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Lot Essay
Plan No. 1: A Model for Isamu Noguchi’s Riverside Drive Playground
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) made the plaster model, from which this bronze was cast, as part of a Quixotean five-year effort to realize a “playground as sculptural landscape” (1) on the upper west side of Manhattan in New York City. Starting alone in 1960, and in collaboration with the architect Louis Kahn (1901–1974) from the summer of 1961 on, Noguchi sought a way through the “hedges” of New York City’s notorious building codes, which as he pointed out can seem “almost as though planned to prevent originality.” Conceived for a four-block-long section of Riverside Park—a steep ribbon of river embankment bounded by the Hudson and Riverside Drive north of 72nd St.—the project went through five, quite-different, fully detailed plans before being permanently shelved by the City: “a victim to political change.”
This model relates to the first plan, which was to occupy all of the original, approximately 20-acre site between 101st and 105th streets. Noguchi and Kahn set out to design an engaging place for “children of all ages, their parents, grandparents, and other older people” to “mutually find enjoyment.” (That term, playground, unfortunately continues to be pulled down by the type of uninspired “fenced-in concrete play areas” “on vacant lots” to which Noguchi was then responding.) Just as he was trying to do in the other, myriad public spaces he was designing at the time, Noguchi hoped to create a sense of place that would encourage civic pursuits such as getting to know oneself, one’s capabilities, and one’s place in the natural world, as well as communing with one’s peers—without the express need for any activity other than physical being. It is a moment in which many of Noguchi's pursuits, trying to satisfy various design briefs and specific functions for public spaces, were converging in his consciousness on the garden, humankind’s most nature-like invention, as the most operative metaphor for the conscious awareness of activity he wanted to encourage through place making.
At the center of this first “play garden” scheme for Riverside Drive Playground was a “nursery building,” essentially an amphitheater (Noguchi often believed the best building was no building)—with subterranean service spaces around the perimeter. Noguchi described it as “shaped like a cup, a sun trap,” to make it attractive in the cold winter months, with fountains and a water zone for summer. Radiating out from this nursery, and breaking its perfect symmetry, was an integrated “play mountain,” or “artificial hill” made of piled triangular terraces. Further from this core were a number of spaces with “definite but not limiting forms to invite play”: “giant slides built into the topography,” a gigantic cellular sand and pebble pit with “maze-like divisions,” and “a theater area with a shell for music, puppets and theater.” Running the length of the site, right down on the river, was a nearly thousand-foot-long row of ambiguous, architectonic “permanent structures forming the landscape” that, had it been built, might have recalled long views in gardens such as those at Versailles.
Noguchi had enlisted Kahn, “a philosopher among architects,” to answer questions about his own capacity, as a solo practitioner without an office or employees to speak of, to produce buildable plans, believing that such questions had perhaps contributed to his inability to realize some of his more ambitious environmental concepts, including previous playspaces in New York City. Addressing the Parks Department’s many questions, objections, and requests for alteration throughout a protracted process, Noguchi and Kahn worked to satisfy themselves and each other that they were delivering meaningful public space in a form that could actually be approved and built. In the end, despite private funding and public support, they ran out of time. Noguchi was ultimately ambivalent, feeling that he and Kahn had gradually discovered, and then perhaps proven, that architecture and design for play are somewhat necessarily at irreconcilable odds with their respect use of scale: play requiring child-scaled structures and capital A architecture needing the freedom to define its own.
Though Noguchi was somewhat renowned for a level of self-containment that could be confused with Olympian disdain, he was in fact entirely serious about designing for children rather than a grown-up’s idea of what a child should want. As he would later say, he worked hard to cultivate the child within in order to do this himself, as his childlike behavior well into his 80s often demonstrated. (Sliding down a big stone in Machu Picchu at the age of eighty-two comes to mind.) But he was also, as can be seen in this wonderful series of photographs of Noguchi working on the plan with a consultant, truly open to, and solicitous of, specific, relevant feedback from a trusted source—someone ready to roll up their sleeves and kick off their shoes (Figs. 1–3).
Noguchi had moved to New York at the age of seventeen to attend Columbia University—not far from the intended site of Riverside Drive Playground—when not much more than a child himself. Having attended elementary school in Yokohama, Japan—where he later remembered the playground as a more or less barren patch of dirt—and high school in rural Indiana, he arrived in New York City desperately wanting not to lose his connection to nature. For so many city kids—the hybrid, transplanted Noguchi being no exception—a park or playground, almost no matter how grim, and back then they were pretty scarce and pretty stark, is an archetypal experience with nature, landscape, and the environment. Which explains why one of Noguchi’s first public statements, as an artist hoping to make “sculpture a vital force in our everyday life” by projecting it into “communal usefulness,” was to propose a mountain for the city, “enhanced,” as he put it, “for child’s play” (Play Mountain, 1933). Play Mountain was the first of his four serious attempts, in four successive decades, to build a playscape in his adopted hometown. All of them would feature some version of a playable mountain—the other two being Contoured Playground (1941), for Central Park, and United Nations Playground (1952), for a site near the then just completed headquarters of world government. None of these was realized.
But the plans and models—later often abstracted, descaled, and defamiliarized by him and others on display, in ways that have served only to extend their wide-openness—and all of the ideas Noguchi generated to produce them, became a wellspring to which he would return again and again when and as opportunities to make playspaces finally arrived. The bronze casts, such as this one, that he made to preserve, promulgate, and promote his ideas—this is the rare example that is not in the collection of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum—are the essential record that has made Noguchi one of the seminal figures in “ideas relating sculpture to the earth.”(2) They constitute the most complete extant catalog of Noguchi’s thinking about how to work with the landscape to encourage empirical engagement with nature, and how to design structures to segment, accentuate, and enhance the experience of being alive.
– Dakin Hart
(1) This and all of the quoted descriptions that follow are taken from Noguchi’s autobiography, first published in 1968 by Harper & Row Publishers: Isamu Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World, rev. ed. (New York: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation / Steidl Publishers, 2004), 177–79.
(2) Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World, 22.
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) made the plaster model, from which this bronze was cast, as part of a Quixotean five-year effort to realize a “playground as sculptural landscape” (1) on the upper west side of Manhattan in New York City. Starting alone in 1960, and in collaboration with the architect Louis Kahn (1901–1974) from the summer of 1961 on, Noguchi sought a way through the “hedges” of New York City’s notorious building codes, which as he pointed out can seem “almost as though planned to prevent originality.” Conceived for a four-block-long section of Riverside Park—a steep ribbon of river embankment bounded by the Hudson and Riverside Drive north of 72nd St.—the project went through five, quite-different, fully detailed plans before being permanently shelved by the City: “a victim to political change.”
This model relates to the first plan, which was to occupy all of the original, approximately 20-acre site between 101st and 105th streets. Noguchi and Kahn set out to design an engaging place for “children of all ages, their parents, grandparents, and other older people” to “mutually find enjoyment.” (That term, playground, unfortunately continues to be pulled down by the type of uninspired “fenced-in concrete play areas” “on vacant lots” to which Noguchi was then responding.) Just as he was trying to do in the other, myriad public spaces he was designing at the time, Noguchi hoped to create a sense of place that would encourage civic pursuits such as getting to know oneself, one’s capabilities, and one’s place in the natural world, as well as communing with one’s peers—without the express need for any activity other than physical being. It is a moment in which many of Noguchi's pursuits, trying to satisfy various design briefs and specific functions for public spaces, were converging in his consciousness on the garden, humankind’s most nature-like invention, as the most operative metaphor for the conscious awareness of activity he wanted to encourage through place making.
At the center of this first “play garden” scheme for Riverside Drive Playground was a “nursery building,” essentially an amphitheater (Noguchi often believed the best building was no building)—with subterranean service spaces around the perimeter. Noguchi described it as “shaped like a cup, a sun trap,” to make it attractive in the cold winter months, with fountains and a water zone for summer. Radiating out from this nursery, and breaking its perfect symmetry, was an integrated “play mountain,” or “artificial hill” made of piled triangular terraces. Further from this core were a number of spaces with “definite but not limiting forms to invite play”: “giant slides built into the topography,” a gigantic cellular sand and pebble pit with “maze-like divisions,” and “a theater area with a shell for music, puppets and theater.” Running the length of the site, right down on the river, was a nearly thousand-foot-long row of ambiguous, architectonic “permanent structures forming the landscape” that, had it been built, might have recalled long views in gardens such as those at Versailles.
Noguchi had enlisted Kahn, “a philosopher among architects,” to answer questions about his own capacity, as a solo practitioner without an office or employees to speak of, to produce buildable plans, believing that such questions had perhaps contributed to his inability to realize some of his more ambitious environmental concepts, including previous playspaces in New York City. Addressing the Parks Department’s many questions, objections, and requests for alteration throughout a protracted process, Noguchi and Kahn worked to satisfy themselves and each other that they were delivering meaningful public space in a form that could actually be approved and built. In the end, despite private funding and public support, they ran out of time. Noguchi was ultimately ambivalent, feeling that he and Kahn had gradually discovered, and then perhaps proven, that architecture and design for play are somewhat necessarily at irreconcilable odds with their respect use of scale: play requiring child-scaled structures and capital A architecture needing the freedom to define its own.
Though Noguchi was somewhat renowned for a level of self-containment that could be confused with Olympian disdain, he was in fact entirely serious about designing for children rather than a grown-up’s idea of what a child should want. As he would later say, he worked hard to cultivate the child within in order to do this himself, as his childlike behavior well into his 80s often demonstrated. (Sliding down a big stone in Machu Picchu at the age of eighty-two comes to mind.) But he was also, as can be seen in this wonderful series of photographs of Noguchi working on the plan with a consultant, truly open to, and solicitous of, specific, relevant feedback from a trusted source—someone ready to roll up their sleeves and kick off their shoes (Figs. 1–3).
Noguchi had moved to New York at the age of seventeen to attend Columbia University—not far from the intended site of Riverside Drive Playground—when not much more than a child himself. Having attended elementary school in Yokohama, Japan—where he later remembered the playground as a more or less barren patch of dirt—and high school in rural Indiana, he arrived in New York City desperately wanting not to lose his connection to nature. For so many city kids—the hybrid, transplanted Noguchi being no exception—a park or playground, almost no matter how grim, and back then they were pretty scarce and pretty stark, is an archetypal experience with nature, landscape, and the environment. Which explains why one of Noguchi’s first public statements, as an artist hoping to make “sculpture a vital force in our everyday life” by projecting it into “communal usefulness,” was to propose a mountain for the city, “enhanced,” as he put it, “for child’s play” (Play Mountain, 1933). Play Mountain was the first of his four serious attempts, in four successive decades, to build a playscape in his adopted hometown. All of them would feature some version of a playable mountain—the other two being Contoured Playground (1941), for Central Park, and United Nations Playground (1952), for a site near the then just completed headquarters of world government. None of these was realized.
But the plans and models—later often abstracted, descaled, and defamiliarized by him and others on display, in ways that have served only to extend their wide-openness—and all of the ideas Noguchi generated to produce them, became a wellspring to which he would return again and again when and as opportunities to make playspaces finally arrived. The bronze casts, such as this one, that he made to preserve, promulgate, and promote his ideas—this is the rare example that is not in the collection of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum—are the essential record that has made Noguchi one of the seminal figures in “ideas relating sculpture to the earth.”(2) They constitute the most complete extant catalog of Noguchi’s thinking about how to work with the landscape to encourage empirical engagement with nature, and how to design structures to segment, accentuate, and enhance the experience of being alive.
– Dakin Hart
(1) This and all of the quoted descriptions that follow are taken from Noguchi’s autobiography, first published in 1968 by Harper & Row Publishers: Isamu Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World, rev. ed. (New York: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation / Steidl Publishers, 2004), 177–79.
(2) Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World, 22.