Asia's Hot New Export
Japanese architects are producing some of the most striking new buildings in the U.S.
By Richard Lacayo

Spring 2005 Style & Design
WHEN YOU FIRST catch sight of the Nomadic Museum, assembled on a pier on the Hudson River side of Manhattan, it looks like a place where somebody has been having some serious fun. How else do you describe 148 rectangular steel cargo containers, the kind you can see being lifted off ships at any port, all piled like giant toy blocks into walls 35 ft. high? This pier is no longer used for shipping—these days it's part of the New York City park system—but of late it has become an anchorage for an iconoclastic mind.

That would be the mind of Shigeru Ban, 47, the Tokyo-based architect known for his unexpected building materials, like bamboo and paper, and his ingenious systems of construction, like the one he devised for a home library in which the bookcases also served as walls to support the roof. A version of that system is in use at the Nomadic Museum, where some of the cargo-container walls will double as storage space. Two long rows of interior columns show off one of Ban's signature devices: hollow-core paper tubes so strong that they can carry heavy loads.

Ban designed this place for a single purpose: to enclose a traveling exhibition of 200 large photographs by the Canadian-born artist Gregory Colbert. When the show closes on June 6, the entire museum will be taken down, then rebuilt at each of the next stops, among them Los Angeles, Beijing and Paris. That's why it's called nomadic, though most of the shipping containers that form it won't actually be traveling. "You can rent them anywhere," Ban says. "But the roof structure we will ship from place to place."

Nomadic would also be a good word for many Japanese architects these days. In the first decades after World War II, the most forward-looking among them, including Kenzo Tange and Fumihiko Maki, secured international reputations without working much in the U.S. But in the past few years many of the most talked-about new American buildings have been produced by Japanese architects. First came the austere Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, Mo., the work of Tadao Ando, 63, long one of Japan's biggest names. Next was his seraphic Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, five thrusting cartons of glass and concrete that appear to float on an elliptical reflecting pool. Then last November the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City reopened, intricately reconceived by Yoshio Taniguchi.

There is no such thing as "Japanese architecture," if what one means by that is a single aesthetic that could account for Ando's serene fields of velvety concrete, the delicate steel palisades of Taniguchi and Ban's witty-serious fabrications. But in the work of all three, Japanese traditions and aesthetic understandings are detectable, though always transmitted through a contemporary, international design vocabulary. "The materials of Modernism are steel, concrete and glass," says Ando. "These are materials that anybody can use, in the U.S. or Japan. But I think I can add to them a Japanese sensibility."

What's surprising is that it is Japanese architects—Ando and Taniguchi in particular—who have brought to the U.S. a reminder of the enduring virtues of classical Modernism, with its doctrine of clearly apparent forms and cleanly articulated lines and its deep suspicion of ornament, flourishes and superfluous gestures. At a time when the most talked-about global architecture starspeople like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskindhave moved into a world of skewed angles, whiplash curves and highly irregular volumes, Ando and Taniguchi have stayed closer to the rule book of Modernism as taught by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Page 1 of 3   1  |  2  |  3   Next > >

BACK TO TOP

Premium Content