Water

Throughout his career, beginning with the magnesite Chassis Fountain for the Ford Motor Company pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, Isamu Noguchi used water as a material for sculpture. Noguchi's fountains are among his most innovative work, using new materials and technologies, and novel designs, to investigate the sculptural possibilities of water. His most ambitious fountains were fabricated of stainless steel: The computer-controlled Horace E. Dodge Fountain, the centerpiece of his Philip A Hart Plaza in Detroit, and the nine exuberant fountains constructed at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. But Noguchi also employed the traditional Japanese conjunction of water and stone to create fountains of a more meditative mood, first at the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and later at the Supreme Court Building in Tokyo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York.

Noguchi on Billy Rose sculpture garden