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Eight Cornell University Student Projects Based on Unrealized Noguchi Concepts
In the Spring of 2020, architect and educator Naomi Frangos led a seminar at Cornell University’s College of Art, Architecture, and Planning (AAP) through an in-depth, cross-disciplinary analysis of unrealized public works by Isamu Noguchi. The eight student projects presented here document her students’ research and efforts to bring Noguchi’s proposals to life in digital renderings.
By Dakin Hart
Isamu Noguchi’s influence on architects and designers seems so widely acknowledged and intuitively self-evident to those who have recognized or experienced it that rarely has anyone tried to articulate the means. The most commonly cited reason to visit The Noguchi Museum is almost certainly You just gotta go. No question, there is something in Noguchi’s point of view that resists technical analysis and deconstruction. He was a great believer in giving art the ambiguous means to resist death by explication. There are few things he liked less than visiting a museum with a curator determined to art-splain something to him.
As a result of working purposefully below the surface of self-conscious, self-aware, self-referential art making, Noguchi made himself quite difficult to reverse-engineer. And because he eschewed style, it’s impossible to reproduce his art by aping the hardware associated with a particular work or body of work. Discerning his point of view, as Noguchi called it, consequently requires the kind of cross-disciplinary cross referencing that most people, knowing Noguchi through only one of his facets—set designer, public space maker, sculptor, or industrial designer—rarely have cause to do.
All of which makes deciphering great mysteries like why an Akari lamp makes it possible to spend twelve hours at a stretch in your home office in relative contentment (where a George Nelson Bubble Lamp does not) quite difficult. Like trying to explain why one tap water tastes like nirvana while another virtually chemically identical tap water reminds you of sweatsocks. It is not impossible. But to get anywhere close, you’ve kind of got to be prepared to learn a lot about the water cycle, and geology, and public works, and metropolitan plumbing, not to mention glass, ceramics, and plastic, the vessels that affect final delivery, the meal that complements the glass, how the morning went, and the room the water drinker is drinking in.
Noguchi’s idiosyncratic, multicultural, cosmopolitan, craft-centric, techno-futurist hybridity was a great, complex, layered, ever-aggregating aquifer. Everything that went through it came out inarticulably but inarguably altered. So there really is something pointed and meaningful to be said for accepting the pervasive, osmotic, a-linguistic, not anti- but extra-intellectual impact of Noguchi’s work.
On the other hand, if you’re a practitioner of the art of social impact through spatial manipulation, it’s really hard not to want to understand how Noguchi so often achieved the inexplicable. No one considering Noguchi at the moment is doing more to figure him out than architect and teacher Naomi Frangos. An artist with the habits of mind and vision that come with training as an architect, Frangos has spent the last several years immersed in Noguchi—not as a writer or curator, but as a scientist of space and a practitioner of place.
Several years ago, Frangos initiated a conversation about the functions of Noguchi’s haptic intelligence. The occasion of our first discussion was a friendly debate we now agree is pretty much irrelevant: whether Noguchi’s models can or should be considered sculpture. Noguchi abhorred labels and corresponding preoccupations with categorization. He would have said that what you call a specific object is a lot less interesting than its capacity to change our perception and, in particular, how we inhabit the world. A dedicated professional empiricist, Frangos understood this and soon started talking about what she described as Noguchi’s material intuition. This was one of many watershed understandings that came out of these conversations.
Frangos’s direct engagements with Noguchi now include a bicoastal course taught with Rennie Tang (College of Environmental Design at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona) while Frangos was still at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), using Noguchi’s playgrounds as raw material. In connection with this course, Naomi received a design-build grant from NYIT to make a body of work in fabric form concrete based on Noguchi’s mesmerizing conflations of topography and topology called “Inhabiting Surface.” The final manifestation of that project was an installation at Cal Poly called “Twisted Ground,” a half-scale rendition of a playscape-sculpture. Together, Frangos and Tang also submitted a competition proposal for a massive interactive Noguchi landscape analysis to the International Garden Festival at Grand-Métis (Québec, Canada), and co-presented “Emergent Beauty in the Work of Isamu Noguchi” at the World Design summit in Montreal, Canada (2017). Last year, in 2019, we invited Naomi to co-curate an exhibition at The Noguchi Museum called In Search of Contoured Playground, which was a full-dress effort to bring an unrealized, mostly conceptually inaccessible Noguchi space into experienceable view. That project will soon produce a flipbook run through what Contoured Playground might have been. And now Naomi has produced this remarkable record of her seminar for us.
Take any ten architects who happily acknowledge going to the well of Noguchi—Pritzker Prize winners included—and maybe one can articulate something specifically compelling about why. That’s no criticism. But by the end of this undergraduate seminar at Cornell with Naomi, every one of her students—who bussed themselves from Ithaca to the Museum and back on their own time to spend a few hours bathing in Noguchi’s worldview—had generated genuine insights into the way he thought and worked.
Students don’t know what they’re looking for, or looking at, or even how to look. There’s a real art to helping them find their own ways without inadvertently introducing them to the old ruts. If Noguchi’s work can be said to have a subject, it is, as much as anything, about that: how to live and work without acclimating to conventional wisdoms, acceptable expectations, and outworn paths. He approached everything he did as if his only competition was the infinite openness of Nature: maker of sticks, trees, and forests, none of which comes with directions or an overwrought press release, but whose imperfect beauties and uses are endless. There’s so much power in empty horizons: in trying to maintain one’s freedom from assumptions and preconceptions while seeing enough to keep moving.
Noguchi once told an interviewer “I know nothing about anything, and that’s why I’m so free.”1 For a semester at least, thanks to Naomi Frangos, the deep intuitions that put the lie to this mischievous confession found an eager audience at Cornell.
Dakin Hart
Senior Curator
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden and Museum
By Naomi Frangos
In his autobiography, A Sculptor’s World, Noguchi identifies himself primarily as a sculptor, but extends his view of what that means into architectural design. In the section “Into Living,” he admits: “It is clear that I often crave to bring sculpture into a more direct contact with the common experience of living,”2 and describes his perspective on different types of social space under the headings “Intervention, Architecture, Gardens and Playgrounds.” The integration he sought between art and life could only be achieved, he believed, within the creator. “True collaboration can only occur when the sculptor and the architect are the same person.”3 Noguchi had no architectural training, but his aptitude for envisioning public spaces was prodigious, ranging vastly in scale—from the human body to urban plazas and outer space—and in function—from memorials and monuments to theater design. As he moved between art forms and design fields, Noguchi used the term “category” to suggest that he found strength in artistic ideas that belonged to larger concerns over specialized roles. Noguchi’s “categories” are what we often refer to today as disciplines, which, requiring specific training and skills, tend to break down design practice into isolated ways of thinking.
Noguchi is an ideal example for young architects aspiring to rigorous design inquiry across disciplines and modes of representation. This past spring my architectural visual-representation seminar at Cornell University in the Department of Architecture tested this potential. Just as Noguchi saw the “invention of function as a possible opening to an art beyond the accepted categories,”4 this seminar dove deeply into Noguchi’s interdisciplinary work using an analytical lens to investigate recurring thematic issues across his art forms—and how they informed, or formed, his imaginative approach to inhabitable spaces. Using a combination of his writings, drawings, and models, we sought to unravel characteristic aspects of his models for unbuilt works: from the scale of the topographies and architectures for which they were made, to the scale of the bodies implicit in them. The aim was to challenge uses of precedent that fail to go beyond superficial aesthetic or functional relationships.
The seminar began with a field trip to The Noguchi Museum to witness live choreographed performances organized for Brendan Fernandes: Contract and Release. Sketches, images and video recordings were used to capture both motion and still moments, which students used to chart the spatial relationships the dancers created as they engaged with devices Noguchi made for Martha Graham, as well as those Fernandes made to turn the Museum’s exhibition Body-Space Devices into a dance set. Next, to experience his built work in different contexts and scales, we visited three Noguchi sites in New York City: 666 Fifth Avenue’s Lobby Ceiling and Waterfall (interior design), Red Cube (sculpture), and Sunken Garden, Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza (urban plaza). Students then had to represent ideas of motion and spatial experiences using serial analysis drawings.
After being exposed to and physically experiencing Noguchi’s vast range of work, students were then asked to choose and study one work from each category: set design, sculpture, architectural model, playground, and urban design. The mandate was not obvious at first: to search for what Noguchi called his point of view, an ideology, within the diversity of his work. Students were asked to consider questions such as: How do various works inform one another spatially? In which way? Are there recurring themes? References to other scales? The learning strategy, adapted from Noguchi himself, was to focus on models for ways of living and thinking about the world, rather than design schemes specific to particular typologies or uses. Through reverse-engineering, the students produced analytical drawings and diagrams with the aim of decoding Noguchi’s gestures and management of scale: to uncover the internal hidden logics suggested by his manipulation of geometry, proportion, order, sight lines, and the overall organization of space.
As a final project, students used the thematic threads they discovered in Noguchi’s work to identify similar ideological concerns for one of his unbuilt models for a space. Although Noguchi successfully completed numerous inhabitable works, many of his larger-scale projects failed to win competitions or gain the necessary approvals. For these unrealized projects that exist only in the form of models he rarely made drawings to clarify size or scale—very little “true” measurement exists. Some models evidence Cartesian geometries, with drawn-on or incised grids suggesting desired alignments and spacing between elements. But scaling was not a key determinant in how the models were constructed. This became an opportunity for the students to approach these intended spatial experiences as a visualization and representation exercise in which scale had to be deciphered and constructed.
Inspired by the upcoming fiftieth anniversary issue of Log (a journal on architecture and the contemporary city), which will “explore the models that architecture produces and the behaviors they elicit and project,” as well as following the example of the Noguchi Museum’s recent exhibitions Models for Spaces and In Search of Contoured Playground and due to the pandemic’s transition to remote learning—students were invited to recast these model-artifacts of unbuilt works as digitally curated experiences. Using archival source material from The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné, Noguchi’s own writings, and other publications on his work, they translated Noguchi’s models from physical to digital, static to animate, display to exhibit, and passive to active audiences, and considered the mental propensities the model anticipates. They also created explanatory exhibition pamphlets, each including an illustrated essay, providing historical context for each model.
To help students think about Noguchi’s approaches to modeling as they worked, and to reinforce the non-objecthood of the model, we read the chapter “Model: From Object to Process” in Teresa Stoppani’s book Unorthodox Ways to Think the City: Representations, Constructions, Dynamics (2019), which offers a compelling analysis of the power of a model’s incompleteness. For additional clarity about how interdisciplinary work enables interconnected readings of art, landscape, and architecture, we read Rosalind Krauss’s iconic 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” Finally, following the theorizing of space on the art-historical side, we looked to Patrick O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1986). O’Doherty provides numerous alternatives for how displayed artworks can become spatially charged experiences, making it especially helpful in evaluating Noguchi’s use of time, space, movement, tactility, and intuitive knowledge to activate the senses.
In the end, the goal was to give the students the raw materials and interpretive tools they needed to model Noguchi’s vision, as opposed to simply reproducing a model of unbuilt space—as a means of inviting the lay visitor to decipher scale and context. What we have tried to unearth here is the provocative behavior of models—the way they reposition the subject-object relationships and challenge representation through imaginable realities—and generate deeper understandings of Noguchi’s intended experiences.
Each of the eight student projects speculates around and represents a specific model, informed by the ideologies the student theorizers discovered on their journey through Noguchi’s world.
Naomi Frangos
Visiting Associate Professor
Cornell University
Editorial Note: The versions of the student texts presented here have been edited from those included in the students’ final project reports. Linked student projects are unedited and appear as they were originally submitted in fulfillment of the course requirements.
Basil Harb, Emerging, Rise, Descent, 2020
Bennet Adamson, Defying Gravity, 2020
Brandon Nolasco, Emergence, 2020
Bushra Aumir, Static Motion, 2020
Christine Gao, Containment and Infinity, 2020
Daniel Min, Intimacy and Inhabitation, 2020
Erin Huang, Contoured Momentum, 2020
Panuwich Wongpaitoonpiya, Manipulating Landscape, 2020
Based On: Isamu Noguchi with Kenzo Tange, Memorial to the Dead, Hiroshima, 1952
Noguchi Works Assigned for Analysis:
“Noguchi’s memorial design looked to encapsulate the many emotions surrounding the tragic event that occurred only a short number of years before. He wanted to show the destructive power of atomic science and nuclear war, the pain and agony of loss, the solace of a final resting place, and the hope of rebirth.”5
Basil Harb, Emerging, Rise, Descent, 2020
Marked Earth: In response to the commission of a public memorial that would feature an underground cenotaph, Noguchi composed a scheme considering the permeability of the ground plane. His four-meter sculpture of black Brazilian granite emerges unassumingly, to light and clarity, with its influence etched into his constructed platform. At the other end of his composition, on another raised platform, the viewer is able to descend through the ground plane and discover the immense weight below the sculpture; the arch form is supported by two massive columns impacted beneath the ground. There is an imbalance of forces surrounding the ground plane, but what is implied is that the space above the ground affords the opportunity for new growth.
Emergent Platforms: A curated digital experience enables unique opportunities for viewership. From Teresa Stoppani’s words in Unorthodox Ways to Think the City, “The model can play with disembodied scales: inside and around models we can fly, crawl, defy gravity, and place ourselves in impossible positions.”6 Through this series of rendered movements around the modeled scheme, we can experience the way Noguchi intended the weight of his sculpture to be perceived and the forces at play transgressing the ground plane.
Breaking the Ground Plane: When observing both sides of this plane at once, the viewer can come to understand the dual nature of the public work: on one side, the descent of the viewer into the ground plane accesses a dark, heavy space for mourning within the earth; meanwhile, Noguchi’s sculpture rises from below the ground plane to an open, bright platform symbolic of new growth. In both conditions, Noguchi intends for the memory of the rest of the sculpture to remain within the viewer’s mind, balancing the powerful experiences at all times with an awareness of an ideological dependency on either side of the ground plane.
Based on: Isamu Noguchi, Sculpture to be Seen From Mars, 1947
Noguchi Works Assigned for Analysis:
In 1947, following the nuclear atrocities of World War II, Noguchi proposed a monument to the frighteningly inevitable destruction of humankind. Originally titled Monument to Man, the work was a stoic and abstract representation of a human face, built up out of the earth and staring out into the cosmos. Noguchi designated the length of the nose at one mile long, rendering it large enough to be seen from space, and to act as a signifier to a distant future civilization of the people that once roamed the Earth. The only remaining documentation of the project exists in the form of a single photographed model. Built out of compacted sand, the texture gives viewers a sense that they are staring down onto the monument from far above, into the now desolate landscape of the Earth.
Bennet Adamson, Defying Gravity, 2020
From his familiarity with the constructed bases of Constantin Brancusi, Noguchi built a masterful understanding of how to play with the perceived weight of an object through its relative position to the body and its surroundings. For Noguchi, scale and weight are interconnected, and Sculpture to be Seen From Mars is meant to be read at two scales: in section, from the perspective of the minute human traversing its massive footprint, and in plan, from the viewpoint of the onlooker staring down from the cosmos. At the scale of the human, sharing the ground plane with the monument reveals just how small one is relative to it, so much so that it becomes impossible to see it in its entirety from any viewpoint. This extreme disproportion of scale creates an understanding of an intense mass pressing down on the Earth. It is only once one is able to look from afar that one can comprehend the monument in its entirety, which becomes clearer the farther away one strays from Earth. From afar, the monument becomes legible relative to the scale of the Earth, not the scale of the human. A small speck on the massive presence of the planet, gently perched on its surface.
Based on: Isamu Noguchi, Monument to the Plow, 1933
Noguchi Works Assigned for Analysis:
Sited in the middle of the Western Prairie, on land affected by the wheat crop curtailment program, Monument to the Plow is a triangular pyramid expanding 1,200 feet at each base edge. Made of earth, one side is soil, tilled in great furrows and radiating from one base corner; another side is planted wheat; and the third side is divided in half from the apex, part tilled soil with smaller furrows radiating from apex and part barren uncultivated earth. At the peak, a large block of concrete and a model of a huge steel plow sit, resembling an American flag blowing in the wind.
This Noguchi earthwork is dedicated to the reality of agricultural labor, land, and production at the beginning of the New Deal. In 1933, at the time of the monument’s conception, the New Deal aimed to respond to the needs of the Great Depression, enacting a series of programs, public works projects, and financial reforms and regulations to help bolster the economy and to address unemployment in America. Monument to the Plow attempts to evoke these complex social, economic, and environmental realities that marked those challenging times. With this sculpted landscape, Noguchi aimed to turn the viewer’s eye to the realities of everyday life in the 1930s, which included economic contraction, agricultural surplus, poor land use planning, drought, and attempts by the federal government to restabilize the economy’s significant agricultural sector. Noguchi’s vision for the project shows how he modeled his work on his own self-identification: “The steel plow, Dr. Rumley told me, had been devised through correspondence between Franklin and Jefferson, which had then made possible the opening up of the western plains. My model indicated my wish to belong to America, to its vast horizons of earth.”7 In Monument to the Plow, Noguchi centralizes vast horizons, emerging earth, and perspectival manipulation through his own lens of Americana.
Brandon Nolasco, Emergence, 2020
Noguchi believed “that which emerges from the earth [are] objects in transit from one state to another.” While analysis of other works reveal “submerged” worlds from which his work “transitions,” the model for the plow studies the counterpart: Noguchi’s “emerged” realm. As this earthwork is all about the land, the first scene of my animation opens by locating and establishing the horizon. Then, the eye is introduced to and follows along the grain of the plowed, perspectival lines. These theoretically parallel lines soon converge to produce the apex of the monument, erecting the form from the earth upward. At the base of this new form, the pyramid transforms into a new horizon, via the perspectival manipulation of the plow lines. At each scene, the land is infinite, bound only by a horizon line. Guided by Noguchi’s intention, Emergence aims to spotlight the capacities of the American soil.
Based on: Isamu Noguchi, Martha Graham Dance Theater, 1976
Noguchi Works Assigned for Analysis:
From early on, Noguchi was highly involved in working with theater sets and their connection to sculpture. He worked on Martha Graham’s sets, where he was able to play between the lines of sculpture and stage set design. For example, his set design for Martha Graham’s Frontier consisted of two pieces of rope that ran out from the stage, creating an infinite volume of space to perform around. Through his strong relationship with Martha Graham, he was able to work with an array of typologies between sculpture, theater, and garden. When Noguchi heard of possible interest from the University of California, Los Angeles in building a dance theater, it was enough of a reason for him to come up with the initial concept of the Martha Graham Dance Theater. Working alongside Buckminster Fuller, he designed a 100-by-100-square-foot lot. Noguchi saw the project as a tribute to both of his close friends, Graham and Fuller.
Ana Maria Torres quotes Noguchi in Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space: “There is a joy in seeing a sculpture come to life on the stage in its own world of timeless time. Then the very air becomes charged with meaning and emotion, and form plays its integral part in the re-enactment of a ritual. Theater is a ceremony: the performance is a rite. Sculpture in daily life should or could be like this. In the meantime, the theater gives me a poetic, exalted equivalent.”8 Noguchi’s conceptual thinking is shown through this statement as he explains how the air becomes charged through form in space. Static Motion highlights the movement or presence of the human body when encountered by a sculpture, object, theater prop, or any piece of urban landscape. Unfortunately, the Martha Graham Dance Theater was the last project that Noguchi designed for Graham. Other than the Dymaxion Car, this was one of the only other major projects that Buckminster Fuller and Noguchi collaborated on.
Bushra Aumir, Static Motion, 2020
The Fuller-inspired glass and metal dome sits on top of a base that Noguchi designed, an undulating form that engages the viewer. It divides itself vertically into two parts. One half is a darker, narrower area under the stage, which has space for performers to change costumes as well as some programmatic space for the audience to wait before their show and storage space for the various sets. The other part, the upper level, is wide open to the sky, bringing the outer universe inside to become part of the performances meant to take place there. The audience’s dynamic experience stems from the ground plane shifting toward the sky. It gives them an understanding of the wider universe they inhabit as they step into the geodesic dome under the starry sky.
Based on: Isamu Noguchi with Yozo Shibata, Katzumi Komuro, and Jiro Kodera, Memorial to Buddha, 1957
Noguchi Works Assigned for Analysis:
Memorial to Buddha is a competition entry for a commemorative monument celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of Buddhism, which was to be built in New Delhi in the 1950s. Noguchi intended to mark the “Buddha’s holy birth, rather than that of a religion.”9 The design was inspired by the lotus flower, a Buddist symbol of divinity, purity, and detachment from earthly concerns. Radiating out from the main monument on the ground are six horizontal earth-formed leaves. They frame the erect center of the lotus blossom and subsequently mark the entry to the monument’s core. The main structure is a dome-like space composed of three separate spheroid sections, quasi-cantilevered in structure and reminiscent of the folded petals of a lotus blossom. The dome has four breakage points, or voids that let in light: three on the sides that form parabolic arch gates, between the vertical petals, and one on top that opens up to the sky. At the center of the monument is a 76-foot-tall column, as if the plant’s root is extending beyond the shell of the blossom and leading the gaze up to heaven.
Christine Gao, Containment and Infinity, 2020
My curated digital model reiterates how Noguchi used models to shape physical experience. The procession throughout the space oscillates between containment and infinity. As one approaches at a considerable distance from afar, the vertical expansion is prominent as the soaring column breaks through the dome. Moving closer, one steps onto the six horizontal petals, raised three feet above the ground plane. The shadows cast by the sun animate the surface of the platform and prompt the body to follow the shadows—navigating from petal to petal, until the long shadow of the column draws the body in through different gates depending on the time of day. Inside the lotus, the field is well defined by the pristine white shell of petals, which seems to encapsulate and incubate everything within. One sits in the meditative space and witnesses time, as the shadow of the column acts as a sundial, tracing the trajectory of the sun. The ever-changing interior shadows also play on the degree of containment. The afternoon’s larger shaded area induces more a sense of containment compared to midday. One circumambulates the column, the gaze follows, moving upward to find the endless column penetrating the sky. In contrast to the six exterior petals, which ripple out from the center, expanding the field laterally, the brass column pushes the boundaries of the field vertically. In addition to the strong verticality, the rhythmic and undulating geometry of the lobed column implies an infinite growth. The compression and release of views further reinforce the contrast between containment and infinity.
Based On: Isamu Noguchi with Gordon Bunshaft, Project(s) for Lever Brothers Building, New York, 1952
Noguchi Works Assigned for Analysis:
The plaza at Lever House was the result of the collaborative efforts of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the architect Gordon Bunshaft. The plaza was built on the bottom floor of Lever House, “the city’s first glass and steel office tower, boldly expressing a modern style that would define an era.” One of Noguchi’s many architectural collaborations, the project unfortunately met with financial issues, which prevented the final scheme from becoming a reality. Noguchi was commissioned by Bunshaft in 1951, as Bunshaft appreciated Noguchi’s sculptural style.
The initial scheme for the plaza imagined an “oasis of art at the heart of the city,” heavily inspired by the white sand gardens of Tokyo. The garden would be a “pristine marble stage, from which sculptures would rise,” the sculptures conceptually derived from three abstract figures representing a father, mother, and child around the marble podium. As the scheme evolved, Noguchi became more interested in the space created by these three sculptures, which would present tension within the marble landscape. He states, “my concept was to eliminate the bed of green in the central marble planting box which had already been determined and to cover it with marble from which would rise sculptures with small risings and apertures in the marble for planting.”10
Daniel Min, Intimacy and Inhabitation, 2020
The curated model experience highlights an analysis of the triangulation created between the three sculptures as they are positioned as figures in a field. By carefully placing the three sculptures within an architectural scale, Noguchi creates a space within another space. My animation allows users to explore both types of space: the “marble stage” and the “sculptural space.” Potential to inhabit these various spaces creates an intriguing visual experience for visitors, who are able to experience Noguchi’s brilliance at both an architectural and sculptural scale.
Based On: Isamu Noguchi, Sacred Rocks of Kukaniloko, 1976
Noguchi Works Assigned for Analysis:
Isamu Noguchi’s forms and siting of sculpture often suggest a specific way of reading the motion of the work, static though it might be. Objects seem as if they have slipped slightly below ground, or are merely peeking above the surface. Sculptures don’t simply end when the object stops—there is an implied momentum and contour, a movement to the work. This “contoured momentum” is a visual motif in and of itself: forms are oblong, stretched out, as if they’re passing through states. Noguchi himself speaks of sculptures and stone as bone-like, belonging to the earth. Speaking of the sculpture Emergent (1971), he describes the work as “that which emerges from the earth. Objects in transit from one state to another.” These collected works give the feeling that they are merely passing by, or simply that they are in motion.
Noguchi’s set designs for Merce Cunningham’s The Seasons (1947) bring to life this idea of “contoured momentum,” most clearly influencing the approach for curating a digital experience of Sacred Rocks of Kukaniloko. Dancers wearing zebra costumes engage with the set design as if they themselves are mounds moving out of the earth, the movements and limbs connecting one action to the next. Read as a whole, the dancers become the earth, animating the ground plane, rising and falling.
Other pieces like The Ring (1948) clearly show the inward-outward appendages of this sculpture, connecting and disconnecting from the ground plane. In the Ceiling for Magic Chef Building (1948), Noguchi sets a datum that he then engages forms around, with lumps, bumps, and mounds emerging out of a hollowed-out ceiling. The roof itself is held up by a column that seemingly drips out of the rest of the ceiling, coming to rest and supporting the sculpted situation above.
Erin Huang, Contoured Momentum, 2020
Perhaps it is fitting, then, to study Noguchi’s unbuilt work and model for the Sacred Rocks of Kukaniloko in Oahu, Hawaii, in the same regard. His proposal was for a large ring-shaped mound to surround the site of the Sacred Rocks of Kukaniloko, considered to be one of the most sacred sites in Hawaii. The mound rises up to protect the stones from its exterior surroundings, shielding it and those inside from external stimuli. It is markedly a womb-like space that cradles and protects its interior. Seen through the lens of “contoured momentum,” one begins to see the site as taking on a life of its own, rising up and enveloping its center. Similarly, the rocks themselves offer a reading as emerging out of the ground, as if unearthed and resting on the surface. Noguchi engages this state of movement and contours through different scales, invoking the mountains of the background that echo the much smaller stones in the foreground. The mountain, mound, and stones engage in conversation as the viewer moves around the stones, with the mound choreographing a visual sequence of the background, at times obscuring the horizon and others revealing it. The significance of this visual play is within the horizon: it is a uniquely landscape trait. Compared to the gallery’s white cube, detached from any context, the landscaped work is of the earth, deeply connected to its surroundings.
Based On: Isamu Noguchi with Julian Whittlesey, United Nations Playground, 1952
Noguchi Works Assigned for Analysis:
The United Nations Playground was a proposal for a playground located south of the United Nations Headquarters. It is a culmination of ideas explored in Noguchi’s previous designs, including Contoured Playground and Play Mountain, for a “new kind of playground that would contain no swing sets, sandboxes, or seesaws”11 but instead encompass a “sweeping, tiered pyramid for undirected play where the imagination could run wild.” The playground was unique among Noguchi’s earlier attempts in that “the ground itself provided shapes and areas for play, more specific to function this time than in Contoured Playground,”12 especially in how the natural landform is aggregated and manipulated to form ridges and steps encouraging jumping and climbing. The action of carving is present in many of Noguchi’s earlier works, including Swimming Pool for Josef von Sternberg and Riverside Playground where Noguchi created different edge conditions to form the boundary of a space by creating upright walls, and then blended the void with the landscape with the addition of artificial landscape features that act as equipment of their own.
Panuwich Wongpaitoonpiya, Manipulating Landscape, 2020
The experience of interacting with the mounds in the United Nations Playground is unique as one’s actions are guided by the way the mounds are aggregated. Since there are three main mounds to interact with, the experience of being on top of one mound is always oriented toward the two other mounds and how they frame each other. The first mound is aggregated through a modular triangular grid where the panels are lowered and raised to form climbing steps, initiating a zigzag motion as one navigates around them. The second mound is divided into strips and when approached perpendicularly, the ridges can be climbed upon, while when experienced in parallel, they can be used as slides. The third mound consists of a depression that is carved into a spiral, inviting a circular, downward motion with a tall wall that blocks views outside of the playground. Overall, the playground project “expanded previous notions of built-in earth modulations and suggested new forms of equipment,” and succeeded in the objectives of the United Nations: to create “a playground that could foster imagination through beauty and good design.”13
Naomi Frangos is an architect, artist, and educator. A Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University, she authored and instructed this seminar, Curating Model Behavior, in the Department of Architecture.
Produced by Alex Miller.
Transcripts of archival materials are available by request to accessibility@noguchi.org.
1 Sam Hunter, “Isamu Noguchi: ‘I Know Nothing About Anything, and That’s Why I’m so Free.’” ARTnews 77 (May 1978): 124-128.
2 Isamu Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World, 2nd ed., (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015), 159.
3 Ibid.,160.
4 Ibid.,159.
5 Ran Zwigenberg, (2015) The most modern city in the world: Isamu Noguchi’s cenotaph controversy and Hiroshima’s city of peace, Critical Military Studies, 1:2, 102-115
6 Teresa Stoppani, Unorthodox Ways to Think the City: Representations, Constructions, Dynamics (New York: Routledge, 2018), 108.
7 Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World.
8 Ana Maria Torres, Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2000), 281.
9 Isamu Noguchi, “Project for the Monument of Buddha.” Arts and Architecture 74, no. 9 (September 1957): 16.
10 Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 164.
11 Jon Earle, “005. Pedagogy: Better Playground, Better People? Isamu Noguchi’s Never-Built New York Playscapes,” Kinder, 2016, http://thekinderjournal.com/archive-pedagogy-2.
12 Shaina D. Larrivee, “Playscapes: Isamu Noguchi’s Designs for Play,” Public Art Dialogue 1, no.1: 53–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/21502552.2011.536711.
13 Ibid.
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