Man of the MOMA, Telegraph Magazine

The Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi prefers to let his buildings do the talking. But the imminent opening of his $858 million rebuild of New York's Museum of Modern Art has turned him into a public figure and challenged his reticence. By Bettina von Hase. Photograph by Yuko Torisu.

Come November 20, the Japanese architect who has never built in the West before will be in the spotlight when his eagerly awaited $858 million rebuild of New York's mighty MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) is finally unveiled to art insiders and public alike. It is the biggest museum opening of the first decade of the 21st century and perhaps ever — with its 630,000 sq ft over six floors almost doubling the capacity of an institution that holds the most impressive and complete collection of 20th-century art in the world. MOMA, founded in 1929 by three rich American art collectors. is an institution in the city, the jewel in the cultural crown of New York.

Yoshio Taniguchi, the man in charge of putting the word ‘modern’ back into MoMA, seems not at all fazed by this momentous task. At 67, Taniguchi exudes Eastern calm and aristocratic bearing, unlike some other star architects who behave more like rock stars. When I first saw him at a press briefing in London, he sat behind a desk with other MoMA colleagues and did not say anything at all. Looking very elegant in a blue suit and with surprisingly long. swept-back silver hair. he merely smiled. and let Glenn Lowry, MoMA’s genial director, do the talking. At one point, Lowry leant over and said, ‘Yoshio, would you like to say something? and Taniguchi very politely answered. ‘No. you are very good at it’, to general laughter. It wasn't until I travelled to Japan on a MoMA-organised tour to look at his work that I realised how revealing this first appearance was. The novelist Junichiro Tanizaki's comment about music in his cult essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, could equally apply to Japanese architecture: ‘Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses.’

Taniguchi's work and the man himself perfectly fit this description. His warmth and relaxed manner momentarily obscure the fact that he is a passionate perfectionist, engaged in every part of the architectural process with an attention to detail that seems maniacal in the West but perfectly natural in Japan. It ranges from the overall design of the building and the choice of materials to the shape, colour and quantity of the trees and flowers of the landscape around it.

Visiting Japan for the first time is a culture shock because of its otherness; everything looks, tastes, feels and sounds different. This applies in spades to its architecture, which has a centuries-old tradition of innovation. The Japanese have lived more densely than us for far longer — the idea of space and how to use it, with its multiplicity of uses for every room, is much more highly developed than in the West.

Over the past 20 years Taniguchi has built 10 museums (the 11th, in Kyoto, is in development). libraries, gymnasiums, schools, a hotel, an aquarium, a tea-house and a garden. Despite being acclimatised to the West following his studies at Harvard, Taniguchi has a very Japanese sense of formality and understatement. It becomes more apparent when you see him in his own environment, and is reflected in his work. At Taniguchi's first-ever press conference in Japan, to present a model of the new MoMA to the Japanese press, I could see journalists crowding around him, and I was surprised at how eager they were to catch his every word. I could tell it was an unfamiliar experience for him. He admitted, ‘This has never happened before, so I guess they were curious.’

His English is fluent. but he is aware that he can't always convey minute subtleties, something that visibly frustrates him. Lowry, a masterful communicator, helps him to articulate his vision. They are a great double-act and have made it their business to take small groups of visitors to several of the latter's museums: the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures, Tokyo National Museum; the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art; the Marugame Genichiro Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art; and a small museum near the Marugame and still under construction - devoted to the artist Kaii Higashiyama, who died five years ago.

Taniguchi was especially keen to show us the latter, perhaps because despite its small size — two simple spaces, a stairway and windows - it was the perfect example of his style. influenced by classic tea-house design with its ceremonial approach, asymmetrical layout based on a grid pattern and extreme subtlety of materials and textures. The tea ceremony, with its simple ritual of pouring tea for guests to promote tranquillity and harmony, encapsulates what Taniguchi thinks is important. It is significant that his sister is married to the brother of the Grand Tea Ceremony Master of Japan, a position handed down for 300 years through one or Kyoto's oldest families.

The Higashiyama museum was the neatest building site I ever saw. Workers with clean white shirts and ties bowed to Taniguchi when we arrived. The building is set along the Inland Sea, overlooking the island where the artist was born, but Taniguchi withholds this view until visitors have been right through the museum, having paid homage to the artist's work. It is all the more satisfying for not being revealed until the end. ‘l did this in order to maximise the view,’ he says. ‘First, I hide it with the two walls; if you open it up at the beginning, it doesn't seem like anything, but if you close it off and suddenly open it up, it's like desire.’

Taniguchi's latest building, a futuristic waste disposal plant, is a James Bond location waiting to happen. The Hiroshima City Naka Incineration Plant is shaped like a huge silver box sliced in two, with a wooden boardwalk running through the middle leading from the street to the sea. A gigantic vertical tower dominates the scene, while inside the bulbous, silver disposal units behind glass look like machinery in Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs come to life. (The German-born Bechers are influential artist/photographers who document machinery and industrial buildings.) Every bit of the disposal process and transformation is visible: dinosaur-like machines with massive claws aerate the rubbish, while touch-screen systems explain the process in Japanese and English. Rubbish disposal is treated like a form of curatorial art installation, a structure every bit as beautiful as his museums, minimalist without being overtly austere. The mildly Left-wing city council wanted to draw citizens' attention to environmental issues. and the result more than succeeds.

The most astonishing of Taniguchi's buildings is the Zen-like atmosphere of calm he creates within. At the Toyota Museum, for example, there is the familiar hidden approach, then a sudden overall view of a series of angular buildings, one of milky glass gridded with aluminium, the other two clad in green slate, materials he also uses for MoMA. The Toyota buildings are united by a portico with three columns, overlooking a pool of water with a Richard Long-like circular water sculpture. But it is the inside that is so compelling. The main room on the first of two floors is a temple of white, with a glass staircase floating almost invisibly from one floor to another, the overall effect underlined by an all-white installation by the artist Yayoi Kusama. Taniguchi does not so much build rooms as create interconnecting spaces that merge mysteriously one into the other. due to his mastery of light, shifting planes of walls and ‘shadow gaps’. where walls do not meet floors but appear to float free because of a small gap at the base that casts a shadow. Layouts reveal themselves only gradually and lead to surprises - a staircase, a window, a terrace. a snapshot of a city, a view of a pool.

‘He understood our desire to have a building that would be suffused with light, not simply ambient light but also a sense of “lightness”, a building where literally walls float off floors and ceilings float off walls,’ Lowry says as I speak to him in New York after our Japan trip. ‘There are moments that are so poetic. The shadow gap is narrow, but just enough to disengage the wall from the floor and the ceiling from the wall, and suddenly this thing happens where planes start to slide into each other and there is this sense of weightlessness that takes over. It's beautiful.’

It is indeed exhilarating to walk around the almost-completed MoMA with a total exhibition space alone of 125,000 sq ft spread over six floors, galleries- 12 or 13 per floor - clustered in a horseshoe-system around a soaring 110ft high atrium that provides glimpses of the cityscape beyond.

The celebrated Sculpture Garden is still in place, 20 per cent larger and with two huge floor-to- ceiling-windows facing each other at opposite ends, so visitors can enjoy it from the inside standing on any floor level. Taniguchi makes sense of a rectangular site between two busy streets in midtown Manhattan that had several buildings on it already, ranging from a SCI-storey skyscraper built by Cesar Pelli, now in a central and prominent position, to a collection of townhouses by Edward Durrell Stone from 1939 and the adjacent 1960s extension by Philip Johnson. The former interior has been gutted but the facades remain, and a single Bauhaus-style staircase inside. The materials Taniguchi chose have a neutral palette, ‘fritted’ (etched with a pattern of white dots) glass. Zimbabwean black granite, green slate from Vermont for the building’s main floor and pale oak for the galleries. Taniguchi’s design weaves the building into the urban fabric of New York - you can feel the city's energy through the enormous glass windows everywhere, but you are also enveloped by a serene interior.

I found myself checking how the floors were laid and whether the shadow gaps were as perfect as in Japan, but it was too early to tell; I wouldn't bet on the New York builders being able to achieve the same extraordinary standard. Workmen from the New York-based executive architect Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates were sent to Japan to study Taniguchi’s work, and when questioned on the collaboration Taniguchi says, ‘I hope they will make it by November. The building methods are a little different than in Japan. I hope they make it, that's all.’ He has been over to New York more than 30 times but the integrated approach he follows in Japan, where he is in complete control of every aspect, is not one he could follow in New York due to the distance between the two cities. Lowry says it took a while for Taniguchi to ‘become comfortable working with another firm, and to trust them and to recognise that they were dedicated to realising his goals’, but overall and to date, the MoMA project seems to have been a remarkably rewarding project for all concerned. ‘Yoshio is a problem-solver,’ Lowry comments.

The museum with its beginnings in six rooms in an office building on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue is the story of modern art itself, told from a largely Western European perspective with its roots in Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists, Picasso, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, moving to America with the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s and becoming far more diversified today.

Hiroshima's futuristic waste incineration plant

MoMA has made a number of acquisitions in time for the opening, a late Francis Bacon triptych, Pablo Picasso's 1950 sculpture, Pregnant Woman, and Jasper Johns’ seminal work on paper, Diver (1962-1963), among others in a collection that already includes more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures. drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and design objects. Once the art is in place, the aesthetic relationship between the collection and the architecture will create far more exciting juxtapositions than before.

The increased space has nurtured a revolution in the way the art is displayed. No longer confined to a single linear route with what the chief curator John Elderfield calls a ‘sense of history flowing like a river through all of the galleries’, it has much more flexibility. Visitors can access individual galleries via several entrances, the so-called ‘porous’ galleries, which also have a greater variety of sizes to acknowledge the fact that art history has many stories, not just one. MoMA wants each gallery to tell its own story rather than be dependent on a dogmatic ‘master route’ laid out by the museum. ‘We have designed it such that any particular gallery could be lifted out and dropped in Central Park.’ Elderfield says.

‘Taniguchi has made tangible our vision for the new Museum of Modern Art,’ says Ronald Lauder, MoMA's chairman and younger son of Estée Lauder, founder of the international cosmetics company. This is just as well, since the Board of Trustees contributed a combined total of more than $500 million to the project, which was finally won by Taniguchi in a competition in December 1997. There were three finalists, the other two being Bernard Tschumi, Dean of Columbia University's graduate school of architecture, and the Swiss duo Herzog and de Meuron of Tate Modern fame. When Taniguchi was announced as the winner, the New York Times Magazine put him on the cover, calling him ‘The Underdog’. 'At first I thought I had no chance at all, but when I was among the final three I became more confident,’ he says.

Confidence seems not to have been a major problem for the young Yoshio, who has admitted to having been a little spoilt by an over-protective mother who worried about his asthma. Born in Tokyo in 1937, Taniguchi has a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree from Keio University (1960) and a Masters from Harvard (1964), and worked in the studio of the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange between 1964 and 1972 before establishing his own practice. Working in America was an enjoyable experience - aged 21 when he arrived, he was amazed by cultural icons such as Superman, and the abundance of food and visual influences, so different from struggling post-war Japan. He recalled his gratitude when an American fellow student suggested that Yoshio change his brand of Japanese hair gel, as its strong scent might put off the girls. The US lifestyle then struck him as very different from the Japanese: 'The wife always domineering; at weekends you put the refrigerator, cats, dogs and kids in the station wagon and go to the country' — but these days, after travelling to New York for more than eight years on a regular basis, he has acclimatised: ‘There's very little difference now, especially for a person like me who lives in an urban environment in Tokyo.'

His father, Yoshiro Taniguchi, born in 1908, was one of the most important second-generation modernist architects, who worked for the Imperial Family and made his name in the post-war period when the country was in ruins. Japanese modernism used Western methodology while keeping Japanese traditions and cultural values. The difference between the two was that Western modernism rejected the past, while Japanese modernism incorporated traditional solutions that worked. Faced with the complex MoMA site, which already had existing buildings, it is this harmony to which the six-member trustee committee responded when they voted unanimously for Taniguchi in the first ballot. They were amazed how painless the selection process had been. ‘What's interesting is that we didn't want to be influenced by the curators, but it turned out that they wanted the same person as us.' Lauder says.

Other than Lauder, the committee included David Rockefeller, brother of Nelson Rockefeller and the son of one of MoMA’s founders, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller; Sid R Bass, president of Sid Bass Inc, who was also chairman of the building committee; and Lowry, who as director was a non-voting member. Lauder says, ‘We have one foot in modern art and one foot in cutting-edge contemporary — we wanted a building that was not about a building, but about the collection.’ MoMA swam against the mid-1990s tide of the iconic building, such as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao or Richard Meier's Getty Museum in Los Angeles — a bold move that art- world insiders believe will benefit them now. The new MoMA has already wowed those who have it and, more importantly, it seems to strike the right note in a post-9/11 world.

The museum's concept was to put contemporary art at the heart of its mission, to increase its ‘laboratory’ aspect, and Taniguchi came back with the best idea of any of the finalists, namely to put a contemporary gallery on the first floor. It is the first place you visit once you enter via two entrances on West 53rd or West 54th Street.

The installation is such that the earliest art is on the top floors in smaller, more intimate galleries than the gigantic first floor for contemporary art, as big as a football field. It was one of the three main reasons Taniguchi won the commission. He also produced the most beautiful design and did more research among curators and staff than the other teams, consequently solving more problems such as providing an additional loading bay for large art works. ‘MoMA is a big project, and if you keep too many different themes in one project, it's not going to be successful.’ Taniguchi says. ‘You don't want to emphasise – that’s also the Japanese way you don't want to emphasise the most important concept that you are trying to get across. I try to make everything very simple - if you look on the 53rd Street facade it's just like any other building in New York. My method is always a reduction, how much I can reduce it and still maintain the essence of my intention.’

Simple is expensive, and the MoMA project is a fundraising feat. The museum's board has raised $700 million of the $858 million total cost. The building alone cost $425 million; $50 million was for the relocation to MoMA Queens for three years while the site was under construction: $111 million for endowment; $52 million of operating support: $100 million plus for land acquisition; and a host of other related costs. ‘The board was very generous,’ Lauder comments in what is perhaps the understatement of the year. However, an attempt to minimise the deficit can be seen in the management's decision to increase the previous entry fee of $12 to $20, making admission to the museum probably the most expensive in the world.

Taniguchi and his wife, Kumi, at MoMA's 36th annual party in New York in June

'We go to huge lengths to make something which at first glance is not made to look impressive.' says Her Imperial Highness Princess (Hisako) Takamado, a friend of the Taniguchis. ‘His work is never loud, but it stands up to close scrutiny.' So far, Taniguchi has mostly let his buildings do the talking, but he is realistic about his responsibilities in the media onslaught to come. ‘It is the most conspicuous new part of my life: he tells me when I ask him how he is coping with something that clearly hasn't been at the front of his mind in his career. He is married to the willowy Kumi Taniguchi, a director of LVMH who is launching the French jewellery brand Fred into Japan; together they make an impressive couple. ‘In Japan, husbands and wives tend to eat separately as men always have business dinners; but Kumi and I have dinner together nearly every night,’ he tells me. They have no children but, as he says, ‘My buildings are my children.’ They also entertain close friends such as the designer Issey Miyake, whose shirt Taniguchi wears during our photo shoot. He is definitely a clothes horse: ‘I'm quite tall for a Japanese man, so I tend to buy European designers, like Giorgio Armani.’

He is less forthcoming about architectural influences. ‘l am very particular about that. I don't discriminate against any type of architecture,' he says, but admits what he prefers are ‘very. very simple modern buildings’. For all his openness and enthusiasm, Taniguchi is a man who keeps to himself. There is something in his manner akin to the curious child-like freedom some artists have, at odds with his establishment standing as a fourth-generation modernist architect. He intends to keep his small office in the centre of Tokyo, on two floors with white- washed walls, where Taniguchi and Associates is based. It is run like an old-fashioned atelier, which gives him the freedom to choose what he wants to do. ‘My life hasn't changed much,’ he says. ‘l emancipate myself from stress.’

MoMA opens on November 20. The exhibition, ‘Nine Museums by Yoshio Taniguchi’, opens there on the same day.