by Kenneth Frampton

 (This essay appeared in Play Mountain: Isamu Noguchi + Louis Kahn , Tokyo: Watari-um, 1996)

"The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place."

Rosalind Kraus, 1979(2)

In a lecture, delivered in New York in 1982, the Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti advanced the thesis that the origin of architecture did not reside in the primitive hut but rather in the marking of ground; that is to say with that pre-scriptic gesture with which primordial man first sought to create order out of chaos.(3) This was surely an observation with which Isamu Noguchi would have had sympathy as we may judge from a number of his initial landscape studies, from his rather cryptic Monument to the Plow (1933) to the equally mysterious sand model, bearing the title Sculpture to be Seen from Mars (1947). Other relief pieces of the early forties testify to a similar preoccupation; notably Yellow Landscape and Lunar Landscape of 1942 and 1944 respectively and This Tortured Earth (1943), all of which seem to anticipate rather directly his more thoroughgoing involvement with landscape after the end of the Second World War.

Noguchi's preoccupation with the ground as some kind of deeper sculptural origin, linked with both relief sculpture and architecture, seems to have come from many different sources and above all perhaps from Pre-Columbian Tumuli, particularly a pre-historic earthwork to be found in Ohio in the form of a serpent. As he would put it in his autobiography, when writing of his 1945 collaboration with Edward Durrell Stone, on the design of a park in Saint Louis, Missouri:

"I was much interested in pre-historic American Indian mounds at that time and had taken a trip to Ohio to see the Great Serpent Mound." (4)

While we do not know at what date Noguchi acquired a book documenting this tumulus,(5) we do know that many of this early reliefs would seem to anticipate aspects of this earth-form, as in his terraced Play Mountain (1933) or in the decidedly more serpentine swimming pool that he designed in 1935 at Richard Neutra's behest for the film director Josef von Sternberg.(6) The Great Serpent Mound may surely be cited as an inspiration behind a number of Noguchi's later landscapes including the initial studies for the Beinecke Library garden court, at Yale University, dating from 1960. It is patently present as a motif in the first garden that Noguchi would actually realize, the undulating earthwork laid-out in front of Antonin Raymond's Reader's Digest Building, Tokyo in 1951. Here a reformulation of the Ohio serpent mound was paralleled by a stream, while an adjacent isolated phallic element laid out on the ground makes an oblique reference to the disconnected head of the aboriginal snake. This garden enabled Noguchi to come close to his lifelong aspiration of fusing occidental and oriental culture,(7 ) even if, in this instance, the occident was paradoxically represented by the serpent mound, while the orient was embodied in the Japanese gardening tradition, with which Noguchi first gained experience while working on this garden. As he put it in retrospect:

"Here was an opportunity to learn from the world's most skilled gardeners, the common Uekiya of Japan. Through working with them, in the mud, I learned the rudiments of stone placing -- using stones we could find on the site. There is to each stone a live and a dead side. They are placed according to the rules of Shin, Gyo and So; that is the formal (Shin), the informal (So) and the in between (Gyo)." (8)

This was the technique that Noguchi would apply freely to his UNESCO Garden in Paris, made in the mid-fifties, although his interpretation of this tradition would be loose and in many aspects mixed with foreign elements, as in the stone stools of cubic and cylindrical shape that were reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi's Table of Silence of 1937, built at Tirgu Jiu in Rumania. These seats were combined with more traditional Japanese features: stepping stones, a shallow vaulted bridge and above all the painstaking placement of rocks brought expressly for this purpose from the bed of the Ayu-Kui-Gawa river in Shikoku.(9) Of this assembly he wrote:

"My effort was to find a way to link the ritual of rocks which comes down to us through the Japanese from the dawn of history to our modern times and needs. In Japan, the worship of the stones changed into an appreciation of nature. The search for the essence of sculpture seems to carry me to the same end. This is an ambulatory garden, the enjoyment of which is enhanced by walking in it whereby one perceives the relative value of all things. ... While the spirit of the garden comes from Japan, the actual composition of the natural rocks, the granite (lanterns, water-fall) the concrete and wood (seating) is my own...The only exceptions to this are the large stone and hill arrangement which closely follows the common horai (sacred mountain) tradition, and two old chosu bachi (water basins) which are included in deference to the appreciation of age which is so much part of the Japanese garden." (10)

For Noguchi the consummation of sculptural space through action was preferable to sculpture being distractedly viewed in an art gallery as an aesthetic object; a predisposition that led him to enter the fields of landscape and scenography. Human movement was the common factor unifying these artistic domains irrespective of whether the work in question was a promenade garden or a stage set for Martha Graham.(11) As far as Noguchi was concerned both forms of expression allowed one to consummate a mythic, ritualistic environment; a fulfillment that in the modern world is usually denied by everyday life.(12)

A common theme links the props that Noguchi devised for Graham to the play equipment that he designed for children in 1939, which were first published as prototypes in 1940 in The Architectural Forum. Comprising a series of devices for climbing, hiding and sitting, plus a stepped swing in tubular steel and his famous spiral slide, Noguchi clearly hoped that this new equipment would come to be accepted as a standard and thus put into mass production. Promptly criticized by the New York City Parks Department on the grounds that such equipment was dangerous, Noguchi responded immediately by designing his super safe Contoured Playground (1940) that was as much a table relief sculpture as it was a realistic project for a playground.(13) The Parks Department would have supposedly realized this prototype had it not been for the outbreak of the Second World War. This is the self-same department which will reject his first post-war attempt to build a landscaped playground; his United Nations proposal of 1951, the first commission of this genre to be sponsored by Audrey Hess. While the then Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, dismissed this design as nothing but a "hillside rabbit warren," this was the first of Noguchi's playgrounds to be unequivocally conceived as such, and not simultaneously as a small-scale sculptural relief.

The UN playground appears in retrospect as a hybrid work: part landscape, part Surrealist stage set, and in part a relief work at a colossal scale. On the one hand wire-framed jungle gyms and basketball hoops together with tunnels and crawl arches, close to the character of the 1939 equipment; on the other, organically shaped earthworks, a ribbed tumulus, an amphitheater shielded by a serpentine wall, and a stepped causeway, built-up, out of equilateral, triangular segments. Following Thomas Hess's defense in his magazine Art News, the New York elite rallied around this design by arranging to have it exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art.

Noguchi's seminal collaboration with Louis Kahn on the design of Riverside Park Playground was preceded by a world tour that the artist undertook during the years 1949-50, under the auspices of the Bollingen Foundation, from which he had received a grant for the ostensible purpose of studying leisure on a transcultural basis. The numerous photographs and drawings that he brought back from this trip presage in various ways the prismatic geometrical forms that crop up in the different versions of the Riverside playground design, including a number of remarkable photographs taken by Noguchi of the Maharajah Jai Singh observatory in Jaipur. As he put it, "I went to the caves of Lascaux, to Egypt, and all the places that people used to believe in as the congealments or cruxes of meaning within each culture." (14)

But such archaic sites were by no means the only source of Noguchi's topographic form. The more ironic and plastic touches of Noguchi's dramatis personae came almost directly from the Surrealist sculptural tradition in which he was immersed at the time. I am thinking of such architectonic assemblies as Alberto Giacometti's The Palace at 4 AM (1932-3) or of Frederick Kiesler's 1942 Abstract Gallery for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century or even of Louis Kahn's rather atypical designs for an exhibition in Philadelphia, dating from 1943, that served to illustrate his essay, "Monumentality" of 1944. (15 )This last comprised a dematerialized space-frame structure in tubular steel, hovering over a podium and inflected by the occasional piece of Surrealist sculpture. This esquisse bore a superficial resemblance to certain environmental works by Noguchi of the same date, although the two men would not meet each other until some sixteen years later.

As with the rejected design for the UN Playground, the initiative for the proposed Riverside Playground came from Audrey Hess (Mrs. Thomas Hess) who was to sponsor and fundraise for the creation of a pioneering park-cum-play space as a memorial to her aunt, Adele Rosenwald Levy. As Noguchi's retrospective description of the park makes clear the overall intention had been to create a kind of surrogate public realm capable of appealing to "children of all ages,"  a complex and comprehensive earthwork incorporating an indoor play space, a play mountain, a slide tumulus, a fountain-cum-wading pool, an amphitheater and finally a sand garden divided up by diagonal curbing to form a two-dimensional maze.(16)

What seems to have been the first sketch for the park could hardly have been more crude since it comprised a rough pastel drawing, sketched out on an existing site-plan. It featured no more than four basic objects: a circular amphitheater, a semi-circular sand garden, placed on the axis of 105th Street, a rather curious ying-yang mound and a skating rink rendered in white crayon, to be situated just below 101st Street, west of the existing Esplanade. (17)

The ostensible brief at this date (August 1961) also comprised crawl and hiding spaces, climbing and exploration areas, a space for the elderly and a stage for dramatic performances. This program will be fleshed out by Kahn and Noguchi acting conjointly, in a drawing dated December 3rd 1961, completed some thirteen weeks after Kahn's appointment as a joint venture partner. A perspective from the Kahn archives seems to represent this first scheme to the letter. By this date the cylindrical amphitheater is enriched by a stepped causeway impinging on it from one side, while the slide tumulus has taken the form of a vaguely elliptical mound with two slides implanted on either side of its central axis. (Cf. bronze table relief entitled Two Mounds) Only the semi-circular sand garden remains as in the initial sketch, while the Esplanade is shown furnished with Noguchi free-standing-play-pieces throughout the length of the playground.

By the time the New York City Parks Department first reviews the scheme on February 20th 1962, the western boundary of the available site has been withdrawn from the Esplanade itself. This move leads into the second version of the scheme which was essentially made up of the following elements: first, a rather generalized amphitheatral space which was no longer circular in plan, second, an irregular sand garden and third, three slides set within two separate tumuli. The project at this stage extended from 101st to 103rd Streets.

As a letter of this date would indicate the initial reaction of the Parks Department was extremely critical.(18) They regarded the proposal as costly, too extensive and excessively avant-gardist, along with their contention that the proposed subterranean family rooms and indoor play spaces, lit by light-wells, could not be adequately ventilated and illuminated, thereby effectively opposing the strategy of conserving green space by putting auxiliary rooms underground.(19)

With the third scheme (agreed to by Noguchi on December 9th 1963) the area to be covered by the playground was drastically reduced. Still bounded on the west by the Esplanade or Mall the proposed intervention now effectively extended from the central axis of 102nd Street to mid-way between 103rd and 104th Streets where there was an existing stairway entrance.(20) The tripartite amphitheatral space of the second scheme had now been transformed into an undulating "play-bowl"  with a single tier of inclined, terraced seating at the northern limit of the site. At this stage three separate mounds dominated the southern end of the scheme: a conical play-mountain, with a short slide descending into a circular water basin, a three-sided climbing pyramid with tunnel holes and a naturally contoured slide tumulus. This basic assembly was complemented by a long ramp and stair, and by an irregular stepped causeway at the base of the tetrahedral pyramid. There was also a circular sand pit and a multiplicity of fixed small scale play furniture. This was the basic program over which the Parks Department and the designers will argue throughout the subsequent evolution of the project. It was, in fact, still the essential format at the time a model of the work was published in Progressive Architecture in March 1964.(21)

This fourth version of the playground passes rapidly through a number of minor variations, including sketches made at the beginning of March and schematic plans and elevation drawn up between April 14th and April 20th. These variations involve slightly different shapes for such features as the twin banks of amphitheatral seating to the north and the tetrahedral pyramid.

A fifth version, held in the Kahn archives, shows an additional interim stage in which the project is greatly simplified.(22) The central conical play mountain has been eliminated from this version while the slide tumulus is linked to the stair system. The stepped causeway of the initial joint scheme re-emerges at this juncture only to be eliminated in the sixth and penultimate version.

This version, dating from the end of 1964, was equally constrained except that the slide tumulus is now restored as an independent element and the stepped causeway has been eliminated. This is the version that will form the basis of the working drawings. Noguchi's play elements are now reduced to a small concrete climbing pyramid with a crawl tunnel, a split, stepped pyramid with a swing bar, a sand pit, seats, a play court and a cylindrical ring-mound-cum-water fountain. By this date a certain division of labor has arisen between the two men with Kahn handling the larger architectural elements, the retaining wall and ramp, the subterranean rooms (now lit from the sides through circular fenestration) together with the terraced amphitheater and play platform. This is the version against which final estimates and quotes will be made in May and August of 1966.

In the event however not even this painstakingly detailed scheme that was within the budget could withstand the reluctance of the Parks Department and the resistance of public opinion, not to mention the disingenuousness of the local electorate that in return for helping John Lindsay become mayor, engineered the immediate cancellation of the playground, once he was elected.(23 ) Of this machination Noguchi was fully aware. As he would indicate in retrospect:

"All the working drawings and plans for the Adele Levy playground for Riverside Drive Park were finally completed and accepted by the Parks Department and the various other agencies of New York City. The money was all in hand. $500,000 from the Rosenwald Foundation matched by another $500,000 from the city. Mayor Wagner called us to City Hall to witness his formal authorization of construction. Alas, however, this was the last thing he did. The next day he was out and the first thing the new Mayor Lindsay did was to kill it -- as a campaign promise, I understood." (24)

 It is ironic that the only commemorative landscape to be finally realized by the two men would be Noguchi's homage to Kahn installed in the southern court of Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas in 1983, seven years after Kahn's death. Entitled Constellation and expressly dedicated to Kahn, this piece comprised a four-part basalt assembly, carved and laid out at Noguchi's studio on the Island of Shikoku. But even this project was not without obstacle, for it took Noguchi a number of years to convince the museum to accept the work, and then only as a gift. With this magnanimous gesture, achieved shortly before his own death, Noguchi added a touching coda to a collaboration that had been both arduous and unique.

Notes

(1) Copyright 1996 by Kenneth Frampton

(2) Rosalind Kraus, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field,"  in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), p.33. This essay was first published in October 8, 1979.

(3) Vittorio Gregotti, Address To the Architectural League, New York, October 1982, published in Section A, Vol. 1, No. 1, February/March 1983, p.8.

(4) Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York: Harper  Row, 1968), p.166.

(5) E.O.Randall, The Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State Archaeological Society, 1907).

(6) See Martin Friedman, Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1978), pp.39-40. Noguchi's description of the project reads:  "I had a ramp on one side, down which water could flow, and von Sternberg could lie there with water running underneath him. Then, when he was sufficiently cooled off, he could lie in another area and be completely dry and warm. Then he could swim around. The whole thing would be luminous with lights coming from the steps..."  In the event Neutra decided not to use the design.

(7) In his 1927 Guggenheim application, Noguchi wrote: "My father, Yone Noguchi, is Japanese and has long been known as in interpreter of the East to the West, through poetry. I wish to fulfill my heritage." Bruce Altshuler and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, eds., Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p.17.

(8) A Sculptor's World, p.163.

(9) A Sculptor's World, p.166. For Noguchi everything turned on the placement of these "bones" as he liked to call them.

(10) Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, pp.61-62.

(11) Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, pp.80-89.

(12) A Sculptor's World, p.123.

(13) This is true of many of Noguchi's landscape pieces, which after they were worked up as plaster models were later cast in bronze to form table reliefs. A rather atypical bronze entitled Archaeology and worked on spasmodically between 1966 and 1984 typifies the opposite process where a relief could be construed as a landscape.

(14) Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes, p.7.

(15) Paul Zucker The New Architecture and City Planning, New York Philosophical Library, 1944, pp. 570-579.

(16) A Sculptor's World, pp.177-178.

(17) Noguchi was to make a separate plaster model of the organic sculptural objects to be included in the skating rink. [516/J]

(18) See letter signed by Commissioner Newbold Morris dated February 20th 1962, held in the Archives of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc., New York.

(19) This strategy was made feasible by the thirty foot change of level at 104th Street between Riverside Drive and the mean level of Riverside Park.

(20) The scheme was still designed as running from 102nd to 105th Streets but the proposed works were less extensive.

(21) Progressive Architecture, March 1964, pp.65 and 67.

(22) See Heinz Ronner and Sharad Jhaveri, Louis. I. Kahn, Complete Works, Birkhauser, Basel  Boston, 1987, p.185. Illustrations LMP8  LMP9.

(23) It seems that the local electorate feared that the playground would bring underprivileged children into the area. At the time of cancellation Thomas P.F.Hoving was serving as Parks Commissioner. On January 23, 1966 Noguchi was still having to defend the scheme. In a letter to Hoving of that date he refers to the sculptural art of making buildings disappear. (Correspondence in the Archives of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc., New York.)

24) Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, p.127.