PLAY MOUNTAIN: ISAMU NOGUCHI + LOUIS KAHN
Shizuko Watari [Planner & Supervisor]
Shizuko Watari [Planner & Supervisor]: PLAY MOUNTAIN: ISAMU NOGUCHI + LOUIS KAHN. Tokyo: Malmo Publications for the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996. First edition. Parallel text in English and Japanese. Square quarto. Photo illustrated French folded wrappers. Black textured endpapers. Publishers obi. 165 pp. Fully illustrated in color and black and white. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Red obi band sun faded at spine, otherwise a nearly fine copy of this beautiful catalog.
10.25 x 9.5 perfect-bound softcover catalog with 165 pages of color and black and white illustrations that document the history of the unbuilt Riverside Drive Park Playground [1961–1966] collaboration between Isamu Noguchi and Louis I. Kahn.
“The sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904 – 1988) first began to explore how art could shape and mold an urban landscape in the early 1930s. In 1934, with one project in hand, he made use of a social connection to meet with New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. Noguchi brought with him an unusual plaster sculpture, measuring about 25 inches square, featuring a low pyramid with a central concave area, ridged side, and a curved edge. Play Mountain was an informal model for an equipment-less playground to be constructed entirely out of shaped earth. As proposed, the realized playground would take up one city block, including earth piled to form a central pyramid and shelter with steps along one side, carved slopes to form a built-in slide and accommodate sledding, a swimming pool, and a band shell with the steps doubling as seating. With no added equipment, children's exercise would be derived by running, jumping, and climbing in and around the massive sculptured earth form. The design was never built.
“In 1960, a group on Manhattan's Upper West Side interested in restoring a derelict 1930s playground in Riverside Park between the West Side Highway and 103rd Street approached her to ask Noguchi to participate. Reluctant at first based on his past difficulties with playgrounds and his busy schedule abroad, Noguchi accepted the task owing to two factors. First was the new leadership of Parks Commissioner Newbold Morris who had expressed “his wholehearted interest and almost certain approval” of the project. Second, it was suggested to Noguchi that an architect could be invited to collaborate. Noguchi joined the project in December 1960, and in August 1961 architect Louis I. Kahn was asked to participate.
“Noguchi and Kahn began their five-year collaboration in the fall of 1961. All told, they would create over a dozen models. It was an ideal moment for the project in some ways, as both men were reaching the peak of their respective careers, and public interest in new approaches to playground design had grown since the end of the Moses era. Unfortunately, the Parks Department, even without Moses, turned out to be a major obstacle. Responding to the first proposal in January 1962, Commissioner Morris, expecting something on a much smaller scale, complained that Noguchi and Kahn had “permitted their talented imagination to soar with the result that we were presented with the design for an unjustifiable architectural monument.” A resolution to Morris's complaints was found when Hess offered to raise half the funds for the playground if it were presented as a memorial to her aunt, Adele Rosenwald Levy, a well-known philanthropist and community activist who had died in 1960. The offer of funding was too good for Morris to refuse, and it was soon reported that Mayor Robert F. Wagner had backed the project from its inception. However, the Parks Department would continue to obstruct the project in a variety of ways, requesting numerous changes and setting arbitrary deadlines. Kahn expressed concern that the Parks Department was acting too quickly, explaining at one point that a 1962 model was merely a “pre-preliminary” idea. But the Department pushed the model through to the New York City Art Commission, where it was reviewed and rejected with both Kahn and Noguchi absent from the meeting, both busy with projects abroad.
“Throughout 1964, the Parks Department requested changes to keep the project within budget, and it was not until 1965 that the final model was completed. On December 29, 1965 Mayor Wagner held a public signing for the playground's City contract. At the ceremony he claimed that throughout his twelve years in office, “there have been very few projects proposals which have encountered more obstacles, hurdles, hindrances, stumbling blocks and difficulties than this one.”However, 1965 was an election year. The Democratic Wagner was to be succeeded in three days by Republican John V. Lindsay who had pledged to fix the City's growing fiscal and economic problems. The Adele Rosenwald Levy Memorial Playground, with half of the project's cost promised from the city, was an easy target. Furthermore, the bickering among community groups and pending legal action had not been resolved. The project was ultimately abandoned in late 1966 after a taxpayers' suit was ruled in favor of the project's opponents owing to shortage of city funds. Opponents had also instituted new action to stop any city efforts to overrule the State Supreme Court decision, this time alleging “improper use of park land.” — Shaina D. Larrivee, Playscapes: Isamu Noguchi's Designs for Play
Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) (1901 – 1974) was born into a poor Jewish Estonian family and achieved much fame and noriety as an American architect and major-league player based in Philadelphia. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own atelier in 1935. While continuing his private practice, he served as a design critic and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957.
From 1957 until his death, he was a professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Kahn created a style that was monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings for the most part do not hide their weight, their materials, or the way they are assembled. Louis Kahn's works are considered as monumental beyond modernism. Famous for his meticulously built works, his provocative proposals that remained unbuilt, and his teaching, Kahn was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal. At the time of his death he was considered by some as "America's foremost living architect."
Kahn trained at the University of Pennsylvania in a rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, with its emphasis on drawing. After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in 1924, Kahn worked as senior draftsman in the office of the city architect, John Molitor. He worked on the designs for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition. In 1928, Kahn made a European tour. He was interested particularly in the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France, and the castles of Scotland, rather than any of the strongholds of classicism or modernism. After returning to the United States in 1929, Kahn worked in the offices of Paul Philippe Cret, his former studio critic at the University of Pennsylvania, and then with Zantzinger, Borie and Medary in Philadelphia.
In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger founded the Architectural Research Group, whose members were interested in the populist social agenda and new aesthetics of the European avant-gardes. Among the projects Kahn worked on during this collaboration are schemes for public housing that he had presented to the Public Works Administration, which supported some similar projects during the Great Depression. They remained unbuilt.
Among the more important of Kahn's early collaborations was one with George Howe. Kahn worked with Howe in the late 1930s on projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and again in 1940, along with German-born architect Oscar Stonorov, for the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania. A formal architectural office partnership between Kahn and Oscar Stonorov began in February 1942 and ended in March 1947, which produced fifty-four documented projects and buildings.
Kahn did not arrive at his distinctive architectural style until he was in his fifties. Initially working in a fairly orthodox version of the International Style, he was influenced vitally by a stay as Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome during 1950, which marked a turning point in his career. After visiting the ruins of ancient buildings in Italy, Greece, and Egypt, he adopted a back-to-the-basics approach. He developed his own style as influenced by earlier modern movements, but not limited by their sometimes-dogmatic ideologies.
Kahn's teaching career began at Yale University in 1947. He eventually was named as the Albert F. Bemis Professor of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. Kahn then returned to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 until his death, becoming the Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture. He also was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University from 1961 to 1967.
Kahn was elected a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1953. He was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964. He was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal in 1964. In 1965 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award given by the AIA, in 1971, and the Royal Gold Medal by the RIBA, in 1972.
In 1974, Kahn died of a heart attack in a men's restroom at Penn Station in Manhattan. He had just returned from a work trip to India. Owing to police miscommunications in both New York City and Philadelphia, his wife and his office were not notified until two days after his death. After his long career, he was in debt when he died.
Kahn had three children with three women. With his wife, Esther, whom he married in 1930, he had a daughter, Sue Ann. With Anne Tyng, who began her working collaboration and personal relationship with Kahn in 1945, he also had a daughter, Alexandra Tyng. When Tyng became pregnant in 1953, to mitigate the scandal, she went to Rome, Italy, for the birth of their daughter. With Harriet Pattison, he had a son, Nathaniel Kahn.
Kahn's obituary in the New York Times, written by Paul Goldberger, mentions only Esther and his daughter by her as survivors. All of his children and their mothers attended the funeral. In 2003 Nathaniel Kahn released a documentary about his father, entitled, My Architect: A Son's Journey. The Oscar-nominated film provides views and insights into the architecture of Kahn while exploring him personally through people who knew him: family, friends, and colleagues. It also provides insights into Kahn's unusual and complicated family arrangements.
Louis Kahn's work infused the International style with a fastidious, highly personal taste, a poetry of light. His few projects reflect his deep personal involvement with each. Isamu Noguchi called him "a philosopher among architects." He was known for his ability to create monumental architecture that responded to the human scale. He also was concerned with creating strong formal distinctions between served spaces and servant spaces. What he meant by servant spaces was not spaces for servants, but rather spaces that serve other spaces, such as stairwells, corridors, restrooms, or any other back-of-house function such as storage space or mechanical rooms. His palette of materials tended toward heavily textured brick and bare concrete, the textures often reinforced by juxtaposition to highly refined surfaces such as travertine marble. He is often well remembered for his deliberation about the use of brick, on how it can be more than the basic building material:
“If you think of Brick, you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’ And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, Brick?’ Brick says, ‘I like an Arch.’ And it’s important, you see, that you honor the material that you use. [..] You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it.”