Details? Yoshio Taniguchi doesn't want you to be conscious of them, and he works hard at making them disappear. In the same spirit of scrupulous neo-minimalism, I should stop right here, and simply present this sentence - set off with lots of white space - as an artful apercu on New York's new MoMA. Or I could do it as an homage to Jenny Holzer, and scroll it in LED. But they pay me for a thousand words, and too much self-referentiality can be self-defeating (if I say so myself), so it's worth decompressing the headline - running a mental Stuffit to disciose the precise reasons for Taniguchi's success. The usual problem with architectural minimalism, as anyone who has ever tried it knows, is that buildings are large things made out of many small pieces. You can design a big, simple shape - a rectangular brick panel, say - but, particularly from up close, the intricate, small-scale pattern of elements and joints will probably dominate the simplicity of the larger unit.
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