. London: EMAP Publishing LTD (787). September 1962. ISSN 0003-861X.

“Yoshiro Taniguchi and His Work”. The Japan Architect. Japan: Shinkenchiku-sha. May 1966. ISSN 0448-8512.