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During the 1930s Noguchi began his life-long quest to make sculpture useful to the general public, an idea born in the social consciousness of the Depression years. In 1933 he conceived three monumental public works: the mile-wide pyramidal Monument to the Plough to be set at the geographical center of the United States, the Monument to Ben Franklin to be erected in Philadelphia, and a city block-sized playground for New York called Play Mountain. Only the Monument to Ben Franklin would be built, and that fifty years later, but in 1936 Noguchi traveled to Mexico City to realize his first public sculpture, a 72-foot long carved brick relief, History Mexico. Noguchi proposed a number of works for the 1939 New York World's Fair, and his Chassis Fountain was constructed at the Ford Motor Company pavilion. He completed the decade by creating a 9-ton stainless steel relief sculpture for the entrance to the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center, News. Noguchi designed a number of public interiors during the 1940s that employed biomorphic imagery and his new concept of illuminated sculpture: a reception room ceiling at the Time-Life Building, a stairwell on the S.S. Argentina (Lunar Voyage), and a lobby ceiling for the American Stove Company Building in St. Louis. When Noguchi visited Japan in the early 1950s he proposed for Hiroshima two memorials to those who perished in the atomic bomb blast, but neither project was realized. After the war Noguchi created a large number of public sculptures, including Red Cube (New York), Black Sun (Seattle), Portal (Cleveland), Landscape of Time (Seattle) and Sky Gate (Honolulu)as well as fountains and landscape projects.
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