YOSHIO TANIGUCHI is the kind of architect who calls a spade a bloody shovel. Forget mystic notions of Zen, Tao, yin and yang. Asked if the perfectly balanced inverse relationship of the circle and the square in the museum he designed for Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido was inspired by an attempt to balance the masculine and feminine, his reply is simple.
'I didn't have anything like that in mind,' he says. 'The museum consists of two parts, one side for the art gallery and one side to exhibit cosmetics and advertising posters. For the art gallery, I wanted to have gentler light, whereas for the other, where they exhibit cosmetics, I wanted light from outside.'
The cosmetics gallery, wrapped around a square courtyard, faces outwards in a circle with large windows admitting bright light. The art gallery, a square structure, is wrapped around a small circular courtyard that admits more subdued light appropriate for paintings.
Despite such practical factors, the aesthetic merits of the design won Taniguchi the 1980 Architectural Institute of Japan Award. Now, his works - which include New York's recently reopened Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) - are celebrated in an exhibition at Tokyo's Opera City Art Gallery.
The show, which uses photographs and architectural models to present 12 Taniguchi designs, includes the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures completed in 1999 to display Buddhist artworks in the grounds of the Tokyo National Museum, and the Centennial Hall, a major expansion of the Kyoto National Museum, due to open in 2007. The main focus, however, is on his 1997 MoMA design, completed last year.
Now that his career has reached a pinnacle with MoMA, it's natural to see Taniguchi as first and foremost a museum designer and to assume this is what he always wanted to do. The truth is more prosaic. 'It was a matter of chance that I got into designing galleries and museums. I was asked to design two museums when I was young, and they were quite successful, so people started asking me to design more.'
