“Jai Singh’s structures are mystical sculptures that define space,” Isamu Noguchi is quoted in a brief essay accompanying his photographs of the Jantar Mantar in “Astronomical City,” Portfolio: A Magazine for the Graphic Arts, 1, no. 3 (1951): 115. “You might call them useless architecture or useful sculpture. They imply a use—much sculpture does that. Whether or not they were intended so, Jai Singh’s works have turned out to be an expression of wanting to be one with the universe. They contain an appreciation of measured time and the shortness of life and the vastness of the universe.”

In this context, the phrase “useless architecture, useful sculpture” represents an alternative to an architecture that is alienating in its totalitarian self-containment, and to sculpture irrelevant to life and time’s passage. It speaks to Noguchi’s ambition to sculpt spaces free from the specific responsibilities of architecture and to create sculptures imbued with more than purely theoretical, aesthetic purpose.

Arranged in thematic installations – Ruins, Theater Space, Architectural Metaphors, Terraces and Panorama, Postmodern Akari, Ends – the exhibition explores how Noguchi drew on architecture to supercharge his efforts to make sculpture civic, communal, and environmental. He had a contentious but phenomenally productive relationship with architects and architecture (see, for example, the digital feature Ten Architects). He stated in an interview in 1957, “I always prefer gardens, because I can work there without pressure from anyone. You know how selfishly architects claim the most important role in a building project for themselves. They see our contribution as secondary and they limit our freedom. Which is why landscaping a garden is a solution of sorts.” (Catherine Frantzeskakis, “The American-Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi talks about Greece,” Zygos no. 17 [March 1957], 20.) Focusing on often overlooked public spaces adjacent to architecture such as courtyards, patios, atria, and landscaping, he was able to create timeless, humanistic spaces in a way that would not have been possible had he needed to assume architecture’s programmatic responsibilities.

Ruins
Ruins are an archetype of useless architecture because they retain their associations with the making of civilization, and the suggestion of space shaping, while having shed their actual functions. The Greek temple complex at Delphi is evoked in this installation in an agglomeration of semi-ruins, composed of abstract sculptures such as Ziggurat (c. 1968), Wrapped Figure (1962), Sentry (1958), and Small Torso (1958–62). The centerpiece of the installation, Capital (1939), on loan from The Museum of Modern Art, suggests a vision of what a truly modern order of architecture might look like if developed in the manner of the classical orders represented by Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian capitals. Describing his first visit to Delphi, Noguchi wrote: “To trace the white marble remnants, imagining their use from scanty information: that I take [it] is what imagination is for. All was there to be filled in as we chose.” On a return visit to Greece on his honeymoon, Noguchi photographed his wife Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi at the Acropolis in Athens in front of the Erechtheion as a caryatid.

Terracing and Panoramas
Terraces were one of Noguchi’s simplest and most powerful semi-architectural play concepts. (All they do is to change your perspective!) One of the most interesting ways in which sculpture can be said to outstrip architecture is by working with human scale without having to adhere to or serve it functionally—as it does in the context of a playground. The human-scale terracing presented here was excerpted from a playground maquette for Riverside Drive (c. 1961), an unbuilt project Noguchi pursued between 1961 and 1965 with the architect Louis Kahn. These simple changes in level enable an altered view of two panoramas composed of various architecture-adjacent ideas of Noguchi’s.

Ends
Temporarily relocated from the garden, End Pieces (1974) is a room that cannot be opened or entered: installed here in another room as what Noguchi would have called a “space of the mind.” What’s inside is a secret.