For a certain aspirationally discerning consumer, Noguchi is synonymous with the paper lamp: like the Ottolenghi cookbook or the lilting monstera, a dependable signifier of “good taste.” Yet the objects in Noguchi’s New York, on view at the Noguchi Museum through mid-September, are more audacious and, perhaps for that reason, less widely admired. As a young artist in the Depression, Isamu Noguchi asked how his work could be “humanly meaningful,” at once “abstract and socially relevant.” His answer was to knock sculpture off its literal pedestal. Play Mountain (1933), a stepped, two-story pyramid spanning an entire Manhattan block, envisioned children watersliding and sledding amid the city’s commercial hustle.
When Noguchi presented Play Mountain to the city, its headstrong parks commissioner laughed in his face. “Mr. Moses took offense at me,” the sculptor recalled, “thought I was trying to kill people, said a playground had to be tested equipment and that New York City could not afford to test my mountain.” This became something of a pattern. In 1941, Moses rejected the revised design, despite the series of gentle berms and hillocks that, Noguchi insisted, were proof against harm; ten years later, after lobbying the United Nations to build a public playground on its new East River campus, Moses steamrolled the choice of Noguchi as designer and canned the idea for good. Add to these unbuilt plans a whole catalogue of what could have been: a sculpture garden for the Museum of Modern Art; another for the Lever House courtyard; a granite-and-marble plaza for an unrealized skyscraper across the street; a lunate monument for Idlewild—now JFK—Airport; open-air gorilla habitats for the Bronx Zoo; and yet another undulant playscape for Riverside Park, designed with Louis Kahn.
The exhibition’s title seems at first a possessive assertion. But it develops a hypothetical, like a city out of Calvino, where airplanes fly over supine crescents and children scale selenian surfaces. There are hints of this moon-like metropole in the designs that did prevail: the stellar Unidentified Object (1979) at Fifth Avenue and East 82nd Street; the excavated Sunken Garden (1964) at One Chase Manhattan Plaza (now 28 Liberty Street). Yet even where the artist’s vision did arise, it did so at the administrator’s sufferance: The Chase building was an “easy sale,” David Rockefeller recalled, once he had the chairman of the City Planning Commission’s ear. Alas, we do not live in Noguchi’s New York, but in Moses’s.