Play Mountain

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
You may have seen them to Noguchi table. Actually I know you’ve seen it. It’s like the coffee table in movies or TV shows when they want to show that a lawyer or an art dealer is really sophisticated, they put an a Noguchi table in their waiting room.

Jackson Roach:
And it is really a beautiful table. Two curvy wooden legs interlock and support this heavy slab of glass which seems like it’s almost floating above them.

Roman Mars:
That’s reporter Jackson Roach.

Jackson Roach:
Since the Noguchi coffee table was introduced in 1948, it’s become one of the emblems of mid-century industrial design. It has its own Wikipedia page and there’s a thriving Instagram hashtag #fynct, which stands for f*ck your Noguchi coffee table, which basically means f*ck your bougie cliche interiors.

Roman Mars:
Which is ironic because like all eventual cliches, Noguchi himself was quite avant garde.

Dakin Hart:
Noguchi was a prodigy, a sculpting prodigy.

Jackson Roach:
Isamu Noguchi was a sculptor and he was so much more than that.

Dakin Hart:
Choreographers and fashion designers and art directors, and a whole lot of different people across a really wide creative swath, look to Noguchi as a point of inspiration.

Jackson Roach:
This is Daikon Hart, senior curator of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Noguchi himself built this studio in Queens to house a lifetime of his abstract, evocative experiments in stone and metal. Hart says Noguchi was challenging himself with every sculpture.

Dakin Hart:
Can I make something hard, feel soft? Can I make something heavy, feel light? Can I make something far away feel like it’s right next to you. To make rock feel fluid that way.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi sculptures seem to twist and balance on themselves undulating with form and texture, but this is all his later work.

Roman Mars:
Back in the 1930s before Noguchi had a signature museum and a namesake coffee table, he was a struggling artist in New York City. He paid the bills by sculpting busts of rich people.

Dakin Hart:
He called it head busting, and he did it just to make money or he said he did it just it just to make money, but in truth he used it brilliantly as a way to social network, and it was a way to romance the people who were his patrons.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi was as great a networker as he was a sculptor, but head busting wasn’t exactly fulfilling. He wanted to think bigger. Here’s Noguchi in an interview from the 70s.

Isamu Noguchi:
In 1933, having done some more heads and so forth and being disgusted with doing heads, one has to decide to get away to another dimension. I suppose the same thing that makes us go to the moon, so I have to get away.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi wanted to make art that would live in the world, not just in a rich person’s home or on a gallery wall. He wanted to change the physical landscape that people moved through.

Dakin Hart:
Noguchi said that he wanted people to feel like the first person on earth, the first person to explore earth.

Roman Mars:
And so he started to think of a concept for a giant public sculpture. It looked like a massive, massive pyramid.

Jackson Roach:
Imagine a cross between a Mayan temple and a mountain, pushing up out of the earth, with a long slide slipping down it, and steps on two of its spaces.

Dakin Hart:
It is a step pyramid essentially, but on each side the steps are different heights and they’re irregular, they’re asymmetrical.

Roman Mars:
But it wasn’t just the sculpture for a museum or a bank plaza. Noguchi thought of it as a playground. He called it Play Mountain.

Dakin Hart:
So he talked about play as the primer for a purposeful approach to space. Trying to teach people to be more mindful of space and how we occupy it and how it works.

Jackson Roach:
This giant ziggurat wouldn’t come with any specific instructions, would have no rules, no single obvious way to play with it. Noguchi wanted Play Mountain to be a strange new landscape, that would dare children to imagine other realities, so that perhaps they could grow up into creative, open-minded adults.

Dakin Hart:
And I think Noguchi hoped that by making playgrounds, he could impact people at that key stage in development.

Roman Mars:
In fact, the inspiration for Play Mountain came to Noguchi when he was at this key stage himself, when he was a little boy.

Jackson Roach:
Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904. His father Yone was a famous Japanese poet and his mother was a white American writer named Leonie Gilmour. They met when she answered an ad he placed in a paper for a translator and assistant. Pretty much as soon as Isamu was born, Yone abandoned them and went back to Japan.

Roman Mars:
Noguchi and his mother eventually followed, but his father had already started another family by then. So Noguchi and his mother moved to a countryside town, where Noguchi’s bright blue eyes marked him as an outsider to the other kids at school. His childhood was pretty lonely.

Dakin Hart:
But from their little house in the little town they lived in on the seaside, they did have a great view of Mt. Fuji, but Fuji quite far away. So like just the perfect little pyramid. So you can imagine that view, that the little boy has everyday going down the stairs seeing Mt. Fuji.

Jackson Roach:
That idea of his own Mt. Fuji stuck with Noguchi. It followed him when he moved to Indiana as a teenager. It followed him to Paris where he apprenticed with the sculptor Brancusi, and it came with him to New York City, the place that he decided would become his home.

Dakin Hart:
So it was like, imagine taking Mt. Fuji and turning it into a giant play structure, I think that’s what play mountain was.

Roman Mars:
Noguchi wrote, “Play Mountain was my response based upon memory of my own unhappy childhood, the desolate playground on a cliff in Tokyo, which I approached with dread. It may be that this is how I tried to join the city, New York, to belong.”

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi wanted to move the mountain from his lonely childhood and reincarnate it as a place for gathering and playing, as a kind of gift to the children of New York. And after years and years of carrying that concept in his head, he got his big break.

Roman Mars:
In 1934, one of the fancy people Noguchi had made a bust of, helped him get a meeting with Robert Moses, the newly appointed commissioner of the New York City Parks Department. Moses had said his number one priority was to build more playgrounds in the city, which at the time, had very few. So Noguchi decided to bring him his idea.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi brought Moses a model of Play Mountain, two feet square, in a white plaster, on a wooden frame, designed to take up an entire New York City block. Noguchi carries this miniature mountain to Robert Moses’s office, dunks it down on Robert Moses’s desk.

Alexandra Lange:
And says, “What if we build this for the children of the city?”

Roman Mars:
This is Alexandra Lang, architecture critic at Curbed and author of the Design of Childhood.

Alexandra Lange:
And Moses is like, “No way.”

Roman Mars:
The playgrounds Moses envisioned were simple, asphalt or dirt surrounded by a chain link fence, with the four S’s of playground equipment – swings, slide, sandbox, seesaw – all made out of steel. Moses was planning just to plonk these four S’s in vacant lots all over the city by the hundreds.

Jackson Roach:
And here comes Noguchi with this massive, ambiguous, otherworldly urban mountain, which would have required the movement of huge amounts of earth and concrete, and probably would’ve cost a ton of money.

Isamu Noguchi:
He just laughed his head off and threw us out more or less, you see.

Alexandra Lange:
Like no way, nope. Four S’s. I’m just going to order them and like we’re going to have 400 playgrounds by tomorrow.

Roman Mars:
Robert Moses did end up erecting 658 playgrounds in New York as Parks Commissioner, but from this moment on he and Noguchi became lifelong enemies.

Dakin Hart:
He took his model and went home fuming. And he fumed about it for the rest of his life, really.

Roman Mars:
The concept of Play Mountain remained very close to Noguchi’s heart. As Noguchi himself wrote, “Play Mountain was the kernel out of which have grown all my ideas relating sculpture to the earth.”

Jackson Roach:
Play Mountain represented this idea that Noguchi had, that children didn’t need instructions to play with say swings or a slide. There’s only one way to use them and kids just do the same prescribed activities over and over again. But if you give children an abstract surreal landscape, they can interpret it however they want. They can make up stories and have adventures and use their intuition to play in a thousand different ways.

Roman Mars:
This philosophy would later be called non-directive play.

Jackson Roach:
For Noguchi, this was the way that sculpture could be out in the world and really change the way people move and think. He wasn’t going to give up on it so easily. In 1939 Noguchi offered to design a playground for Honolulu’s Āliamanu Park.

Roman Mars:
But that fell through.

Jackson Roach:
Still not discouraged, Noguchi pitches his Hawaii playground ideas back to the New York Parks Department again.

Roman Mars:
Again, he gets rejected.

Jackson Roach:
But Noguchi is relentless.

Dakin Hart:
And so Noguchi still excited by the challenge, went off and designed Contoured Playground.

Dakin Hart:
Contoured Playground is really gentle, basically a smooth abstracted landscape of sloping hills and dales and river beds. It’s still a non-directive playground, but it’s very subtle. This time the New York Parks Department actually seems open to it. They even start talking about finding a spot in Central Park to build it.

Roman Mars:
But by then the year was 1941, and Noguchi’s plans were about to change.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi was in California, visiting a friend, and he was out shopping for some onyx for a sculpture.

Isamu Noguchi:
In fact, I was on my way to San Diego and I happened to turn on the radio and that’s where I heard it.

Radio Announcer:
We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.

Isamu Noguchi:
And my immediate reaction was, oh wow, oh my God, I’m a Japanese or I’m a nisei at least.

Roman Mars:
Nisei, or Americans born to Japanese parents.

Jackson Roach:
With the US entering World War II, Contoured Playground was forgotten by both the Parks Department and Noguchi. There were bigger stakes now.

Isamu Noguchi:
I felt that I wanted to be able to help in some way.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi started to link up with other Nisei looking for ways to make it clear to the government that they were firmly on the American side of the war.

Isamu Noguchi:
And so we had these meetings and our intention was that we would counteract the bad press, to stop kind of hysteria that’s developing,

Roman Mars:
But that hysteria was quickly coming to a head.

Roman Mars:
Barely two months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066.

Dakin Hart:
Executive order 9066 gives the American military the right to declare martial law in any part of the country that it deems necessary to protect the homeland. And that’s with the understanding that in the western United States, they would round up the Japanese American population.

Roman Mars:
Evacuation orders with fast approaching deadlines started landing on peoples’ doorsteps

Isamu Noguchi:
And we have to get out of California. Everybody had to get out, including me. I had to get out, I abandoned my car in Los Angeles and flew out, came to New York.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi had always been good at finding exactly the right person for the moment. In this moment, he needed someone to help him take action, and so he found him in Washington DC.

Isamu Noguchi:
So I went to Washington, went around, inquiring whether there’s anything I can do. Finally, I happened to bump into John Collier.

Jackson Roach:
John Collier was the head of the bureau of Indian affairs, because the government needed to build the internment camps in large open areas of federally controlled land, they decided to build two of them on Native American reservations, which meant that the actual undertaking of building and running these camps would fall to John Collier’s department.

Roman Mars:
John Collier was relatively progressive. He wanted to give tribal governments more autonomy and support Native American culture. And then suddenly, he’d been given the task of designing and building prison camps on reservation land. Noguchi reached out to him.

Isamu Noguchi:
And he says, “Well, come on over. Let’s talk about it.”

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi and Collier started talking about what they could do with this assignment, now that there was no way to prevent internment from happening.

Dakin Hart:
They cooked up, and this is going to sound so crazy, but in a way they cooked up what was a utopian scheme. Because from their point of view, if it’s going to happen, let’s make it as good as it can possibly be.

Roman Mars:
Noguchi drew up a suite of plans for the largest of the camps being built. The one at Poston, Arizona,

Isamu Noguchi:
I made plans for the park development and this and that and the other, to make an indoor park like place.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi took the rigid grid of a military style camp with rows and rows of tarpaper barracks, and cut an avenue right down the middle of it, lined with public services, schools and gardens, a hospital, restaurants, a department store and a movie theater and a church and a cemetery, and a zoo, botanical garden, sports fields and a mini golf course and playgrounds.

Dakin Hart:
What you’re looking at is what he thinks the key parts of civilization are. You have a huge population of people who have been removed from their lives and artificially plunked down in the middle of nowhere where they are expected to “live.” What does that mean? What is a life? What does life consist of? What does it need to be real, to feel real? The playground is critical to it.

Jackson Roach:
The plans themselves are pretty unbelievable. But the really wild thing is that even though Japanese internment only affected people living on the West Coast and Noguchi was living on the East Coast, Noguchi and Collier decide Noguchi should actually go to this concentration camp in Poston, Arizona voluntarily, and live there while he carried out his plan.

Isamu Noguchi:
And that’s how I happened to go to Poston.

Jackson Roach:
The camp was being constructed in the middle of the desert in the southwestern part of Arizona, on the Colorado River Indian reservation. There was hardly anything for miles around, just scrubby brush and dust, mountains in the far distance.

Dakin Hart:
So Noguchi got to Poston like a week before it opened.

Isamu Noguchi:
So I was one of the people getting the base ready. Most of the people were coming in there to help, you see, and I was among them.

Roman Mars:
Noguchi was given his own room and thought he’d soon be getting to work on realizing his vision for a utopian community. I mean, this was a guy who plunked Play Mountain down in front of Robert Moses and said, “Let’s build this for kids.” His strange hopefulness knew no limits. But as soon as the camp opened, it became painfully clear to Noguchi, that the people weren’t coming there for an idyllic new lifestyle. They were prisoners.

Jackson Roach:
To the camp administrators from the War Relocation Authority, Noguchi looked just like another one of the prisoners. They wouldn’t give him the time of day, and because he had some special privileges, the other internees, assumed he was this trader in cahoots with the camp administrators.

Dakin Hart:
He immediately realized he was sort of the worst of both worlds, because he was just an internee from the administration’s point of view, and he was a turncoat, like a spy, from the other internees point of view.

Jackson Roach:
After about two months at Poston, Noguchi realized that the War Relocation Authority had no interest in making it a nice place to live. They ran it like a prison camp.

Roman Mars:
Because it was a prison camp.

Jackson Roach:
All of John Collier’s and Noguchi’s idealistic plans were ignored.

Roman Mars:
Seeing that there was no chance of doing what he’d come to do, Noguchi decided to move on. He figured he’d just go back to normal life, being a famous artist and hanging out with his famous artist friends.

Dakin Hart:
And they wouldn’t let him leave.

Jackson Roach:
Which was definitely not a part of the plan.

Dakin Hart:
He had no idea that he wouldn’t be able to leave.

Isamu Noguchi:
So I was locked up and couldn’t get out for seven months. That made me very uncomfortable.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi was suddenly a prisoner, having made enemies of internees and administrators alike, he spent most of his time alone with nothing to do. Poston was a bleak, barren place. Almost every day there was triple digit heat and huge dust storms tearing through, coming in through the thin walls of the barracks, getting stuck in your bed, and your mouth, and your eyes.

Roman Mars:
Noguchi wrote to one of his famous friends, the artist Man Ray, “Here time has stopped and nothing is of any consequence, nothing of any value. Neither our time or our skill. The world is nuts.”

Jackson Roach:
After seven months and many, many letters and phone calls, John Collier was able to get Noguchi out.

Isamu Noguchi:
After seven months, I got out on pass.

Roman Mars:
And he never went back.

Jackson Roach:
It’s hard to know what to make of Noguchi’s failed mission to Poston, and it kind of leads to this deeper question. Does it even make sense to try to find joy or beauty or playfulness, in a system that’s just fundamentally awful?

Alexandra Lange:
Trying to make a prison better when the prison shouldn’t exist.

Dakin Hart:
Critic Alexandra Lang again.

Alexandra Lange:
Like he thought he could make this internment camp more humane, but it’s in a sense…, like it’s an inhumane endeavor.

Roman Mars:
The whole experience was painful for Noguchi. His goals had been so compassionate going in, but racism and fear and bureaucracy killed those dreams. And then imprisoned him, when he tried to help.

Isamu Noguchi:
When I finally landed back in New York, in 1942, it must’ve been back in the late fall, in ’42, you see, I got back. I had about enough of all causes and everything else, and I just f*ck the whole work. I mean, I wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.

Jackson Roach:
After Poston, the idea of designing public works and playgrounds must’ve seemed wrong somehow. Like, how could you think about play when there’s so much cruelty in the world? In fact, in 1943 the year after Noguchi gets out of Poston, he makes this sculpture called This Tortured Earth, which is like the nightmare version of his model for Contoured Playground. A twisted landscape, it looks like it’s been stabbed and torn with a knife.

Roman Mars:
But once he was back in New York, Noguchi put Poston behind him. He threw himself into the art scene.

Dakin Hart:
He’s designing furniture, he’s making sculpture, he’s building a career in New York City.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi steps back from his utopian ideas about art and sculpture, and this is the period when he designed some of the things he’s most famous for today, including the iconic coffee table.

Roman Mars:
Noguchi’s career in sculpture really took off, and he also got to design other kinds of environments. He designed dance sets for Martha Graham and sculpture gardens for corporations like IBM and Chase Bank. He was schmoozing up a storm, becoming a household name and a real star of mid-century art and design.

Jackson Roach:
Still, Noguchi has that hunger in his soul for something more meaningful than the New York art scene. He still wants to make something that can transcend a gallery space.

Isamu Noguchi:
And that is because, again, I have this feeling that sculpture was an important part of the living experience, you see, and not something for collectors to buy.

Roman Mars:
After a decade of looking inward, indulging in the adoration of the art world and recovering from Poston, Noguchi turns his sights back to playgrounds.

Jackson Roach:
He couldn’t shake that realization that he’d had, that playgrounds were actually the perfect way for a sculptor to make real change in the world. So he tried two more times to build playgrounds for New York. Once in 1950 at the new UN building and another in the early sixties, in Riverside Park.

Roman Mars:
And again, Noguchi’s playground plans were shot down by the city. But something was different in this round of rejections, because Noguchi was now mega famous. Everyone in the art world had heard all about his rejected playground designs. They’d been written up in newspapers and the models were displayed in museums, so other architects, artists and designers started copying them.

Alexandra Lange:
So there are a fair number of people in the 50’s and 60’s making abstract concrete forms and saying that they’re for children.

Jackson Roach:
It becomes a movement, a whole strand of playground design that Noguchi kind of founded. Alexandra Lang calls this the Abstractionist Strand. You can play with an abstract form any way you want, and imagine it as anything you like.

Alexandra Lange:
These shapes can become anything in your mind.

Jackson Roach:
In the 60s and seventies designers, artists and architects build abstract playgrounds all over the world. Climbing arches and stepping stones in Amsterdam, blobby triple slides in Austria, webs of steel and rope in Japan, and in the U.S., modular octahedrons and pixelated wooden landscapes, all made by famous architect designing and building abstract non-directive playgrounds. Even Noguchi himself was able to build some abstract-ish sculptural playground equipment in the 60’s and 70’s.

Alexandra Lange:
Noguchi was one of the first people to say that and make those things and kind of taking children seriously as connoisseurs of form, in a way.

Roman Mars:
It would seem like the perfect time for Noguchi to build the thing he wanted his whole life, the true Play Mountain vision of something that could turn landscapes into massive abstract forms.

Jackson Roach:
But just as it seems, Noguchi’s ideas are gaining traction, it’s cut short as the 60’s turned to the 70’s and the seventies draw to a close. The abstract playground movement goes underground, because in the 1980s the entire world of playground design in the US changed dramatically.

Roman Mars:
After the break, why the abstractionist movement went underground and why your neighborhood playground probably looks very similar to every other neighborhood playground. After this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
A boy named Frank Nelson was climbing a 12 foot tall slide in a Chicago park because that’s just how tall slides used to be. He slipped through the railing off the steps and hit his head on hard asphalt.

Alexandra Lange:
And has permanent brain damage.

Jackson Roach:
Frank became paralyzed on his left side. Yet problems of vision and speech had to wear a helmet to protect his fractured skull.

Alexandra Lange:
So there’s this big lawsuit where the park system of Chicago has to pay out millions of dollars.

Roman Mars:
9.5 million dollars to be exact. The accident was in 1978 and it changed everything.

Jackson Roach:
At the time there were no laws or real industry standards even when it came to the safety of playground equipment. But Frank Nelson’s fall was one of a number of lawsuits that led to Consumer Product Safety Commission to publish the handbook for public playground safety in 1981. Then another standards organization the ISTM published its own guidelines. Pretty soon these rulebooks were in the hands of insurance companies and parks departments and school boards across the United States.

Roman Mars:
And now to this day almost all playgrounds have to be approved by certified playground safety inspectors.

Craig Faitel:
Craig Faitel with safe to play.

Craig Faitel:
Today I want to go over with you just a few of the things that I use to make sure that your playground is safe.

Jackson Roach:
When I do that this is a YouTube video that a certified playground safety inspector uses to advertise his services. He’s standing on your typical modern playground and he has a bunch of these weirdly shaped metal objects on sticks.

Roman Mars:
They’re all different sizes. Each approximating different child sized body parts a hand foot ahead.

Craig Faitel:
A prob here which could imitate head at nine inches so the feet would go in and then the head would get stuck. So obviously we don’t want that to happen.

Roman Mars:
And safety inspectors basically tried jamming these probes into every space or gap on a playground looking for places where kids could fall or get pinched poked or trapped.

Jackson Roach:
Obviously no one wants kids getting hurt on playgrounds but as you might imagine all these rules and regulations make the job of a playground designer a lot harder.

Tom Keller:
Don’t get me wrong the job is fun as hell.

Jackson Roach:
Tom Keller designs playgrounds I’d look forward to coming in here every day because what a blast.

Tom Keller:
But the more rules we have to adhere to, it just becomes more and more difficult. Not impossible but definitely more difficult to think outside the box.

Jackson Roach:
Tom works at Landscape Structures, a playground manufacturing company in Minnesota, and he says playground standards are so detailed that they end up ruling out almost all variation.

Tom Keller:
In the cases of common playground equipment swings slides springing up equipment and stuff like that. They truly create their own being because the rules it’s going to look like this. A slide is a slide and your ability to alter that form is almost impossible.

Roman Mars:
Theoretically we love the idea of a special or unusual playground like even within Tom’s company. They want to manufacture beautiful new forms for kids to play on.

Tom Keller:
Our executives you know they’re like well we want a slide that nobody’s ever thought of. You’ve got to be more creative than that and I’m like guys you know what. You don’t want to read the rulebook because that’s going to bore you to death. But trust me it is what it is.

Jackson Roach:
So the playgrounds that you see everywhere in neighborhood parks and schoolyards, they still all look more or less the same.

Tom Keller:
The majority of playgrounds on the market today are what we refer to as Post Index Systems.

Roman Mars:
Post Index Systems are also called Post and Platform Playgrounds.

Jackson Roach:
And with those you have desks and you have stairs and you have pathways.

Alexandra Lange:
The Post and Platform equipment essentially combines swing slide and monkey bars into one piece of equipment.

Roman Mars:
They’re elevated platforms made of plastic parts in bright primary colors. Sometimes the parts are connected with pathways covered with roofs sometimes with bridges but there are steps and slides and ladders coming off the platforms at every turn.

Alexandra Lange:
Blocking kids from being able to just kind of step off the platform into space. That agglomeration is kind of in response to the safety standards.

Jackson Roach:
Post and Platform playgrounds definitely have more variety than the four S’s that Robert Moses was into. On the Moses style playgrounds, kids were just moving from one repetitive activity to the next. At least with posting platform structures kids can make some decisions about how to get onto the platform and then how to get down from it again.

Roman Mars:
But still posted on platform playgrounds are all remixes of the same basic kit.

Scott Roschi:
It’s time for a change a little bit.

Jackson Roach:
This is Scott Roschi, Creative Director at Landscape Structures. In addition to the standard playground kits, Landscape Structures also designs custom playgrounds for the clients that can afford them. And actually one of Scott’s big inspirations is the work of Isamu Noguchi.

Scott Roschi:
Designs of today as are echoing a lot of what Noguchi’s concepts were.

Jackson Roach:
The kind of abstract playgrounds that Noguchi inspired are starting to re-emerge.

Scott Roschi:
We’re starting to bring them back in a lot of custom playground design.

Jackson Roach:
For these special projects Scott works with a lot of landscape architects. Moving earth around and experimenting with new forms.

Scott Roschi:
We’ve been to playgrounds that we’ve designed that are very abstract and where parents literally say I don’t know how this is supposed to work. That’s the best.

Roman Mars:
And this goes back to Noguchi concept of non-directive play. If adults are confused by a piece of play equipment it often means that kids will be all over it.

Scott Roschi:
The kids are gonna figure it out. They’re going to attack it. They’re going to go and have fun. They’re going to make it play. We don’t have to tell them how to do that. We can make it safe and last a long time and look beautiful. But man let them play.

Jackson Roach:
This resurgence of abstract playgrounds is still developing but special destination playgrounds are experimenting with new materials and processes they’re able to make forms that would have been astronomically expensive to produce in Noguchi’s time. Contemporary designers are now starting to push back against convention and play with more abstract shapes, for communities that can afford custom playgrounds that is.

Alexandra Lange:
So I feel like there are people that are pushing the envelope and you know it’s expensive to start out with. But if more people adopt this equipment the price could come down.

Jackson Roach:
Although there are no playgrounds in New York City with Noguchi’s name on them. His ideas about imagination and freedom to play have left a deep mark on playground designers and are affecting the emerging playgrounds all around us.

Roman Mars:
Noguchi could have never imagined the long shadow of his ideas. For all he knew his greatest concepts had never been made.

Isamu Noguchi:
My best things had never been built. No other playground for them.

Jackson Roach:
That’s a recording from 1973. At that point Noguchi had only ever seen one of his playgrounds kind of built in Japan. A few years later he design another one in Atlanta. But both of these were nothing close to his true play mountain vision. His own city New York had rejected him five times.

Daikin Hart:
Never found a way to break in New York even after Moses was gone for various reasons there’s always a reason. But you know hugely frustrating. This was his home.

Roman Mars:
Noguchi’s model for play mountain remained on display in his studio in Long Island City – an unrealized dream in miniature. That is until January of 1988.

Alexandra Lange:
A man from Sapporo Japan comes and visits Noguchi and is going around his studio in Long Island City. And he says you know what. Like I can get one of your playgrounds built in Sapporo Japan.

Roman Mars:
At this point in 1988, Noguchi is 84 years old. He goes out to visit this marshy site in Sapporo called Moerenuma Park. It’s just perfect. This is the spot where play mountain would finally live.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi started designing play structures and earthworks for the park with his longtime collaborator the architect Shoji Sadao. But in the winter of that year he came down with a cold and when he came back to New York.

Jackson Roach:
It turned into pneumonia and he died.

Jackson Roach:
Noguchi died on December 30, 1988 having designed the vast majority of the park. His collaborator Shoji Sadao continued to work on it. From Noguchi’s death at the end of 1988, Moerenuma Park took 17 years to build.

Roman Mars:
It finally opened in 2005.

Daikin Hart:
It’s enormous. 454 acres.

Jackson Roach:
Dakin calls it “Noguchi Disneyland”. And it’s actually five times the size of Disneyland.

Daikin Hart:
It is kind of an amalgamation of greatest hits of Noguchi’s unexecuted land and playground ideas. In one spot.

Jackson Roach:
It’s 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.

Alexandra Lange:
And you do feel like a tiny version of yourself in this alien city.

Roman Mars:
But most satisfying of all, rising high above this alien landscape, is Play Mountain.

Alexandra Lange:
It’s totally amazing. It’s totally amazing.

Jackson Roach:
Alexandra saw this mountain with her own eyes. A grassy angular pyramid. Surreal in its hugeness. At one hundred feet tall.

Alexandra Lange:
So I went to Sapporo. It was in October. And, I park my bike at the bottom of this flight of like 1,000 steps. It’s really windy. It’s cold. I’m all alone. I mean it’s like I could be on the moon or something and I get to the top of the mountain and there’s a memorial to Noguchi and it says, you know, he made this.

Jackson Roach:
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 – a mountain teleported from the wild alien planet of his mind. The one place Noguchi ever felt he really belonged.

Isamu Noguchi:
Extremely interesting to meet people in this place in the world. And their sense of belonging, how we function in this planet earth. I think I have that kind of feeling about sculpture, like wanting to be inside the sculpture not just looking at, but a part it. It’s your world and the world then becomes a sculpture.

Roman Mars:
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.