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SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: That's reporter Jackson Roach.
SPEAKER_07: 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, hashtag FYNCT, which stands for fuck your Noguchi coffee table, which basically means fuck your bougie cliche interiors.
SPEAKER_03: Which is ironic because like all eventual cliches, Noguchi himself was quite avant-garde.
SPEAKER_11: Noguchi was a prodigy, a sculpting prodigy.
SPEAKER_07: Isamu Noguchi was a sculptor and he was so much more than that.
SPEAKER_11: Choreographers and fashion designers and art directors and you know, a whole lot of different people across a really wide creative swath looked to Noguchi as a point of inspiration.
SPEAKER_07: This is Daiken 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.
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_07: Noguchi's sculptures seem to twist and balance on themselves, undulating with form and texture. But this is all his later work.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_11: He called it head busting and he did it just to make money, or he said he did 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_09: In 1933, having done some more heads and so forth, and being disgusted with doing heads, one has desire to get away, you know, into another dimension. I suppose the same thing that makes us go to the moon. Desire to get away.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_11: Noguchi said that he wanted people to feel like the first person on earth, the first person to explore earth.
SPEAKER_03: And so he started to think of a concept for a giant public sculpture. It looked like a massive, massive pyramid.
SPEAKER_07: Imagine a cross between a Mayan temple and a mountain, pushing up out of the earth with a long slide sloping down it and steps on two of its faces.
SPEAKER_11: It is a step pyramid, essentially. But on each side, the steps are different heights, and they're irregular. They're asymmetrical.
SPEAKER_03: But it wasn't just a sculpture for a museum or a bank plaza. Noguchi thought of it as a playground. He called it Play Mountain.
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_07: This giant ziggurat wouldn't come with any specific instructions. It 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.
SPEAKER_11: And I think Noguchi hoped that by making playgrounds, he could impact people at that key stage in development.
SPEAKER_03: In fact, the inspiration for Play Mountain came to Noguchi when he was at this key stage himself, when he was a little boy.
SPEAKER_07: 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 Gilmore. They met when she answered an ad he placed in the paper for a translator and assistant. Pretty much as soon as Isamu was born, Yone abandoned them and went back to Japan.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_11: But from their little house in the little town they lived in on the seaside, they did have a great view of Mount Fuji, but Fuji quite far away, so like just the perfect little pyramid. So you can imagine that view that this little boy has every day going down the stairs seeing Mount Fuji.
SPEAKER_07: That idea of his own Mount 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.
SPEAKER_11: So it was like, imagine taking Mount Fuji and turning it into a giant play structure. I think that's what Play Mountain was.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_07: Noguchi brought Moses a model of Play Mountain, two feet square, made of 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, and dunks it down on Robert Moses's desk.
SPEAKER_04: And says, what if we, you know, we build this for the children of the city?
SPEAKER_07: This is Alexandra Lang, architecture critic at Curbed and author of The Design of Childhood.
SPEAKER_04: And Moses is like, no way.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 have cost a ton of money. And he just laughed his head off and threw us out, more or less.
SPEAKER_04: Like, no way, dope. Like, four S's, I'm just going to order them. And like, we're going to have, you know, 400 playgrounds by tomorrow.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_11: He took his model and went home fuming and he fumed about it for the rest of his life,
SPEAKER_03: really. 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: This philosophy would later be called non-directive play.
SPEAKER_07: 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 Ala Moana Park.
SPEAKER_03: But that fell through.
SPEAKER_07: Still not discouraged, Noguchi pitches his Hawaii playground ideas back to the New York Parks Department again.
SPEAKER_03: Then he gets rejected. But Noguchi is relentless.
SPEAKER_11: And so Noguchi, still excited by the challenge, went off and designed Contoured Playground.
SPEAKER_07: Contoured Playground is really gentle. Basically a smooth, abstracted landscape of sloping hills and dales and riverbeds. 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.
SPEAKER_03: But by then, the year was 1941, and Noguchi's plans were about to change.
SPEAKER_07: Noguchi was in California visiting a friend, and he was out shopping for some onyx for a sculpture.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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. And my immediate reaction was, oh well, oh my god, I'm a Japanese.
SPEAKER_09: Or I'm a Nisei at least.
SPEAKER_03: Nisei or Americans born to Japanese parents.
SPEAKER_07: With the U.S. entering World War II, Contoured Playground was forgotten by both the Parks Department and Noguchi. There were bigger stakes now. I felt I ought to be able to help in some way.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_09: So we had these meetings, and our intention was that we would counteract the bad press to stop the kind of hysteria that's developing.
SPEAKER_03: But that hysteria was quickly coming to a head. Barely two months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Evacuation orders with fast approaching deadlines started landing on people's doorsteps.
SPEAKER_09: We had 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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, D.C.
SPEAKER_09: So I went to Washington, you know, went around inquiring whether there was anything I could do. Finally, I happened to bump into John Collier.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: John Collier was relatively progressive. He wanted to give tribal governments more autonomy and support Native American culture. And then, suddenly, he had been given the task of designing and building prison camps on reservation land. Noguchi reached out to him.
SPEAKER_09: He said, well, come on over and let's talk about it.
SPEAKER_07: Noguchi and Collier started talking about what they could do with this assignment, now that there was no way to prevent internment from happening.
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Noguchi drew up a suite of plans for the largest of the camps being built, the one at Poston, Arizona.
SPEAKER_09: I made plans for the park development and this and that and the other to make it into a park-like place.
SPEAKER_07: Noguchi took the rigid grid of a military-style camp with rows and rows of tar paper 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, a botanical garden, sports fields and a mini golf course, and playgrounds.
SPEAKER_11: 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 plonked down in the middle of nowhere where they are expected to live, quote unquote. What does that mean? What is a life? What does life consist of? How what does it need to be real, to feel real? The playground is critical to it.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_09: And that's how I happened to go to Poston.
SPEAKER_07: 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. So Noguchi got to Poston like a week before it opened.
SPEAKER_09: So I was one of the people getting the place ready.
SPEAKER_09: All the people were coming in there to help, you see, and I was among them.
SPEAKER_03: 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 plonked 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 traitor in cahoots with the camp administrators.
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Because it was a prison camp.
SPEAKER_07: All of John Collier's and Noguchi's idealistic plans were ignored.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_11: And they wouldn't let him leave.
SPEAKER_07: Which was definitely not a part of the plan.
SPEAKER_11: He had no idea that he wouldn't be able to leave. So I was locked up and I couldn't get off for seven months, you see, and that made me
SPEAKER_09: very uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Noguchi wrote to one of his famous friends, the artist Man Ray, quote, Here time has stopped and nothing is of any consequence, nothing of any value, neither our time or our skill. The world is nuts.
SPEAKER_07: After seven months and many, many letters and phone calls, John Collier was able to get Noguchi out.
SPEAKER_09: After seven months, you know, I got out on a pass.
SPEAKER_03: And he never went back.
SPEAKER_07: 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?
SPEAKER_04: You know, trying to make a prison better when the prison shouldn't exist.
SPEAKER_07: Critic Alexander Lang again.
SPEAKER_04: Like he thought he could make this internment camp more humane, but it's in a sense like it's an inhumane endeavor.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_09: When I finally landed back in New York in 1942, must have been late fall of 42, you
SPEAKER_09: see, I got back. I had about enough of all causes and everything else and I just, you know, f*** the whole
SPEAKER_09: works. I mean, I wasn't going to have any better to do with it.
SPEAKER_07: After Poston, the idea of designing public works and playgrounds must have 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 that looks like it's been stabbed and torn with a knife.
SPEAKER_03: But once he was back in New York, Noguchi put Poston behind him. He threw himself into the art scene.
SPEAKER_11: He's designing furniture, he's making sculpture, he's building a career in New York City.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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 the storm, becoming a household name and a real star of mid-century art and design.
SPEAKER_07: 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. And that is because, again, I have this feeling that sculpture was an important part of the
SPEAKER_09: living experience, you see, and not something for collectors to buy.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 60s in Riverside Park.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_04: So there are a fair number of people in the 50s and 60s making abstract concrete forms and saying that they are for children.
SPEAKER_07: It becomes a movement, a whole strand of playground design that Noguchi kind of founded. Alexandra Lange calls this the abstractionist strand. You can play with an abstract form any way you want, and imagine it as anything you like.
SPEAKER_04: These shapes can become anything in your mind.
SPEAKER_07: In the 60s and 70s, 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 US, modular octahedrons and pixelated wooden landscapes, all made by famous architects designing and building abstract, non-directive playgrounds. Even Noguchi himself was able to build some abstract-ish sculptural playground equipment in the 60s and 70s.
SPEAKER_04: You know, 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_07: But just as it seems Noguchi's ideas are gaining traction, it's cut short. As the 60s turn to the 70s and the 70s 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Visit article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_03: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Did you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. A two-year-old 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.
SPEAKER_04: Um, has permanent brain damage.
SPEAKER_07: Frank became paralyzed on his left side. He had problems with vision and speech and had to wear a helmet to protect his fractured skull.
SPEAKER_04: So there's this big lawsuit where the park system of Chicago has to pay out millions of dollars.
SPEAKER_03: 9.5 million dollars to be exact. The accident was in 1978, and it changed everything.
SPEAKER_07: 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 the Consumer Product Safety Commission to publish the Handbook for Public Playground Safety in 1981. Then another standards organization, the ASTM, published its own guidelines. Pretty soon these rule books were in the hands of insurance companies and parks departments and school boards across the United States.
SPEAKER_03: And now, to this day, almost all playgrounds have to be approved by certified playground safety inspectors.
SPEAKER_01: Hi, Craig Fatale with Safe2Play. 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. This is a YouTube video that a certified playground safety inspector uses to advertise his services.
SPEAKER_07: He's standing on your typical modern playground, and he has a bunch of these weirdly shaped metal objects on sticks. They're all different sizes, each approximating different child-sized body parts.
SPEAKER_03: A hand, a foot, a head.
SPEAKER_01: Probe here, which could imitate a 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_10: Don't get me wrong, the job is fun as hell.
SPEAKER_07: Tom Keller designs playgrounds.
SPEAKER_10: I look forward to coming in here every day because what a blast. 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_10: In the cases of common playground equipment, swings, slides, springing equipment, and stuff like that, they truly create their own being because of the rules. It's going to look like this. A slide is a slide and your ability to alter that form is almost impossible.
SPEAKER_03: Theoretically, we love the idea of a special or unusual playground. Even within Tom's company, they want to manufacture beautiful new forms for kids to play on.
SPEAKER_10: Our executives, 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 rule book because that's going to bore you to death. But trust me, it is what it is.
SPEAKER_07: So the playgrounds that you see everywhere in neighborhood parks and school yards, they still all look more or less the same.
SPEAKER_10: The majority of playgrounds on the market today are what we refer to as post and deck systems.
SPEAKER_03: Post and deck systems are also called post and platform playgrounds. And with those, you have decks and you have stairs and you have pathways.
SPEAKER_04: The post and platform equipment essentially combines swing, slide and monkey bars into one piece of equipment.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_04: Stacking 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 post and platform structures, kids can make some decisions about how to get onto the platform and then how to get down from it again.
SPEAKER_03: But still, post and platform playgrounds are all remixes of the same basic kit.
SPEAKER_02: It's time for a change a little bit.
SPEAKER_07: This is Scott Roshi, 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.
SPEAKER_02: The kinds of today are echoing a lot of what Noguchi's concepts were.
SPEAKER_07: The kind of abstract playgrounds that Noguchi inspired are starting to re-emerge.
SPEAKER_02: We're starting to bring them back in a lot of custom playground design.
SPEAKER_07: For these special projects, Scott works with a lot of landscape architects, moving earth around and experimenting with new forms.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_03: And this goes back to Noguchi's 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.
SPEAKER_02: The kids are going to 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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. More communities that can afford custom playgrounds, that is.
SPEAKER_04: So I feel like there are people that are pushing the envelope. It's expensive to start out with, but if more people adopt this equipment, the price could come down.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Noguchi could have never imagined the long shadow of his ideas. For all he knew, his greatest concepts had never been made.
SPEAKER_09: My best things had never been built. None of the playgrounds were built.
SPEAKER_07: 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 designed 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.
SPEAKER_11: Never found a way to break through in New York, even after Moses was gone, for various reasons. There was always a reason, but, you know, hugely frustrating. This was his home.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_03: At this point in 1988, Noguchi is 84 years old. He goes out to visit this marshy site in Sapporo called Morinuma Park. It's just perfect. This is the spot where play mountain would finally live.
SPEAKER_07: 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, it turned into pneumonia, and he died.
SPEAKER_07: 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, Morinuma Park took 17 years to build.
SPEAKER_03: It finally opened in 2005. It's enormous.
SPEAKER_07: 454 acres. Bacon calls it Noguchi Disneyland. And it's actually five times the size of Disneyland.
SPEAKER_11: It is kind of an amalgamation, a greatest hits, of all of Noguchi's unexecuted land and playground ideas in one spot.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, you do feel like a tiny version of yourself in this alien city.
SPEAKER_03: But most satisfying of all, rising high above this alien landscape, is Play Mountain.
SPEAKER_04: It's totally amazing. It's totally amazing.
SPEAKER_07: Alexandra saw this mountain with her own eyes. A grassy, angular pyramid, surreal in its hugeness at 100 feet tall.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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. It's extremely interesting to me, people's place in the world.
SPEAKER_09: Their sense of belonging. How we function in this planet Earth, you see. I think I have that kind of feeling about sculpture, like wanting to be inside the sculpture. It's not just looking at it, you see, but part of it. It's your world. It's the world. And the world then becomes a sculpture.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_04: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jackson Roach and edited by Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_03: Jackson Truffleman is the director of the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. Audio of Noguchi comes from a 1973 oral history interview held by the Smithsonian archives of American art. Special thanks to Katie Swanson and everyone at Landscape Structures, Janine Biyuno and the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Diana Nguyen, Carlos Morales and Marfa Public Radio, Stefania Gomez, Liza Yeager, Marlene Shigagawa and the Poston Community Alliance and Preservation Project and the staff of the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation Museum. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.FL. You can find the show and enjoy discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit too. But your digital playground for design stories is at 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
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