Yoshio Taniguchi Nine Museums

This volume celebrates Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi by presenting nine of his museum designs, from the renovation and expansion of The Museum of Modern Art - Taniguchi's only museum to be built outside of Japan - to projects in Tokyo, Kyoto, and throughout his native country. Taniguchi's museums are central to understanding his approach to architecture. Distinctly modern, each design is marked by a rich materiality, a respect for pure geometry, and a commitment to the art of building. Yoshio Taniguchi: Nine Museums is the first critical assessment of the architect's achievements. The book unfolds chronologically, starting with his first independent museum, the 1978 Shiseido Museum of Art, and ends with his Centennial Hall, which will be part of the Kyoto National Museum upon its completion in 2007. An essay by Terence Riley, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, contextualizes the many threads that inform Taniguchi's work, including his early education at Harvard, his development as an architect during the movement toward a new urbanism in the 1960s, and the unfolding of a vocabulary of forms that is distinctly his own.