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The uncompromising order running through Yoshio Taniguchi's architecture is so strong that it seems to assume greater substance than the people who occupy his buildings. It is impossible to inhabit this Japanese architect's designs and not consider the power of rhythm and proportion. The lines of a three-dimensional gridwork seem to radiate through one's body.
This approach is certainly a result of the period when Taniguchi came of age. Born in 1937, the son of the influential architect Yoshiro Taniguchi first received an engineering degree from Tokyo's prestigious Keio University in 1960, then immediately entered Harvard's Graduate School of Design to study architecture. During the years of his American studies, Taniguchi was deeply affected by the 1960s debates over proportion and structuralism. He also worked briefly for Walter Gropius, which architect Fumihiko Maki claims led Taniguchi to adopt the Modernist order of the postwar period with a Germanic rigor.
The architect's work is one of exacting compositional strategies that seem almost academic. His designs address geometric play, polar juxtaposition and contrast in materials and organization, rhythmic use of simple vocabularies of columns and planes, and legible proportional systems. In his early work, this approach is pronounced: the Shiseido Art Museum, for example, is organized as two buildings connected at the corner: one is square in plan with a circular courtyard, and one is circular in plan with a square courtyard. Today, through tight control of the design process and extensive research into...