Revisiting one of Isamu Noguchi?s most elusive designs: An NYC playground
Sculptor Isamu Noguchi tried many times to build a playground in New York City, but one never came to fruition. One of his ideas, called Contoured Playground, is shown here as a bronze model. | Courtesy Noguchi Museum
A new Noguchi Museum exhibition is almost like being inside the designer?s visionary playscape While sculptor Isamu Noguchi created some of the most beloved midcentury designs?like his namesake coffee table and paper Akari lanterns?there was one project that continually eluded him: a New York City playground. Despite many attempts across several decades to build one, Noguchi was constantly stymied by policy. ?In Search of Contoured Playground,? a new exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, brings us one step closer to envisioning what it would have been like if he succeeded. Intended for Central Park, Contoured Playground is a rolling, undulant landscape with gentle hills, subtle depressions, and ridges that gradually slope up from the ground to a defined edge. It almost looks as though it were molded over thousands of years by flowing water. Noguchi only ever made models of the early-1940s playscape, including a small bronze cast that?s typically wall-mounted when exhibited, a conceit that makes the model feel like an object, not an inhabitable space, as the artist intended.
So the museum, working with independent curator and Cornell architecture professor Naomi Frangos, created a 10-by-10-foot plaster model of Contoured Playground tha...
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