|
Isamu Noguchi first treated the earth as an object for sculpture in 1933 with the design of Play Mountain , and his early landscape projects were all playgrounds. But during a 1951 visit to Japan, Noguchi began to design gardens, and the garden became the reigning metaphor for his post-war landscape sculpture. Noguchi's first major garden commission was for the new UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1956-58). During the 1960s Noguchi built gardens for large institutions and corporations such as IBM, many of them for buildings by architect Gordon Bunshaft . Among his innovations include the sunken garden (Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza in New York City) and the interior stone landscape (Sogetsu Kaikan, Tokyo). Noguchi's landscape ideas also were realized in urban parks and playgrounds,and museum sculpture gardens. For Isamu Noguchi, all of this work was part of what he called the "sculpture of spaces", his project of making sculpture useful in everyday life.
|
