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Noguchi work dismantled - Front Page
Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Janet Koplos
Shin Banraisha, a room and adjacent garden designed in 1952 by Isamu Noguchi for Keio University in Tokyo, was dismantled early this past summer to facilitate the expansion of the university's law school. The indoor installation, a meditative space located within a building of the same name and used as a faculty room, was designed as a memorial to the artist's father, a poet who taught at Keio. It was described in a Noguchi catalogue of the time as "an experiment based on cooperation between architecture and sculpture." The room focused on a round hearth. It involved several levels of flooring as well as seating designed by Noguchi, including African and Western-style benches and chairs and several types of Japanese-style seating. The garden centered on a large sandstone sculpture called Mu (a Zen term for fertile nothingness).
Because Shin Banraisha was site-specific, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation of New York and Japan and other supporters maintain that altering it in any way, even relocating or re-creating it, would destroy it. (Another Noguchi project of the same period, the gardens at the Reader's Digest Building in Tokyo, was previously demolished.) The university maintains that not only was the building in poor condition, the site had become crowded by other buildings and not easily accessible; Taisei Construction Co. is to reinstall the elements on the third floor of the new building, with the Mu garden on a terrace. However, the Noguchi Foundation holds the copyright to the design and has not agreed to the plan.
Shin Banraisha was created in collaboration with the architect Yoshiro Taniguchi (father of Yoshio Taniguchi, architect for the current expansion of New York's Museum of Modern Art), and was regarded as a symbol of postwar regeneration in Japan. The installation was a synthesis of "modern primitive," Surrealist and biomorphic styles typical of Noguchi's sculpture of the time, when he made an extended visit to Japan and produced a body of ceramic sculpture.
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