99% Week: Whimsy Up Your Ass

Earlier this week, Dave introduced you to 99% Invisible, the podcast hosted by the euphoniously-toned Roman Mars. As the G:TB staff knows, in accordance with our carefully curated editorial calendar, this post is the second installment in our new (and now ongoing) series of pod-reports on 99pi's offerings.

Episode 351, released on April 23, 2019, tells the story of Isamu Noguchi. Born in 1904 to an American mother and Japanese father, Noguchi found himself caught between two cultures as a young man. His blue eyes marked him as an outsider in Japan, and his skin tone and facial features the same in America. His lonely childhood would inspire his life's work. From the podcast, "He started to think of a concept for a giant public sculpture, and in his mind, it took the form of a massive pyramid. Try to imagine a cross between a Mayan temple and a mountain. It pushes out of the earth with a long slide sloping down with steps on two of its faces. Essentially, it’s like an asymmetrical Egyptian step-pyramid. Noguchi thought of it as a playground, and he called it Play Mountain."

After building a career as a sculptor of busts of prominent people, Noguchi sought ways to bring his ideas about play and form to broader audiences. In the early 1930s, he received an audience with famed New York parks commissioner Robert Moses. The latter envisioned a massive park-building program across the city, and Noguchi pitched Play Mountain, his whimsical, free-form monument to non-directive play. Moses favored the four S's - swings, slides, see-saws, and sandboxes, and summarily dismissed Noguchi's fanciful idea.

Noguchi went on to live a roller-coaster life, gaining fame as an artist and designer (the Noguchi coffee table is one of the most famous furniture designs of the 1950s), while also being interred briefly during World War II with other Japanese-Americans. But he never forgot about Play Mountain and his notions of the importance of non-directive play.

Ironically, while he never saw his vision executed in America, his growing fame in the art world led other designers to develop playgrounds that borrowed heavily from his ideas, even as increasing concerns for safety spurred new standards for playground equipment and influenced much of the bland sameness we see today in our parks.

It wasn't until 1988 that Noguchi got a chance to build the park of his dreams. Sapporo, Japan commissioned him to develop a 454-acre parcel of land to his whimsical specifications, called Moerenuma Park. Sadly, while he designed the project, he died in December of that year, and his collaborator Shoji Sadao oversaw its construction, which took 17 years. The finished product is "this huge green swath of land, tucked into a bend in the river. There are forests of his candy-like play equipment, mounds and pyramids and swooping paths, an enormous conical hill to climb, a huge fountain that cycles through an hour-long water show."



We'll give Roman Mars the final word on this Gheorghie artist:

"Isamu Noguchi was never able to take in the view from the peak of his creation. The sculpture he’d spent his whole life dreaming about., like a mountain teleported from the wild alien planet of his mind. The one place he ever felt he really belonged. Noguchi wanted us to see the world as if we were visiting for the first time. To move our bodies through space as if the simple facts of gravity and contour were brand new delights. To look around with wide eyes, to feel with outstretched fingers, and imagine infinite possibilities. In other words: to live like kids on a playground."