by Ángeles de Hita - Sep 17, 2024.
As playspaces will be a key topic in the upcoming sessions, it’s important for us to start by discussing a pioneer in this field: Isamu Noguchi. He was instrumental in bringing art into the places where kids play. He strongly believed in the educational potential of sculptural forms that children physically interact with while they play.
In the early 1930s, Noguchi embarked on an ambitious journey to transform urban spaces through art. His vision wasn’t limited to traditional sculpture; he saw playground design as a chance to blend creativity with functionality. For him, these spaces could be more than just recreational—they could be a form of living art.
In 1934, he proposed a bold idea to New York City's Parks Commissioner. This concept, called Play Mountain, was anything but ordinary. Instead of the usual swings and slides, Noguchi imagined a pyramid-shaped mound of earth designed for children to climb, slide, and explore. It was a sculptural landscape where play and art merged seamlessly.
The Play Mountain bronze cast model illustrates the vision of transforming an entire city block into a unified play space.
With elements like slopes and contoured surfaces, the design aimed to physically challenge children and create opportunities for them to play together, fostering social interaction and community bonding. These spaces were meant to enrich public life by blending art with function, making urban areas more vibrant and connected to the environment.
The goal was to transform public spaces by moving away from rigid, standardized playground designs. But these forward-thinking ideas weren’t always welcomed. The Play Mountain concept was rejected by New York City's Parks Commissioner, who favored more conventional playground designs. Safety concerns played a significant role—anything that didn’t follow the tested norms was deemed risky.
Similarly, his subsequent designs, such as the Contoured Playground (1941), were never built due to safety concerns and shifting city priorities. Despite these setbacks, this rejection only fueled a determination to prove that playful, artistic concepts could make a real difference.
Isamu Noguchi with the plaster model for Contoured Playground.
Contoured Playground plaster model with play equipment.
In 1946, Noguchi’s work gained recognition when his playground models were featured alongside his abstract sculptures in the MoMA exhibition Fourteen Americans, highlighting the innovative nature of his ideas.
Despite the setbacks, the determination never wavered. He believed that play should be an immersive experience—a blend of art, nature, and physical activity. Even though early ideas faced resistance, they planted the seeds for what would later become a movement towards more creative and adventurous playground designs.
Noguchi’s first completed playground was temporary: Kodomo No Kuni, outside Tokyo, built in 1965 for the Japanese Children’s Year.
Komodo No Kuni. Tokyo, Japan.
A few years later, the city of Atlanta invited him to design a playground for Piedmont Park. Here, he proposed a series of sculptural play forms that integrated rolling hills, tunnels, and slides into the landscape itself. The idea was to create a playscape that felt organic and fluid, where children could explore different paths and surfaces, discovering new ways to play.
But again, the designs were ahead of their time. While the Piedmont Park project received some attention, it was never fully realized due to budget constraints and continued concerns about safety. The abstract, non-traditional designs clashed with the more conservative approaches to playground safety that dominated the era.
However, his influence didn’t go unnoticed. As the 1960s progressed, cities and architects began to embrace more adventurous playground designs. Noguchi’s early ideas were echoed in the works of European designers like Aldo van Eyck and in the emerging “adventure playground” movement.
Though many of his playground designs never made it off the drawing board, Noguchi’s legacy is evident in the growing recognition of play spaces as essential components of urban life. His work challenged the idea that playgrounds had to be purely functional or utilitarian; instead, he introduced the possibility that they could be imaginative environments where art, nature, and community come together.
His final and most ambitious playground design, Moerenuma Park in Sapporo, Japan (1988–2004), was conceived in the last year of his life. This project, envisioned as “the whole being a single sculpture,” integrating the park’s fountain, hills, and geometric shapes into a unified landscape.
Moerenuma Park. Sapporo, Japan.
In many ways, Moerenuma Park revisits and further develops the concepts from Play Mountain, showing how his vision evolved and matured over time. It’s as though, in his final work, Noguchi was able to realize the ideas that had first taken root decades earlier, despite the initial rejections and setbacks. Though many of his designs were never built, his dedication to creating imaginative, artistic spaces for children has had a lasting impact, establishing his work as a reference point in the evolving dialogue between play, art, and public space.
Children playing with Play Sculpture at Moerenuma Park.