A NOTE ON ISAMU NOGUCHI’S PLAYGROUNDS

Architecture exists, or more correctly it is design to exist, which is why it is interesting when an architectural design is never realised and is instead left to float unsuspended through history. An exemplar of this is Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, which exists now as a monument to the constructivist theories of architecture and not to the Bolsheviks who commissioned it. By never being built it is denied one of the primary functions of architecture, to be a place, and yet neither is it a negation of place, non-place.

Architecture exists, or more correctly, it has different states of existence, it moves from realm to realm, from idea, to planning, to building, to completion, and then possible destruction, destruction can occur during any of these stages, and yet there is some fluidity between these states. We have renovation and rebuilding as well as destruction, we can resist the movements of time upon architecture. So what is interesting is when an architectural project never moves becomes anything more concrete than an idea, never passes from planning to building, and it instead becomes a symbol. This can also occur if a building is completely and irrevocably destroyed. There is a juxtaposition here, it is because architecture is a designed as a place for human interaction, architecture defines the way human beings feel, act and behave, and if an architectural project is never realised it can never play host to the exchanges that make up society. Never realised, it can only form part of a semiotic system that hints at these actions, it becomes part, not of architecture, but of philosophy.

When we consider this, in relation to the designs for the playgrounds Isamu Noguchi planned for outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, we must consider the planned type of human interaction that would occur there. For example, Tatlin’s Monument was planned to house Soviet government, Noguchi though, designed a playground, a place where one of the purest types of interaction occurs, play. Psychgeographry is concerned with how we live and how we want to live, but it is also concerned with how we ought to want to live, this rogue ought forms the basis of theories of psychogeography, especially in theories of urbanism. This will often focus on play, especially in the use of play to create new geographical contours for the city. Noguchi’s architectural playgrounds are the place designated for enjoyment, and all other spaces of enjoyment, from sporting arena to the cinema and the pub, follow on from the role play has in socialising young children in the playground. And because these playgrounds were never realised they themselves turn into the psychogeographical theories of how we ought to want to live.

Noguchi’s playground are not usual playgrounds, his approach is via the theories of urbanism, those that centre on the radical use of play and on the idea of maximising the spaces in a city designated for areas of play, by titling and angling the surfaces of his playgrounds they become part moonscape, part Dali’s draping clocks. Play is turned into a surreal activity, mythic in its ritualism, they are putting forward suppositions about how we should be socialised into functioning civilian adults from children, and yet they represent a sort of dystopian image of socialisation, it is Lord of the Flies as Modernist architecture not as allegory. Through their geographical location, next to the United Nations building, they are positioned as an area for the socialisation of future world leaders and so it predicts dystopian futures. It sits in the theoretical shadow of the United Nations organisation itself. The playgrounds aimed to pervert the way we ought to want to live through altering the environment that contains the early acts human interaction and socialisation; it twists our future, adult relationships into dystopia.