Monuments And Memorials

The monuments and memorials of Isamu Noguchi contain some of his most important ideas for public sculpture , although only two of them have been built.  Among Noguchi's first large-scale sculpture proposals in 1933 were two monuments: The unrealized mile-long Monument to the Plough, to be located at the geographical center of the United States, and the Monument to Ben Franklin, which fifty years later was re-engineered and constructed at the base of the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. During that socially-conscious decade Noguchi also submitted a proposal for a memorial to labor leader Carl Mackley.The Second World War was wrenching for this artist of mixed Japanese and American ancestry, eliciting the powerful model for a Monument to Heroes during the war and two proposals for a memorial to those who perished in the atomic bomb blast: A tall Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1950), and Memorial to the Dead, Hiroshima (1952), commissioned by the city but finally rejected because Noguchi was an American. (In this period Noguchi also designed a memorial room to his father at Keio University in Tokyo.) Noguchi's pessimism about the atomic age was expressed in the proposal for Sculpture to be Seen from Mars, first entitled Memorial to Man, an earthwork  face, large enough to be recognized from space, informing others that an intelligent life form once had existed on our planet. Noguchi also designed several monuments to great leaders, none of which were built: Memorial at Gandhi's Burial Place at Raj-gat, India (1948), Memorial to Buddha (1957) and Tomb for John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1964). But the last monument that Noguchi designed, memorializing those who had perished in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, was constructed in his Bayfront Park in Miami, Florida.

Noguchi on Memorial to the Dead, Hiroshima |  Noguchi on Tomb for John F. Kennedy  | Noguchi on Study for a Memorial to Buddha