A Prescient, Pre-Skateboarding Landscape + Newsletter Launch
Model for Contoured Playground, with original equipment attachments, 1941. Plaster and steel. Photo: F.S. Lincoln. Reproduced with the permission of the Special Collections Library, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries.
Upon first glance, it’s easy to see what this is. A mellow roll-in, the curves of a snakerun, bowled corners, a hip — this is the image of a concrete skatepark.
Except it’s not. Isamu Noguchi, whom you may know from his furniture designs or his namesake museum in Queens, NY also designed several playgrounds. The image above is one such design, titled Contoured Playground, and was devised for placement in Central Park. Yeah…we know.
Model for Contoured Playground, 1941 (enlarged and fabricated 2018). Photo: Nicholas Knight. ©INFGM / ARS
Stranger than the fact that this skatepark-esque landscape came from the mind of a furniture designer is it was created in 1941, decades before proper skateboards had been put to use.
One wonders how a landscape such as this could be created without skateboarding (or something like it) in mind. What’s the point of all these curved shapes if you can’t roll over them?
Noguchi himself said that he intended his creation to be “a primer of shapes and functions; simple, mysterious, and evocative; thus educational.”
Installation view, In Search of Contoured Playground, August 21, 2019 – February 2, 2020. Photo: Nicholas Knight. ©INFGM / ARS
We often forget how much we learn about our surroundings by rolling over them. Anyone who’s skated can tell you about the texture of the ground in one area versus another, about characteristics of neighborhoods others never seem to pick up on (which have trees with those weird seeds that get stuck in your wheels), and are definitely more attuned to the presence of elevation changes (hills!). Perhaps this is the kind of awareness that Noguchi sought to instill in the children who would have utilized his playground.
It’s also a reminder that we’re only able to do what we do because our surroundings are conducive to it. Imagine if international style architects like Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe were fans of using wood instead of granite and marble, we’d be living and skating a very different world.
This playground sadly never came to life, but Noguchi did succeed in getting a couple other playground concepts built.
Playscapes, Atlanta GA. Photo by Martha Clifford
Playscapes, Atlanta GA. Photo by Martha Clifford
Playscapes in Atlanta, GA is a Noguchi playground that made it from concept to finished product, and although it lacks the smooth surface of his New York concept, one look at the mound and concrete blocks that are present lets you know the same mind & impulses were at work.
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