Isamu Noguchi: maquette for Riverside Drive c. 1961. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 01952.
© The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum / ARS
Isamu Noguchi: useless architecture
Isamu Noguchi moved easily through the worlds of fine art, architecture and design, a polymath like
Iannis Xenakis and
Mathias Goeritz.
I have always found the idea of play central to 'primary structures' such as the work of
Tony Smith which I encountered as a child. In his 'maquette for Riverside Drive' Noguchi integrated the idea of play into the work. This was intended to be a playground for children, an ambition he realised later in works such as 'Playscapes', Atlanta, Georgia (1976), a commission from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. An artist's playground absolutely does not need swings and slides: the abstract sculptural forms provide an essential playground for exploration.
Isamu Noguchi: Constellation (for Louis Kahn) 1982
photo © Thomas Deckker 1995
I was fortunate to visit Noguchi's 'Constellation (for Louis Kahn) 1982' at Kahn's
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (1966-72), two great works that reflect upon archetypal and archaic form. This work was the culmination of a series of gardens designed in the 1960s and the fulfilment of a long collaboration with Louis Kahn. During the 1960s Noguchi designed gardens for SOM: the Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, with rocks set in cobblestone paving that recalls the 'dry landscape' of the Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto, Japan and a garden for the Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale, with archaic geometric forms that recall the Samrat Yantra Observatory, Jaipur, India. Noguchi visited these with a travelling scholarship from the Bollingen Foundation in 1949-51, at the same time as Kahn was encountering ancient ruins as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1950. Noguchi was sponsored and promoted by Gordon Bunshaft of SOM during the 1950s and early 1960s, coincidentally the only period when SOM were designing buildings of any architectural merit.
Isamu Noguchi: Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza, New York 1961-64. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 01935. Photo: Arthur Lavine
© The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum / ARS
The subtitle 'useless architecture' comes from the recent
exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London. Many of these works, like other can be seen as meditations on architectural space. Like that of his near contemporaries
Mathias Goeritz and Barbara Hepworth, Noguchi's work retains an emotive force, unlike later work, such as that of
Richard Serra and
Tony Smith, generally work that was exhibited at 'Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors' at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1966.
Isamu Noguchi: Orpheus (1958)
photo © Thomas Deckker 2022
Thomas Deckker
London 2022
