Yoshio Taniguchi: Nine Museums

Book Description

The Museum of Modern Art is now in the midst of the largest building project in its history. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, the new Museum will reopen in midtown Manhattan in winter 2004-05 to coincide with its 75th anniversary. The 630,000-square-foot Museum will be nearly twice the size of the former facility, offering dramatically expanded and redesigned spaces for exhibitions, public programming, educational outreach, and scholarly research. But The Museum of Modern Art is not Taniguchi's first museum, though it is his first museum in the United States. The architect has been designing museums in his native Japan since 1978. In celebration of the opening of the new MoMA building, the Museum is publishing this book about Taniguchi's museums--nine in all. They include the Tokyo National Museum, Marugami Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagano Art Museum, Ken Domon Museum of Photography, and Shiseido Art Museum. For the Higashiyama Kaii Gallery in Nagano, Taniguchi situated a display space for the works of painter Kaii Higashiyama next to a reflecting pool and garden. In the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, built on the old castle site of Komoro City, Taniguchi expressed the history and distinct nature of the place by affording views to both the new city and the historic area. Finally, the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, situated across from the city's railway station, was designed to include a plaza that connects the museum with the station. Taniguchi: Nine Museums will discuss the plans of each of these museums with an emphasis on The Museum of Modern Art's new building.

Customer Reviews:

Art in water garden........2006-12-04

If one is trying to understand contemporary Japanese architectural trends,
or the heavy theoretical background of Taniguchi's
architecture, then this might not be the best book. Yet, if one is
seeking an architectural book that speaks of architecture as a spatial
art and a coercive modulator with water
garden, then here is a book that provides great pleasure.

This book communicates more with drawings and supplementary images than
words. When I first saw this book at the bookstore, I was a bit hesitant
to buy it. The price and the text in the book simply did not match.
Expository writing for each project is extremely short. Yet they are
condensed enough to deliver quintessential themes of the project.

The common denominator, besides being museums, which binds the
projects, is water body (garden). His museums have one leg in the water
and the other leg on the earth. His water bodies (typically, artificial)
have different faces; sometimes, static, promoting Ryoanji-like
meditation; othertimes, dynamic, promoting Katsura-like shakkei (editing
middle ground to borrow background landscape).

His museums weave in and out of the water to illuminate and intensify
the experience. The strokes of water garden in his museums, without
doubt, will wet the dry museum fatigue. In addition, because Taniguchi
reveals sometimes part and sometimes all of a water body, his spaces
breathe.

One criticism I have is that the fourth project, Marugame
Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, somehow does not belong
with other projects. It's a fine piece of building, but unlike
other museums, it's very self-contained. The other eight museums actively
engage with the exterior water body. Only the fourth museum defeats the
purpose of inter-penetration of Taniguchi's architecture; that is,
inter-penetration of Japanese garden and modernist's space.

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Inspiring Modern Design with Understated Text
Heavy and Bulky

Architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi
Yoshio Taniguchi
Manufacturer: Harry N. Abrams
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0810919974

Amazon.com

Having one's work included among the many items in the design collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art is a major honor for any product designer or manufacturer. For architects, the Modern club is very exclusive: only five of them have ever designed buildings for MoMA. Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi is the latest, and the first non-American. He bested nine carefully picked peers in a design competition in 1998, and his project is slated for completion in 2004.

Taniguchi is not yet well known in the U.S., and this handsome, large-format book is one of the first English-language explorations of his career. It presents 18 buildings and projects through short introductions, generous color photos, and rather small line drawings. The son of an architect, Taniguchi studied mechanical engineering in Tokyo and architecture at Harvard. His works typically exhibit directness, clarity, and fine-honed sparseness. At their best--as in the brilliantly planned and boldly structured Kanazawa Library, or the magically transparent Kasai Rinkai Park visitors center--their virtues are obvious, but other projects may need a visit to reveal their essence fully. Indeed, parts of some of the projects appear rather ordinary, and one, the IBM Makuhari Technical Center, seems to flirt with banality.

There is always an inherent difficulty in compressing the large-scale, space-time experience of architecture into book form. This volume does struggle with this problem, but the elegant design mirrors Taniguchi's ordered and understated aesthetic. An introduction by architect Fumihiko Maki and an autobiographical essay by Taniguchi enhance the reader's understanding of this subtle and meticulous designer. --John Pastier

Customer Reviews:

Inspiring Modern Design with Understated Text.......2004-08-30

Taniguchi's book illustrates the clear visions of a modernists interpertations on each project. Responding to the buildings function, the image of the institution, and the site with refreshing concepts that make the whole much more than the sum of the parts. The book presents coordinated photographs and drawings that do an excellent job of communicating the substance of each project. The text is jargon-free, clearly and concisly explaining the design intent and detail. Taniguchi's modesty is quite refreshing, as is the quality of his work.

Heavy and Bulky.......2002-03-30

A very... heavy and bulky book. On contrary to its size and many colourful pictures, Taniguchi's architecture represents the typical modern/minimalist architecture with not much of inspiring insight. It therefore is understanble why there are a lot people wanted to sell it on the web.

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A Small but Concise and Visually Appealing Inside Look

New Museum Of Modern Art, The

Manufacturer: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0870701592
Release Date: 2004-11-02

Book Description

For the past few years, The Museum of Modern Art has been in the midst of the largest building project in its history. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, the new museum will open in midtown Manhattan in November 2004 - 2005 to coincide with MoMA's 75th anniversary. The 630,000-square-foot complex is nearly twice the size of the former facility, with dramatically expanded and redesigned spaces for exhibitions, public programming, educational outreach, and scholarly research. In his initial proposal, Taniguchi explained that his goal was "to create an ideal environment for art and people through the imaginative and disciplined use of light, materials, and space." His stated vision of "a museum that preserves and reinforces MoMA's unique character as the repository of an incomparable collection of modern and contemporary art, as a pioneer of museums of modern art with a unique historical inheritance, and as an urban institution in a midtown Manhattan location" has been resoundingly implemented. The New Museum of Modern Art offers an affordable, concise overview of the new building and its master architect by Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art.

Customer Reviews:

A Small but Concise and Visually Appealing Inside Look.......2005-06-13

For those of us who will have to wait until our next trip to New York to see the newly refurbished and designed Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, this little book by Glenn D Lowry offers a fine history and background on the new museum as designed by architect Taniguchi. The book is filled with excellent photographs of the various aspects of the museum including views from inside to the outside, a sense of the ambience of the building, and a fine demonstration of how the space greets its mission of displaying art.

A fine addition to the book is an essay by Terence Riley with snapshots that takes us step by step through the process of building the edifice and in doing so presents a fine mini-history of the old vs the new building.

This well designed and beautifully illustrated book is a fine introduction to one of the more important museums of the world and appears to be a superb introduction to understanding the new landmark before visiting the New MOMA. Grady Harp, June 05

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The Architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi
Yoshio TANIGUCHI
Manufacturer: see notes for publisher info
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000RJK0Q8

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Japanese Architecture
yoshio taniguchi
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000TGWNGY

Product Description

Folio illustrated with photographs and diagrams Hardcover in brown textured cloth with 8 inch square applique to front cover. Titles in gilt. Text in Japanese

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Architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi
Yoshio Taniguchi
Manufacturer: HARRY N. ABRAMS, INC.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N5DGYY

Book Description

An exhibition held in Paris a century ago demonstrated the key role American women photographers played in the international pictorialist movement. The accomplishment of these professional and amateur photographers clearly demonstrated a mastery of the medium and made a strong impression on those in attendance. Ambassadors of Progress explores this largely unknown event. Each of the 29 artists, including such well-known figures as Gertrude Kaesebier, Amelia van Buren and Zaida Ben-Yusuf, is represented in a selection of approximately 70 breathtaking color plates drawn from the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection at the Library of Congress and the National Museum of American History. The photographs include landscapes, portraiture, genre scenes, and still-lifes, all of which are evocatively composed and delicately toned using a variety of photographic techniques.

The book contains essays by Verna Curtis (Curator of Photography, Library of Congress -- on Frances Benjamin Johnston as photographer and curator), Michel Poivert (President, Societe Francaise de Photographie -- on the French critical reception), Derrick R. Cartwright (Director, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College -- on the relationship of pictorialist photography to contemporary American painting), and Andrew Robb (Senior Photograph Conservator, Library of Congress -- on the conservation processes surrounding these works).

Ambassadors of Progress: American Women Photographers in Paris, 1900-1901

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Ambassadors of Progress: American Women Photographers in Paris, 1900-1901
Verna Posever; Griffith, Bronwyn A. E. (editor); Poivert, Michel; Robb, Andrew; Meister, Laura Ilise Curtis
Manufacturer: Musee d'Art Americain Giverny / Library of Congress
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OR9MTO

Book Description

The dream of the twentieth century was the construction of mass utopia. As the century closes, this dream is being left behind; the belief that industrial modernization can bring about the good society by overcoming material scarcity for all has been challenged by the disintegration of European socialism, capitalist restructuring, and ecological constraints. The larger social vision has given way to private dreams of material happiness and to political cynicism.

Developing the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept, Susan Buck-Morss attempts to come to terms with mass dreamworlds at the moment of their passing. She shows how dreamworlds became dangerous when their energy was used by the structures of power as an instrument of force against the masses. Stressing the similarities between the East and West and using the end of the Cold War as her point of departure, she examines both extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.

The book is in four parts. "Dreamworlds of Democracy" asks whether collective sovereignty can ever be democratic. "Dreamworlds of History" calls for a rethinking of revolution by political and artistic avant-gardes. "Dreamworlds of Mass Culture" explores the affinities between mass culture's socialist and capitalist forms. An "Afterward" places the book in the historical context of the author's collaboration with a group of Moscow philosophers and artists over the past two tumultuous decades. The book is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narratives rescue historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion and challenge common conceptions of what this century was all about.

Customer Reviews:

Where's the Beast?.......2004-03-24

Having been raised in the ideological wasteland of 20th century America, I found this book an interesting read. It could be seen as a vindication of Chomskii's idea that the Cold War was a fake, in which the 2 sides's respective leaders colluded to pick the pockets of their respective peoples in order to finance the buildup of huge military machines which could be used to suck the blood of the 3rd world. My main disappointment, aside from ocassional annoying forays into psuedo-intellectual gibberish (especially the Soviet "nomenklatura" variety,), was the author's failure to inquire into the cause of the socialistic failure, apparenty assuming the fact that the leaders of neither side actually had any interest in the welfare of their people was sufficient explanation. It seems more likely to me that the collapse of social welfare is an inevitable result of the global population-explosion (i.e. as the population increases & the competition for Earth's resources intensifies & grows increasingly vicious, things are bound to deteriorate). Considering that the Wise Men of yore warned us of this problem long ago (i.e. population-explosion becoming the "Beast of Armagedon" & threatening to drag us to our doom with it's 4 Horsemen of Famine, Plague, War, & Avarice when we had finished the job of replenishing the Earth), it's hard to understand why the global intelligensia don't get it. Perhaps the "dumbing-down of America" has taken it's toll on the rest of the world, as well.

Daddy Stalin and Warbucks: Friends 'Til the End.......2001-09-21

Buck-Morss's tale of the sputtering, guttering end of the modern Fordist disciplinary project both in the U.S.A and in the Soviet Union is a stunner. Most compelling are the historical insights -- told with particular elegance through the comparison of patriotic and advertising images -- that show how similar both projects really were! Some of the historical tidbits stick in the mind never to be dislodged: Daddy Stalin asking Henry Ford to come build him a factory to make tractors in the middle of the Depression. Lenin's admiration for Frederick Taylor. Amazing how the salvation for both communists and capitalists was the same industrial regime, the same worker's paradise of factory labor!

The second half of the book, a kind of diary of cross-cultural US/Soviet cultural exchanges prior to and after the Berlin Wall, is interesting but less intellectually energizing. Still, there is a great deal of wit in Ms. Buck-Morss's observation that Western Marxist critics such as Frederick Jameson (who attended some of the same seminars with Soviet intellectuals that Buck-Morss did) seem less willing to give up on the socialist dreamscape than their Soviet counterparts.

A great companion read is Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's "Empire" which really has an interesting take on the near simultaneous end of Fordism and the disciplinary state in both the U.S. and Soviet Union. They suggest it was the "multitude" or proletariat in both nations who rebelled against the industrial factory/modern project and destabilized both, an argument which runs counter to the usual top-down explanations for the rise of postmodern economics.

Interesting how we're told these days that the Soviets, now suffering in the hot bath of capitalism, are nostalgic for the certainty of the Daddy Stalin years. Perhaps their nostalgia is not so different than Baby Boomer Americans' nostalgia for the lost innocence of the early 50s/60s, the Golden Age of American economic hegemony, before the New Deal project finally collapsed. Now that the veil has dropped it seems we had a lot more in common with "them"(us) than we ever thought we did. And still do!

The Betrayal of History.......2001-02-25

'Dreamworld and Catastrophe' is a cry of anguish disguised as the interdisciplinary analyses of a (neo-)Marxist scholar. It is a fragmentary and tortured reaction to the betrayal of history, in the best of Walter Benjamin's tradition, consciously emulated in this tome by this leading authority on the Frankfurt School. It is painful to wade through the convolutions of denial, intellectualization and projection that constitute the first part ('Democracy' - the political framework). The next two sections ('History' and 'Mass Culture')are a joyride of erudition and an intellectual tour de force. The last part - a dry chronicle of the comings and goings of the author's milieu amidst the disintegration of the USSR and the emergence of Russia - is anti-climactic. The opus in its entirety does not fuflil the blurb's somewhat hubristic promise: 'This book offers a revaluation of the twentieth century'. Sam Vaknin, author of 'After the Rain - How the West Lost the East'

Passing The Buck: Congress, The Budget, And Deficits

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Passing The Buck: Congress, The Budget, And Deficits
Jasmine Farrier
Manufacturer: University Press of Kentucky
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0813123356

Book Description

In the past thirty years, Congress has dramatically changed its response to unpopular deficit spending. While the landmark Congressional Budget Act of 1974 tried to increase congressional budgeting powers, new budget processes created in the 1980s and 1990s were all explicitly designed to weaken member, majority, and institutional budgeting prerogatives. These later reforms shared the premise that Congress cannot naturally forge balanced budgets without new automatic mechanisms and enhanced presidential oversight. So Democratic majorities in Congress gave new budgeting powers to Presidents Reagan and Bush, and then Republicans did the same for President Clinton.

Passing the Buck examines how Congress is increasing delegation of a wide variety of powers to the president in recent years. Jasmine Farrier assesses why institutional ambition in the early 1970s turned into institutional ambivalence about whether Congress is equipped to handle its constitutional duties.

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Yes, it IS about making a movie.

Bridge for Passing
Pearl S. Buck
Manufacturer: Pocket Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0671803204

Customer Reviews:

Yes, it IS about making a movie........2003-01-14

Pearl S. Buck, A Bridge for Passing (Pocket, 1962)

The strength of Pearl Buck's writing, it becomes evident from page one, is in her ability to tell a story as if she were sitting next to you sipping lemonade on an unseasonably cool August day. Her observations are flowery, well-described, and often at least a touch naïve; one wonders, had she written the book ten years later, if it would have had the same tone it does.

A Bridge for Passing intertwines the filming of her novel The Big Wave, the first major collaboration between Japanese and American filmmakers (and now unforgivably obscure), with the death of her husband of twenty-five years. And oddly, though the ratio of the two in page real estate is about 90/10, the reviews, the blurbs, and the cover reverse the ratio when talking about the book. To the rest of the world, it seems, A Bridge for Passing was a precursor to the spate of books that started appearing roughly a decade later about how to handle major life crises. The movie was just an afterthought.

Not so, Othello. The movie is the mechanism by which Buck learns to deal with her grief, true, but there is much more to it than that. This is no fictional memoir; we are treated to the lives of real people, most of whom have remained obscure from the American perspective, but some of whom are not (Big Wave director Ted Danielewski, for example, has a pair of kids well known to media critics, House of Leaves author Mark Danielewski and his sister, the singer known as Poe). And when one keeps one's mind on the idea that these are real people, one starts to realize the enormity of the task Buck and her cohorts have set themselves. This is not just an on location shoot, this is politics of the highest order (and only fifteen years after the unpleasantness at the end of World War II).

There is much to be said for the way in which her husband's death pervades the book, but any Buck fans who have avoided this, fearing it to be nothing but a celebrity-penned self-help tome, put your fears at ease. This one's a keeper. *** ½

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4 Titles By Pearl S. Buck : Peony - Come, My Beloved - The Exile - A Bridge for Passing
Pearl S. Buck
Manufacturer: Pocket Book
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000VTPX34

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multiple books ship as one item. save on shipping/handling charges.

An attitude adjuster: a lesson learned while passing the bucks.(contemporary spirituality): An article from: Presbyterian Record

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An attitude adjuster: a lesson learned while passing the bucks.(contemporary spirituality): An article from: Presbyterian Record
David Webber
Manufacturer: Presbyterian Record
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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This digital document is an article from Presbyterian Record, published by Presbyterian Record on October 1, 2003. The length of the article is 1406 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: An attitude adjuster: a lesson learned while passing the bucks.(contemporary spirituality)
Author: David Webber
Publication: Presbyterian Record (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 2003
Publisher: Presbyterian Record
Volume: 127 Issue: 9 Page: 50(2)

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A Bridge for Passing
Pearl S. Buck
Manufacturer: The John Day Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000SXI6YQ

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A Bridge for Passing
Pearl S Buck
Manufacturer: John Day Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NRUZ5U

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A Bridge for Passing
Pearl S Buck
Manufacturer: A Giant Cardinal Edition/ Pocket Books Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000NPM4VA

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Bridge for Passing
Pearl S. Buck
Manufacturer: EDGEWEAR
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000V7CSAW

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A Bridge for Passing
Pearl S. Buck
Manufacturer: Pocket Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0000CLNJ4

Customer Reviews:

Interesting bio.......2000-07-18

You don't necessarily have to be a gear head, or even remotely interested in motorcycles, to enjoy this Horatio Alger-like biography about a winner - on the race track, in the business world and in life. Working for Trev Deeley for the past 15 years, I had only known him for his stunning home & love of "toys", his quick temper and his thoughtful generosity. Naturally I was curious to learn more about this supposedly "larger than life" celebrity in the motorcycle world. The book provided the answers to my questions. It is well researched, if a little skimpy on the details, and a quick, easy read. A lot of references to local (Vancouver/ Victoria) geography make it particularly interesting to those who are familiar. It is accompanied by some fascinating photos that provide a good reference to the narrative. A good inside look into the motorcycle industry, and the life of a very fascinating man...it actually inspired me to pursue an unfulfilled lifelong desire: to purchase a motorcycle and learn to ride!

Book Description

This study examines how unions representing telephone workers--one in Mexico and one in British Columbia, Canada--have responded to changes in technology, work organization, and government policy stemming from the rise of a more global economy. Some business writers have suggested that globalization will compel unions to cooperate with managers as workers are more exposed to international competition. By analyzing the actual record of two unions in the highly internationalized telecommunications industry, however, a different picture emerges.

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