The following texts are excerpted from Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York and Evanston: Harper  Row, 1968)

MONUMENT TO THE PLOUGH and PLAY MOUNTAIN
1933, unrealized

The steel plow, Dr. Rumely 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.

Play Mountain was the kernel out of which have grown all my ideas relating sculpture to the earth. It is also the progenitor of playgrounds as sculptural landscapes. But these are afterthoughts. Who can foresee true significance? Not even the artist, and he is the least able to convince. With the help of Murdock Pemberton who was then art critic on The New Yorker, I took the model to show Robert Moses, the New York Park Commissioner. We were met with thorough sarcasm.

HISTORY MEXICO
Abelardo Rodriguez Market, Mexico City
1936

How different was Mexico! Here I suddenly no longer felt estranged as an artist; artists were useful people, a part of the community. A group of artists working in the Indian market of Abelardo Rodriguez offered me a wall to sculpt if I would agree to the same rate of pay as they were receiving for painting fresco, so much a square meter. I joyfully accepted.

This is how I made my first major work, colored cement on carved brick, two meters high and twenty-two meters long, which I called History Mexico. It was history as I saw it at that time, from Mexico.

It was no doubt biased by my bitter view. At one end was a fat 'capitalist' being murdered by a skeleton (shades of Posada!). There were war, crimes of the church, and 'labor' triumphant. Yet the future looked out brightly in the figure of an Indian boy, observing Einstein's equation for energy. In answer to my request, Bucky Fuller had sent me a fifty-word telegram explaining the equation. However I could also appreciate the sardonic humor of the man who used to come by to watch me work, saying that E=MC2 really meant Estados=Muchos Cabrones2 ('the State equals Many SOB2) . In any case I was able to shout and do what I pleased, and I was happy.

The cement was supplied by the Tolteca Cement Company, the bricks were almost free. It took eight months to complete. I only managed to collect half, or $88, of the money the government owed me for the work. The Guggenheim Foundation had loaned me $600 for my second trip there, and I sold my car to get back, but I have never regretted having had the opportunity of executing what was for me a real attempt at a direct communication through sculpture, with no ulterior or money-making motive.

PLAYGROUND EQUIPMENT
1939, unrealized

Following discussion with the architect Harry Bent and Lester McCoy, Park Commissioner, as to what I might do in Hawaii, I was commissioned to design play equipment for Ala Moana Park, for which they were responsible. I did this upon my return to New York.

I designed a multiple-length swing with different rates of swing (finally built in Japan), and a spiral slide (since copied and manufactured). Both were educational. There was a climbing apparatus, etc.

Unfortunately Mr. McCoy died, so my models were shown instead to the representatives of the New York Parks Department, who warned me of their great potential danger.

Some years later I recognized my equipment being used as the final set in a movie called Down to Earth starring Rita Hayworth. It depicted the world as again fit for human habitation. Columbia Pictures agreed to pay me.

CONTOURED PLAYGROUND
1941, unrealized

I felt obliged to answer all the dire warnings of the danger to which I would expose small children with my play equipment and so designed a Contoured Playground. This would be proof against any serious accidents, being made of entirely earth modulations. Exercise was to be derived automatically in running up and down the curved surfaces. There were various areas of interest, for hiding, for sliding, for games. Water would flow in the summer.

PLAYGROUND FOR UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK CITY
1952, unrealized

The suggestion that I design a playground for the United Nations came from Mrs. Thomas Hess in early 1951. It was proposed that the spirit of idealism and good will engendered by the UN should be matched with a new and more imaginative playground for the small children of the delegates and of the neighborhood. A private subscription was raised for the building, and everybody was enthusiastic about it, including the people at the UN and, of course, myself.

Upon finishing the model and submitting it, I asked Julien Wittlesey, the architect, to join with Mrs. Hess in promoting its realization, as I had other things to do in Japan. That Robert Moses was so opposed to it should not have been the surprise that it was; I thought that this time he would not be concerned, because of the United Nations extraterritoriality. I had underestimated him.

The upshot was that the Museum of Modern Art showed the model in an exhibition in their children's department as a protest, in which the press joined: The playground was killed by ukase from a municipal official who is supposed to run the parks in New York, and who somehow is the city's self-appointed guardian against any art forms except banker's special neo-Georgian. The fact that he had no legal or moral right to dictate the UN's aesthetics was of concern only to the many distinguished educators, child welfare specialists and civic groups who had seen the model and had hailed it as the only creative step made in the field in decades...A jungle gym is transformed into an enormous basket that encourages the most complex ascents and all but obviates falls. In other words, the playground, instead of telling the child what to do (swing here, climb there) becomes a place for endless exploration, of endless opportunity for changing play. And it is a thing of beauty as the modern artist has found beauty in the modern world. Perhaps this is why it was so venomously attacked ('a hillside rabbit-warren') by the cheops of toll bridges. -- Art News, April, 1952

Eventually the United Nations had to submit to Moses who I understand threatened not to install the guard rail facing the East River.

MEMORIAL TO THE DEAD, HIROSHIMA
Architect: Tange Kenzo
1952, unrealized

In view of the successful completion of the two bridges, I was again approached by the Mayor of Hiroshima and Tange Kenzo, this time to design a Memorial to the Dead in Hiroshima. I proceeded to work out my ideas with a model which I built in Tange's office in Tokyo University.

The requirements specified that the core, or repository of names, should be underground. A cave beneath the earth (to which we all return). It was to be the place of solace to the bereaved -- suggestive still further of the womb of generations still unborn who would in time replace the dead. Above ground was to be the symbol for all to see and remember.

A challenging subject. I thought of sculpture as a concentration of energies. My symbolism derived from the prehistoric roots of 'Haniwa' like the protective abode of infancy, or even equating this with birth and death, the arch of peace with the dome of destruction.

It was to be a mass of black granite, glowing at the base from a light beyond and below. The feet of this ominous weight descended underground in concrete through the box which formed its anchorage. To be seen between heavy pillars was a granite box cantilevered out from the wall, in which were to be placed the names of the world's first atomic dead.

Unfortunately both Tange and Mayor Hamai had neglected to consult with the committee in charge--specifically with Mr. Kishida Hideto, an architect and Tange's teacher. Was it because I was an American, or was it a case of Giri not having the proper authorization, to which my design fell victim?

After rejecting mine, Kishida forced my friend, Tange, to draw up a design himself, within a week, in order to have something ready for the anniversary celebration. There is what is there now.

CONNECTICUT GENERAL INSURANCE COMPANY, BLOOMFIELD HILLS, CONNECTICUT
Architects: Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill
1956-57

I had the opportunity to do four interior courts and a long terrace outside a completely integrated large office structure, in the country, outside Hartford, Connecticut. This was my first perfectly realized garden.

The difficulty, as always, was scale: equivalent scale to large buildings and spaces are not necessarily met by bigness but rather by relative scale and simplicity of elements. This was the question of illusion over which we had a great deal of argument. The large sculptures were originally designed for the terrace outside, but as they grew larger, it became obvious that they could no longer belong there. I chose the site where they are now, away from the buildings, at the last minute after the sculptures were on the way. I do not deny that the results seem to have justified the dispute --which teaches me never to be tied to preconceptions, to be open to change and chance to the end.

666 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY
Architects: Carson and Lundin
1956-58

In 1952 I had designed a sculpture of contoured louvers (indicating the geological place of minerals), for a bank wall in Texas. The design was not used but Robert Carson had kept the model. Five years later he told me he was going to adapt the design for an elevator lobby ceiling and asked me if I would be interested in doing a waterfall to go with it.

I was horrified at the idea of such arbitrary use, and wishing to save my reputation, offered to redesign the ceiling for the cost of the waterfall alone. A precise model permitted templates to be taken and executed directly in aluminum and stainless steel. The ceiling became a landscape of the clouds.

UNESCO, PARIS
Patio des Delegues, Jardin Japonais
Architect: Marcel Breuer
1956-58

In the fall of 1956 I was recommended to Marcel Breuer to do a Garden for the UNESCO Headquarters being built in Paris. This job took two years, two trips from New York, and two from Paris to Japan.

Nothing could have been more opportune or rewarding in showing me the way I must go: toward a deeper knowledge through experience of what makes a garden, above all the relation between sculpture and space which I conceived as a possible solution to the dilemma of sculpture, as it suggested a fresh approach to sculpture as an organic component of our environment. Ultimately, of course, only the doing can teach. A job is a lesson, not to be learned otherwise, a great job, a great lesson.

Actually, what I had been asked to do was the Patio des Delegues, a roughly triangular small area at the end of the main secretariat building, intended as a sort of outside room. It was placed in difficult relation to this building but on the other side, toward building No. 3, there was a large sunken area for which a Calder mobile had been intended. In Paris I became convinced that something should be done to better correlate the spaces. Upon my suggestion it was agreed that I should make a model for submission. I proposed that there should be a path connecting to the two buildings, like a bridge or garden viewing verandah, or like the Hanamichi or flower path of the Japanese theater.

Fortunately, the artistic committee which met after I had returned to New York, was in agreement with this plan, and allocated $35,000 for the construction of my design of a walk, a cascade of water, and a flowing pond below. I was delighted and went again to Paris in February to develop the design and to get to work.

I gradually became more and more involved, ever more ambitious for it to be something exceptional. In the beginning I hoped only to integrate the two levels by raising portions of the lower one containing greenery and trees. However, as I elaborated on the model it became apparent to me that it would be ideal if the area below could be transformed into a major sculptural effort through the introduction of rocks and so forth. There was no budget for rocks, nor for any trees either, and the subsequent development of the garden was due to the persistence and the good will of many people. First I suggested that Japan might donate some rocks. The UNESCO people did not feel that they could approach the Japanese government themselves, but thought that perhaps I might do so on my own. As the site was not ready for construction at the time (I had been told that if I came back in May or June it would be time enough) I rushed off to Japan to see if I could get some rocks as a gift. Immediately I got in touch with the UNESCO Commission and various people in the Foreign Office. The idea naturally appealed to them, but the question was how it might be organized. That it was realized, was due to certain young people in the Foreign Office who organized a committee with Mr. Fujiyama Aiichiro as Chairman, who subsequently became the Foreign Minister.

And how was I to realize my part of the work? (My previous experiences were obviously quite inadequate). I went to Kyoto, the city where the greatest gardens are to be found, and there sought the key.

Everybody had different recommendations. Finally I was introduced through Kawashima Jimbee, for whom I had done a Doncho (theater-curtain ) to Shigemori Mirei, a man of tea (reflective taste), of knowledge (twenty volumes on gardens) and a master garden designer. He took me to a mountain area on the island of Shikoku (along the river Ayu-Kui-Gawa, 'the river of eating ayu fish', the source of the stone called Io-No-Ao -- 'the blue stone of Io'). Inside a ravine in a brook in the mountains there, I selected each stone, following the plan that I had devised in Tokyo (again working in Tange's office). There could be no waste, such as might be afforded in Japan, no hauling of stones that were not to be specifically useful, and for a particular shape and a purpose.

It is remarkable how smoothly the whole operation took place. Collecting the rocks; setting them up in a trial area in Tokushima; getting the water basins (chozubachi) and stepping-stones in Kyoto; quarrying the Fountain Stone in Okayama; quarrying and carving on Shodo shima (island) the stone bridge, the various stone lanterns, and stepping-stones.

All this was done before any money had been collected, such was the credit of the purpose. And thanks to the enthusiasm of so many people, eighty-eight tons of stone were shipped to Paris.

The building of the garden in Paris, however, did not go smoothly. For a while it looked quite hopeless, with every bureaucratic reason why nothing could be done. By the time winter set in, I had managed to get two rocks placed, and realized that French riggers could handle marble statuary but not rocks on a rough terrain. I requested two gardeners from Japan (Noguchi and Shizue). With them I worked the following spring. In the fall, a third gardener (Sano) arrived with seventy cherry tree saplings, and varieties of dwarf bamboo, of camellia, and decorative maples.

The lower garden is often refereed to as the Jardin Japonais, and derives more directly from the Japanese garden than does the upper level -- In accordance with the nature of the commission and because of the generous gift from Japan of all the stones.

To learn but still to control so strong a tradition is a challenge. My effort was to find a way to link that ritual of rocks which comes down to us through the Japanese from the dawn of history to our modern times and needs. In Japan, the worship of stones changed into an appreciation of nature. The search for the essence of sculpture seems to carry me to the same end. This is an ambulatory garden; to enjoy it truly, one must walk in it, and thereby perceive the relative value of all things. The raised paved area in the center of the lower garden recalls the 'Happy Land'. One arrives on it and departs from it again -- with time barriers of stepping-stones between --it is the land of voyage, the place for dancing and music and may be viewed from all around the garden and from all levels of the surrounding buildings.

While the spirit of the garden is Japanese, the actual composition of the natural rocks is my own with the exception of the large stone and hill arrangement which closely follows the common 'Horai' (sacred mountain) tradition. The two old 'chozubachi' are included in deference to the appreciation of age which is so much a part of the Japanese garden.

The spirit of Japan is not so obvious in the rest of the garden, but it may be recognized in the triangulated and asymmetric composition and in the rather oblique references the various elements supply. The walk I have mentioned. The stone lanterns are my lunars made of stone. A portion of the concrete seating above is so disposed as to offer what I thought might be a new and formal variation of the tea ceremony, but nobody has yet ventured to use it. My calligraphy for Peace (HEI WA) which is carved on the large waterfall stone is written backward and so distorted as to be generally illegible (as in the best Japanese tradition). The waterfall itself is composed of two stoned which may be read as 'man'.

Everything in the garden is thus given a personal twist, and so it may not be considered a true Japanese garden. However, it should be borne in mind that the Japanese tradition allows for the greatest latitude. It is in rising above the easily recognized that the great tradition asserts itself. The great garden is not easily differentiated from nature, with nothing so obvious as stone lanterns.

More truthfully, I should say that I never wanted to make a purely Japanese garden. It would not have been in scale -- not that it is perfect in this respect-- at least I did my best with the materials at hand. The planting I see is too much, or too divergent -- but what planting is equal to large modern buildings? What stones excepting in strictest isolation? On the other hand, it may be just these inadequacies and lack of grandeur that give this garden charm.

'Sculpture is the mountain', nothing is more sculptural than rocks in nature, and they represent the most profound Japanese expression of sculpture, only now being appreciated as a form of abstract sculpturing.

Any gardener will tell you that it is the rocks that make a garden. They call them the 'bones' of the garden. Plants of all sorts, however large the trees, are in a way like weeds: they come and go. But the essential quality of a garden is maintained through the solid disposition of rocks.

The famous gardens of Japan are attributed to great Zen masters, such as Muso Kokushi, and Soami, who built the famous Ryuanji temple garden. Such masters are the men of Tea. They must have understood sculpture. The Japanese garden is based on an appreciation of the quality of leisure; on an awareness of the inner purpose, of timelessness and the timely weaving together; on the permanence of rocks and the transience of vegetation -- on nature.

Sculptural quality in a Japanese garden derives not from individual sculpture, but rather from the garden in its entirety -- each element (trees, too) is but a part -- for this reason carving in a Japanese garden is held to a minimum; thus for a water basin, an old stone or some broken fragment from an old stupa is used. A new-seeming thing should not intrude. Learning from such a wise tradition, we may seek the rebirth of a major art form; a sculpture garden that shall be of today, personal, timely yet reaching beyond time.

MEMORIAL ON THE 2500TH ANNIVERSARY OF BUDDHA'S PARANAMNIRVANA
1957, unrealized

My curiosity was aroused by an inquiry from UNESCO as to whether I would be interested in helping to design a park in Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, in Nepal; and I stopped there the next time I went to Japan. Later, in Japan, some young architects asked if I would join them in a competition for a commemorative monument for the 2500th anniversary of Buddhism, to be built in New Delhi. I entered this competition with the wonderful memory of Nepal in my mind. Failure to have our design chosen only leaves me more convinced that such a monument should be built to mark the Buddha's holy birth rather than the birth of his religion. For our entry application I wrote:

What we attempted was to depict the truth, which is always new -- truth to ourselves and truth to art. Our search led us to the lotus. In the blossom so closely related in significance to the teachings of the Buddha, we found the theme of recurrent change and rebirth. We came to realize it was not only the birth of Buddhism that we wished to celebrate, but the significance of universal birth and awakening.

Our plan shows an apparent parabolic dome, which is composed in actuality of three separate spheroid sections that form the central raised petals of a huge lotus blossom. Radiating out from this are nine horizontal, earth-bound petals, three double ones inside and six on the outside.

In the very center on the monument, rising out of six water-filled petals, and between the three vertical ones, is a nine-bulbed spire, somewhat like the lotus root, each section of which is perforated by six apertures in the form of lotus petals. The structure is thus visible inside and out. The seventy-foot high sculpture is made of cast bronze.

What we have attempted is to present the familiar -- the lotus, the domed stupa, the ringed spire -- in the creative form of our day, making new for us the old, and reminding us that the spirit is paramount.

SUNKEN GARDEN AT THE BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Architects: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
1960-64

In view of the powerful, classic geometry of the Yale Library building, and since no planting was possible anyway, I proposed a garden in which everything would be of white marble. The whole project was executed in Rutland, Vermont.

The idea started from the sand mounds often found in Japanese temples. But soon the image of the astronomical gardens of India intruded, as did the more formal paving patterns of Italy. It became a dramatic landscape, one that is purely imaginary; it is nowhere, yet somehow familiar. Its size is fictive, of infinite space or cloistered containment.

As seen from the reading room, the illusory effect of space is cut by a pyramid (geometry of the earth or of the past), whose apex introduces another point of infinity. To the right beyond this, dominating the drama, is the circular disk of the sun almost ten feet high. A ring of energy, it barely touches the horizon. Its radiation, like lines of force in a magnetic field, transfixes it in a curvilinear perspective.

The symbolism of the sun may be interpreted in many ways; it is the coiled magnet, the circle of ever-accelerating force. As energy, it is the source of all life, the life of every man -- expended in so brief a time. How he does this, is the purpose of education. Looked at in other ways: the circle is zero, the decimal zero, or the zero of nothingness from which we come, to which we return. The hole is the abyss, the mirror, or the question mark. Or it may be the trumpet that calls youth to its challenge --from which a note has sounded (as the cube).

The cube signifies chance, like the rolling of dice. It is not original energy (sun) or matter (pyramid), but the human condition from whose shadow the rest is seen in light. If the 'sun' is primordial energy, the cube is that man-made pile of carbon blocks by which he has learned to stimulate nature's processes. The cube on its point may be said to contain features of both earthly square and solar radiance.

Looked at from above, this garden is contained by the massive frame of granite that surrounds it. The drama is being silently enacted, inexorably.

The tactile evolution of sculpture is of course, more complicated than words, and impossible to describe. There were at least ten variants of the sun, and the cube went through phases when it was not a cube at all, and was originally in a cupped well. Many of these elements were in themselves more interesting than those use. However, nothing could be allowed to detract from the whole. The sun being more plastic could not stand apart from the rest, the cube and the pyramid had each to relate to each other and to the topography as a whole.

SUNKEN GARDEN AT CHASE MANHATTAN BANK PLAZA, NEW YORK CITY
Architects: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
1961-64

As consultant on the design of the plaza some years before, I had suggested a water garden. When asked to make further studies of this, I realized that, in awareness the six floors below, the base of the basin (the landscape itself) could be sculpturally treated -- like the wild and surging shell of the sea, and rising out of or floating on it would be the elemental rocks. These I found in Kyoto, Japan, when I next went there. They were dragged out of the bottom of the Uji river where I went 'rock fishing'.

As it has worked out, the Chase Garden floods in the summer with water cascading over its rim. In the winter it is dry. It is my Ryuanji, as it were. But I have never been interested in doing a Japanese garden per se. The UNESCO garden was a study, and a tribute. The Chase Garden is not that. I have used rocks as an element of sculptural composition. Otherwise it is an utterly modern garden, with the rocks used in a vertical as well as a horizontal plan. The chief interest here is the use of rocks in a non-traditional way. Instead of being a part of the earth they burst forth seeming to levitate out of the ground. At least that is the intention.

The ground itself is contoured, it is man-made, that it, it is sculpture. The concentric patterns of the paving may be said to like the contour raking of Japanese gardens, but they go back more to their Chinese origins of stylized sea waves. The rocks, which otherwise are the sculptures, are natural. There is this transposition. An unnatural thing of will  as is our whole technological age -- like going to the moon.

I have noticed that when one visits the plaza on a quiet but somewhat windy Sunday, the great building emits an eerie music, and looking down into the garden with its water flowing is like looking onto a turbulent seascape from which the immobile rocks take off for outer space.

Nature and non-Nature. There will come other gardens to correspond to our changing concepts of reality; disturbing and beautiful gardens to awaken us to a new awareness of our solitude. Can it be that nature is no longer real for us or, in any case, out of scale?

IBM, ARMONK, NEW YORK
Architects: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
1964

I have transported rocks from Japan as a matter of convenience. There are equally beautiful rocks elsewhere, but this was not the case at the site of the new headquarters of IBM in Armonk, New York. The stones there were the fractured bedrock which had been blasted out of the foundation. Of these, I made a setting for rocks and trees to represent mankind's past. A granite path crosses diagonally an area of bluegrass. On one side of this is a large rock with water running down its surface into a small pool, and on the other a composition of six large rocks.

The two gardens, separated by a three-level glass walled bridge which houses escalators, are visible from all the interior offices.

The theme of the north garden is science and mankind's future. A large black dome near the center emerges from the earth to explore the universe. Diagrams of nuclear formations, stellar constellations and computer circuitry, are carved in this; and critical formulas of scientific development in the dial-like marble semi-circle at the other end. Between them is a red concavity with a fountain inside, and facing this is a bronze sculpture of two interlocking helix, the code of life.

THE BILLY ROSE SCULPTURE GARDEN, JERUSALEM, ISRAEL
1960-65

In the fall of 1960 Billy Rose, the New York showman, proposed that I make a sculpture garden for the new National Museum being built in Jerusalem, Israel. I declined. This he would not accept, contending that one who had voluntarily incarcerated himself in a War Relocation Camp could not refuse such a challenge. An argument more to be appreciated were I Jewish. But why not Jewish? The man in the Foreign Office in Tokyo had said, 'For the purposes of art, you are Japanese'.

January saw us in Israel looking at a rock-strewn hillside where I was told to create a five-acre garden -- a challenge indeed! At the office of Alfred Mansfield the Museum architect, in Haifa, working together and alone, I devised a model showing five curved retaining walls some thirty feet high and over one hundred feet long. Straight, they would have been of little interest. By curving them both in plan and elevation, and by placing them at different levels, I hoped to create an undulating and walkable landscape, something memorable born out of the adversity of the terrain...a place, a garden, even a monument, but not a monument to any individual, rather to the people who would visit it and have hope.

Having agreed to do a work, a responsibility weighs upon the artist to see his conception completed. How else can he claim it to be his work of art? That I have been more or less able to do this may be due in part to my not accepting private commissions.

The sculpture garden, I was given to understand, was to be a gift to Israel. To avoid trouble, I insisted that the contract stipulate that the architect was to be my only collaborative judge.

I had not anticipated Billy Rose, his economic strictures at every phase of the work, first eliminating the architect; then questioning the need of structural and textural elements, the basis of ground stabilization and harmony such as the embedment of the rocks, olive trees, large fixed bases, etc. With all these delays, it was only completed in time for the opening of the Museum in May 1965, after a final desperate five weeks of activity.

To work with nature as with art is always a process. Improvisation is necessary no matter how much one tries to foresee; difficulties as well as unforeseen clarifications arise to dismay us or delight us.

This sculpture garden is a setting or stage where the disposition of sculpture will help define its purpose -- to enhance its drama, that is -- as a living experience. But I believe the emotional impact of the garden is clear enough even without this addition.

The emotions aroused will no doubt differ. My own feeling is that here is consciousness of the earth upon which we stand. It is free, open -- a place of release. The great walls do not limit possession. They are mounds within the general landscape from which they rise to and to which they return. They are like the hills of Judea; like the wings of prayer touching the sky. The sea of stones so characteristic of Israel's hills laps into the garden and coalesces in the crests of three giant arcs. The enclosures they form are not exclusive; they define only in a periodic or relative sense.

Sculptures are to be seen in three and more dimensions as we walk up and down as well as around, near or at great distances. In this context size is a very relative matter, neither a necessity nor a virtue.

The big platforms of varying heights and sizes are not bases for individual sculpture. They are like rooms without walls, in the open. One or more sculptures may be placed upon them to form compositions. They are a device to overcome the difficulty of a lack of definition in a curved area -- and, as a practical matter, to supply level islands for sculptures with or without bases, and a place to rest.

Bases for particular sculptures will no doubt come. Indeed, many more cast and movable bases are in supply to be used mostly in the geometric terraced areas, where the more conventional concept of sculpture will prevail. But where the garden is defined by the great arcs, the horizons seem like the contours of the earth itself.

I made one large compromise in agreeing to make the sculpture garden self-contained and not integrated with the museum buildings as originally planned. I was led into doing a kind of architecture within the garden itself. That it has turned out well may prove to some that I am an architect. I prefer to think that the way it blends into the hill proves me a sculptor.

Actually there was never any dispute that an area of wall enclosures was needed for the sculptures that were conceived in such a framework -- 'studio sculptures' one might say, of the recent past or small and intimate works that would be otherwise lost.

Two of the walled areas have been roofed for those sculptures that may not stand in the open. This does not make architecture. Roofed sculptures if you like, since I claim the whole garden is a sculpture.

Here you have a sculpture fifty meters high, twenty dunams (five acres) wide, weighing a million tons. No, it is a piece of the earth itself, extending all the way to China. This is what I have sculptured, and one may walk upon in and feel its solidity under foot and know that it belongs to all of us without limit and equally. That it is in Israel does not make it less a part of any of us. We are all Israelis who go there and walk its slopes.

I was told that the hill was called Neva Shaanan, place of Tranquillity, that it was mentioned in the Bible.

Jerusalem is an emotion shared by all of us. It gains new meanings, and it is my hope that the garden and museum of which it is a part, will come to be a very integral part of this new image -- an acropolis of our times.

LAYGROUND FOR RIVERSIDE DRIVE PARK, NEW YORK
With the Architect Louis I. Kahn
1961-66

The idea of playgrounds as a sculptural landscape, natural to children, had never been realized. How sad, I felt, that the possibility of actually building one presented itself when it was past my age of interest. Why could it not have been thirty years before, when the idea first came to me?

I found myself getting involuntarily involved in the design of a large project to remake a portion of Riverside Park as a Children's Playground for New York. It was as if I was no longer free to choose -- the work chose me. In this dilemma, and needing the association of an architect of strong convictions and ability, a partnership was formed with Mr. Louis I. Kahn. The moving spirit again was Mrs. Thomas Hess, who interceded on behalf of the Bloomingdale Conservation Project, a West Side Redevelopment Committee, to get me going and help find the means to build the playground as a memorial to her aunt.

The purpose of the Adele Levy Memorial Playground is to establish an area for familiar relaxation and play rather than an area for any specific sport. We have attempted to supply a landscape where children of all ages, their parents, grandparents, and other older people can mutually find enjoyment. The heart of the plan is a nursery building placed as near to Riverside Drive as possible which will supply the functions necessary to lengthy sojourns in the park for little children. This building is shaped like a cup, a sun trap for winter months, a fountain and water area for the summer. The service and play rooms are built underneath the ramp and under the open air play and rest area so that the roof has a double function. From this central point radiates the play areawith definite but not limiting forms to invite play; first, integral with the nursery, is a play mountain, like a mound of large triangular steps -- for climbing, for sitting, -- an artificial hill. Outside this central core are giant slides built into the topography, areas for home games. Things to crawl in and out of. There is also a large oval sand and pebble area which is crisscrossed by maze-like divisions: a theater area with a shell for music, puppets and theater. Other structures will be incorporated as we go along. The play elements are to be made permanent structures forming the landscape. They should be made of concrete with integral color.

This described our first plan submitted in June 1962. There was enthusiasm from the Housing and Welfare Departments, a forlorn interest from the Parks Department and, it developed, active antagonism from the 'better-advantaged' people of the community against what they thought might become an invasion of their quiet park by the rowdy Negroes and Puerto Ricans from the slums a few blocks east. (The very reason why a greater use of the park was sought in the first place).

There were all sorts of objections: meetings, picketing. I myself was at first not unsympathetic to their demands that vacant lots be used instead, though I later came to feel that children should not be restricted to fenced-in concrete play areas, and that some parks, or parts of some parks, should become 'play gardens'.

I offered to make another model (as a strategic retreat) situated at the southern tip of the land we were authorized to use. This proved too narrow and cramped. The following three other models in different situations, five in all, covering five years. The indifference of the Park Department changed to a certain enthusiasm, produced though it may have been by Mayor Wagner.

Through all of this there could not have been a more devoted and interested collaborator than Louis I. Kahn. A philosopher among architects, I came to feel that each meeting was an enrichment and education for me, and that I should not mind how long it took or how many models I had to make.

The many unforeseen problems and objections were met one by one; to minimize the disturbance to nature; to bed the buildings into the landscape; to cope with the uncertainties of subterranean structures. To avoid the New York Central Railroad tracks below Riverside Drive, and the retaining wall supporting it; to gain more space than we took away; to double each function, i.e. no roof, but a functioning space that is also a roof.

Just as construction was about to start, the opposition secured an injunction to stop it. My own feelings at this denouement were somewhat ambivalent.

That a large work involves compromises is taken for granted. One hopes to overcome them in a manner which does not ruin the design. The rules and regulations limiting building in New York are known to be excessive, almost as though planned to prevent originality. The eventual passage of our project through these hedges must have been due to friendly powers.

More distressing to me was my belated realization that the architect must above all, be primarily responsible to the architecture. Its scale is often as not in contradistinction to its surroundings. A playground, however, is necessarily related to the use of children. There is a limit to its adaptability to changes in architectural scale. While I marshaled my plans to cope with an ever more formidable fenestration, in the end I could not help feeling that while I may agree with the resolutions as architecture, the playground itself, because of its limited space, had become visually inadequate.

The caption to the playground model in the exhibition of Louis Kahn at the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 1966 read as follows:

It is difficult to see the best of Kahn in this project. Free play is not his forte; neither is an architecture undisciplined by those physical and economic demands which delimit human and describe its fate. Kahn free to wander is Kahn prowling around in a world he cannot believe in. But that lunar strangeness is surely there, as well as a scattered assault of Kahn's geometries upon Noguchi's Hill.

Our playground took too long. Finally it fell victim to political change; the new administration could not give us its backing. But the lessons of our difficulties seem not to have been lost in that an admittedly 'influenced' playground was inaugurated shortly afterward with great fanfare by the wife of the President of the United States and the Mayor of New York.

TOMB OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY, WASHINGTON DC
1964, unrealized

During the summer of 1964 the architect John Carl Warnecke, who had been commissioned to do President Kennedy's tomb, asked me to help him with its design.

I went to Washington three times, initially to discuss the terms of contract for which I asked only collaborative credit, with compensation deferred until the work was accepted and completed. Upon a verbal agreement I went a second and a third time to work on the design, only to find that the architect no longer felt free to share any credit. It was not anonymity that I minded, but the loss of control that went with it -- a difficulty that one often meets with architects.

Honored to be asked, and appreciative of the opportunity to contribute my best in acceptance and recognition as an American, I had by then already applied myself to the problems of the area around the tomb and of what to do with the flame. First I felt the need to remove the ponderous weight of any stone mass away from the platform, to put it beyond, so that it would rise from the grassy earth as a visual break of sufficient size to be a screen and a containment. I gave it an evocative slant away from the grave, like the cup of a hand.

For the area of the grave, I felt that instead of being covered with grass it should be surfaced with large beach pebbles. This would have the purpose of easier care of flowers (they are a mess on grass), and the aesthetic one of being more in harmony with President Kennedy and his love of the sea and the wider, more youthful aspects of nature -- with connotations of purity and strength. I domed this surface so that wreaths might be laid on it directly without stands. The pebbles were to be graduated -- small on the top, large at the perimeter where the larger interstices would permit the insertion of cut flowers. These pebbles were repeated and extended around the perimeter of the raised platform.

I designed a simple cross facing up. From the center would glow the flame. It would be utterly pure and basic, as would be one by Mies or Brancusi -- a true Christian symbol, of which the flame would be a significant but not a dominant part. The cross is not a decoration.

For an artist concepts and design are integral. Further development, which I do not deny, would only come with his responsibility. He cannot accept improvements  which do damage to his concepts.

y trips to Washington have all been unhappy. However perversely, I could not help feeling that I had been rejected by America as I had been by Japan with the Hiroshima Memorial to the Dead.