Yoshirō Taniguchi

By the time he entered Tokyo University in 1925, he had already seen the old architectural world of Tokyo give way to the new revivalist style coming from across the ocean including Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, or worse, crumble to the ground in a series of terrible earthquakes, culminating with the great Kanto earthquake of 1923.

He searched for a new way of building that would be capable of surviving such devastation, one in which European engineering and construction technologies promised great freedoms and advances, along which with came new styles.

He attempted to integrate the many disparate influences which inspired him: the traditional forms and craft-based aesthetics of old Japanese architecture, the “universal” classicism of ancient Greece that inspired Schinkel, the Germanic reductivism that transformed classicism into a modern idiom through the work of Schinkel into Speer's awesome expressions of State institutions, the idealistic pure aesthetics of the International Style as embodied by the radical new projects of Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe, the utopian promise of the democratic transformation of cities through the architecture of the Bauhaus, all coalescing around the most critical question: how to build the large new buildings out of the new materials - steel and concrete - that could make a new city, and one in particular that could resist the great earthquakes that had so afflicted Japan.

“Corbusier and the modern architecture influenced Taniguchi, but he is also in sympathy with Classical, particularly Renaissance, architecture.”[5] It is for this reason that Taniguchi straddles the spectrum from traditional to modern and makes it difficult to place him specifically at any one point leading some to see him as “a link between the newer school of modern architects and the more conservative school that based its work more directly on Japanese vernacular traditions.”[6] Taniguchi's work took the form largely of projects in the public realm, with a focus on cultural entities which not only had to serve important practical functions but which also were burdened with conveying Japan's cultural wisdom, both looking back at a lost and tragic history as well as looking to instill new ideals and a promise of the future.

There was no better place to do so than in the educational sector and he was embraced by several universities to produce a number of buildings for their newly re-built and growing campuses, as well as many of the museums, theaters, cultural centers, and monuments that would become important parts of the new Tokyo.