THE ICON
Isamu
the landscape
— WORDS BY VINCENT ROMAGNY, TRANSLATION BY TOM SNEDDON AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY SEBASTIAN SABAL-BRUCE
I n 1933 Isamu Noguchi, not yet 30 years old, conceived the idea of Play
Mountain, a radically new kind of playground. In place of the traditional
sandpit, swings, seesaw and slide, grouped together and separated by
barriers from the urban space beyond, he sketched a pyramid-like structure,
with one side covered in irregularly spaced steps. A long, spiral descent, star-
ting at the summit, could be used as a luge track in winter. A swimming pool
and a bandstand stood at the base. Unlike a conventional playground, it was
not a matter of placing disparate, unconnected objects on the ground, but of
having forms that seemed to emerge organically and fashioning a landscape
closer to a natural model. As he wrote in his biography, with this project he
hoped to “give to sculpture a human character, not realist, but infused in its
abstraction with social pertinence”.
I t was a project born of “utopian thoughts” and one which, like so many of
Noguchi’s ideas, was to be thwarted at every turn. The list of his unreal-
ised playground projects is long. In 1940, the playground he was construc-
Noguchi:
of play.
ting in Ala Moana, Hawaii, was cancelled because of the war, and it was not
until seven years later that he discovered his designs had been copied in the
final scene of the musical comedy Down to Earth, starring Larry Parks and
Rita Hayworth. It would take years of legal action against Columbia Pictures
before his intellectual copyright was recognised. Robert Moses, the powerful
park commissioner of New York City, laughed at Play Mountain, and thereafter
opposed all Noguchi’s playground proposals, including the Contoured Play-
ground of 1941, a playground for UN headquarters in 1952, and the playground
for Riverside Drive Park in New York, conceived in collaboration with the
architect Louis Kahn in 1965.
T he press, however, reported the difficulties Noguchi had in realising his
projects, and the Museum of Modern Art exhibited models of them. As
a result, his work was soon influencing a new generation of New York play-
ground designers, who often produced unaltered copies of his ideas without
acknowledging the least debt to him.
A u t u m n / Wi n te r 2 0 1 9 . PLEASURE GARDEN 26
 THE ICON

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THE JOURNEY
F rom the mid-1960s on, this new type of playground flourished. Noting their
emergence, in 1966 the illustrated monthly Art in America announced the
advent of “the artist as designer and the designer as artist”, while at the same
time sketching a portrait of a bitter Noguchi, a “prophet without honour” who
had seen none of his plans brought to fruition. Even the park he designed for
Yokohama in 1966, the Kodomo no Kuni, or Park for Children, brought him no
satisfaction: for various reasons, it was completed only in truncated form.
I t was not until 2005, almost 17 years after Noguchi’s death, that the
utopian ideas embodied in Play Mountain were translated into reality at
Moerenuma Park, which occupies the site of a former waste treatment centre
on the outskirts of Sapporo on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
Respecting to the letter the plans Noguchi conceived shortly before his
death in 1988, the playground has become a garden, the play equipment has
become sculpture, and the park has become landscape. Rather than super-
imposing itself upon an already extant landscape – none existed – the park is
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the landscape. Spanning some 88 hectares, grandiose to the point of seeming
practically limitless, its sculptures and constructions offer perspectives over
a reconstituted space, like some vast Japanese garden.
T
hose sculptures and constructions include Moere Mountain, a realisation
of the original 1933 Play Mountain. The pyramidal Tetra Mound is a hill
surmounted with a sculpture of iron tubes, two metres in diameter. The Forest
of Cherry Trees in Bloom constitutes seven covered zones with play equip-
ment in geometric shapes and lively colours, while the Sea Fountain sends
a plume of water 25 metres into the air. A new version of Play Mountain can
be descended by three toboggans that spiral down around the hillside, while
Hidamari is a pyramid of glass designed by Noguchi’s faithful right-hand man,
Shoji Sadao. The spectator’s experience is close to that inspired by Noguchi’s
sculptures, or by his gardens, including the 1957 UNESCO Garden of Peace
in Paris and the garden that surrounds his workshop-museum at Takamatsu
on the island of Shikoku. None of these, though, can match the gigantism of
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Moerenuma, where visitors are invited to a paradoxical experience: the fusion
of three voluminous elements in an oversized landscape. The relationship
between the landscape and its constituent elements is not so much dynamic
as expanded, since the contemplative experience of the space can only be
achieved by the time it takes to walk from one place to another within it.
W hile he was conceptualising it, Noguchi explained that to him, Moerenuma
Park was simply a sculpture. I would suggest that it is more than this.
Noguchi’s gardens, playgrounds and sculptures are among the most
passionate expressions of 20th-century design, and they are bound by a
strikingly consistent visual unity. Is it possible to impute this unity of vision
to his time as a stage designer, notably with Martha Graham? By his own
admission, through this experience he came to “realise all is sculpture,
whether garden, theatre or playground. All are part of the human context… Art
is extensive on many levels, not only a visual one.” In Noguchi’s playgrounds,
the forms do not determine in advance the functional gestures – climbing a
ladder, sliding down a slope, balancing on a beam – that children practise
under the guise of playing. In a traditional playground, it is almost as if
children are being programmed, like future workers being rendered physically
capable but mentally docile. The new type of playground is based on an idea
which at the time was radical, though today it seems to us self-evident: it
is in the heat of the game itself that children give sense to the forms with
which they are presented. They invent usages that the designer may not
have anticipated. The forms given to playground equipment should there-
fore be sufficiently abstract that they do not prescribe, but rather liberate the
imagination. Noguchi imagined sculptures at a child’s scale, redesigned the
arches of seesaws, had them play on rounded modules and coloured cubes.
Play had become creative. “Children, I think, must view the world different-
ly from adults, their awareness of its possibilities are more primary and
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attuned to their capacities,” he wrote. “When the adult would imagine like a
child he must project himself into seeing the world as a totally new experience.
I like to think of playgrounds as a primer of shapes and functions; simple,
mysterious, and evocative: thus educational.” As he said of his Black Slide
Mantra, a sculpture integrating a toboggan which sits in Sapporo’s Odori
Park, “the backsides of children complete the sculpture”.
T his, indeed, is a defining feature of modern sculpture, of which Noguchi
was a herald: the object only takes on significance through interaction
with the body of the beholder, not simply through the gaze. In his landscapes
of play, Noguchi took the full measure of this insight.
A nd is this not the same experience Noguchi proposes in those spaces
which he was able to design himself, in particular Moerenuma Park? No
longer is the landscape merely a culturally determined perspective, in the
way Western culture has conceived it, nor a representation of the universe in
microcosm, as Far Eastern cultures have understood it. Instead of a binary
opposition between vision and conception, Noguchi makes reference to a third
term which was to be explored at great length by philosophers of the 20th
century: perception. It can only be achieved through the generative
experience of the body, and its primary model has been the child. No
description of Moerenuma Park could better that which Noguchi himself
offered, so it is worth rereading his words. “The perception of the garden
is multidirectional. Awareness comes from depth. All points within it are
central thanks to the mobile participation of the individual. Without a fixed
perspective, all points of view become equal, and this within continual mo-
vement, for continual change. Imagination transforms this space until it has
bestowed upon it the dimensions of the infinite.” Just like a child’s playground,
it becomes a space where everything is possible. VR
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