Yoshio Taniguchi (1937–2024) was a Japanese architect best known for his redesign of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and for calm, exact museums that join traditional Japanese aesthetics with modernism. The son of the architect Yoshirō Taniguchi, he studied engineering at Keio University and architecture at Harvard, worked briefly for Walter Gropius and from 1964 to 1972 for Kenzō Tange, and opened his own office in Tokyo in 1975.
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Most of his work is museums in Japan, among them the Ken Domon Museum of Photography in Sakata (1983), the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA) (1991), the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (1995) and the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures at the Tokyo National Museum (1999). In 1997 he beat nine international architects, among them Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron, to redesign the Museum of Modern Art (2004), his first work outside Japan; its central atrium, his "light garden", helps visitors find their way "visually, not with signs". The D. T. Suzuki Museum in Kanazawa (2011) looks over a still Water Mirror Garden. Yoshio Taniguchi's buildings are studied for clarity, proportion and calm.
Ken Domon Museum of Photography1983 · Sakata
Toyota Municipal Museum of Art1995 · Toyota
Museum of Modern Art2004 · New York
Tokyo Sea Life Park1989 · Tokyo
Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA)1991 · Marugame
Gallery of Horyuji Treasures1999 · Tokyo
D. T. Suzuki Museum2011 · Kanazawa