Yoshio Taniguchi was already Japan's preeminent museum architect when Toyota City tapped him for the project. His portfolio included the Nagano Prefectural Museum of History, the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Gallery of the Horyuji Treasures at the Tokyo National Museum -- buildings praised for their restrained elegance and meticulous attention to how light meets wall. For the Toyota museum, Taniguchi designed a structure that sits quietly on its hillside, its geometric volumes of glass, steel, and pale stone deferring to the landscape rather than competing with it. The American landscape architect Peter Walker shaped the surrounding grounds, centering them on a large reflective pond that mirrors the building and the sky. Standing by the entrance, visitors encounter two monumental sculptures: a simple white cube by Sol LeWitt and a massive work of rusted, curved steel plates by Richard Serra -- a pairing that announces the museum's ambition to bridge minimalism and material presence.

The collection inside matches the architecture's range. The museum's stated aim is to provide an overview of art after modernism, from both Japan and other countries, and the European holdings alone would be the envy of many larger institutions. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele represent the Vienna Secession. Rene Magritte and Max Ernst bring Surrealism. Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi contribute sculpture that dissolves the boundary between abstraction and organic form. Salvador Dali and Alberto Giacometti round out a survey that moves from dream logic to existential thinness. The Japanese collection runs equally deep, with works by Shunso Hishida, whose soft-focus nihonga paintings revolutionized the form, and Taikan Yokoyama, his contemporary and collaborator in pushing Japanese painting beyond traditional boundaries. Kanzan Shimomura, Shiko Imamura, Ryusei Kishida, and Tsuguharu Fujita extend the collection through the turbulent decades of early twentieth-century Japanese modernism.

The museum's hillside setting carries its own historical weight. The slopes below the galleries overlook the ruins of Koromo Castle, the Edo-period fortress whose donjon once commanded views of seven provinces. Where feudal lords surveyed their domain, visitors now wander Peter Walker's garden paths among outdoor sculptures, pausing at benches beside the reflecting pond. The transition from castle to museum happened gradually -- after the Meiji Restoration dismantled the feudal system, the hilltop served as a school, then a park, before the city decided this elevated ground deserved a cultural institution worthy of Toyota's economic stature. The location means the museum exists in quiet dialogue with centuries of local history, a modern temple of art resting on the foundations of older ambitions.

Toyota City renamed itself in 1959, trading its old identity as the textile town of Koromo for the name of the company that had transformed its economy. The museum represents a deliberate effort to ensure the city's identity extends beyond the factory floor. At $122 million, it was a statement: wealth generated by precision engineering could support a collection that includes some of the most important European and Japanese modern art in the country. Public transport connects the museum to the city center via the Mikawa Line to Toyotashi Station, placing world-class art within easy reach of the engineers and assembly workers whose labor funded its construction. Taniguchi, who died in December 2024 at the age of 87, left behind a building that ages as gracefully as the art it houses -- a controlled geometry of light and space that makes the viewing of a Klimt or a Schiele feel like a private conversation rather than a public spectacle.