An Afternoon At The Noguchi Museum

Outside what used to be the Chase Manhattan Bank in lower Manhattan hides a sunken plaza designed by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi. I found myself there by accident early one morning, drinking a coffee and watching the sun move between the various skyscrapers of Wall Street. 

Built in the early 1960s, the plaza draws your eye down into the earth, rather than up toward the impenetrable wall of steel and glass that defines the Manhattan skyline. Noguchi wanted to build a Zen garden amid the chaos of the city, something tantalisingly just out of reach, below you. The plaza contains seven natural stones that Noguchi found in the Uji River in Japan, raised up on granite bricks laid out in patterns of concentric circles, water gently ebbing around them. 

Many of Noguchi’s works can be discovered just like this: stumbled upon in the public arenas of the city as small, tender oases of calm. Primordial sculptures erupting into the forecourts of office blocks and metropolitan institutions: strange material experimentations, elegant curves, geometric abstractions. In their slowness and tranquility they feel increasingly spiritually relevant for a world of endless and accelerating busyness.  

Inspired by this small encounter, and without much else to do on a Saturday in New York, I crossed the Roosevelt Island Bridge and headed into Queens, navigating Long Island City’s landscape of light industry to visit the Noguchi Museum, housed in the Japanese master’s former studio. 

It was this industry that brought Noguchi to Queens in the first place. He left Manhattan in search of more space and increasingly complex fabrications to make the large-scale works he was being commissioned for. Noguchi bought the building that now houses the museum in 1974. It had once been a photogravure plant that had fallen out of use and sat abandoned directly across from a studio he’d occupied since the 1960s. He began turning it into a museum dedicated to his work, which opened in 1985, three years before his death in 1988. 

The museum is enclosed by high brick walls on one side, with a willow tree creeping out over concrete on the other. Noguchi restored and reworked the decayed spaces of the old plant, partly for use as a studio, but also with an eye on the future, creating a garden and a permanent space for the display of his works. He conceived of the museum from the beginning as a living, evolving thing, rather than a mausoleum. 

Famously, Noguchi lived a transient life. Born in 1904 in Los Angeles to a Japanese poet father and an American mother, he spent his early years in Japan before being sent back to America in 1918 to attend boarding school in Indiana. He then moved briefly to Connecticut to assist the sculptor Gutzon Borglum before going to New York to attend medical school. He didn’t last long, dropping out and earned a living making portrait busts while studying art. 

An encounter with an exhibition of the work Constantin Brancusi led him to Paris, where he worked for the legendary artist for six months. Inspired by Brancusi’s explorations of abstract, minimalist sculptural forms—and the way he reshaped the relationship between sculpture and its base—Noguchi began to find new modes of expression in his own work. 

From his upended youth he developed an idea of art as an expression of belonging: a desire to expand on Brancusi’s ideas about sculptural space into large environmental forms and complex arrangements. 

“The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature.” 

You can read much of his work as a reaction to that exile and displacement—never quite Japanese enough for Japan, too Japanese to be American. The museum then becomes a permanent home. The sculpture is heavy and rooted and defiantly public, or else domesticated and universal and disseminated widely. His sculptural coffee tables and Akari light sculptures are still in production today, ubiquitous both in their original forms and in countless soft imitations. He was a relentless collaborator, working with architects, other artists, designers, dancers, musicians, searching for hybridity across the arts in diverse forms of creation, and it’s this synthesis the museum celebrates: the melding of forms in a single space as a search for unity. 

Entering the museum, you are greeted immediately by the garden—and it’s the garden that feels like the heart of the museum. If Noguchi seems to stand outside the art movements that ruptured and redefined the 20th century, it’s because he relentlessly searched for new ways of artmaking that returned to the fundamental materiality of sculpture. His objects are archaic, primitive, clear, and mystical. For all Noguchi’s monumentality elsewhere, the museum is intimate and human in scale and scope.   

The garden feels like the museum’s heart because it is the clearest expression of the synthetic impulse that drives Noguchi’s work: the ideal of the stone in its correct place outdoors, in relationship to the ground, the open sky, and the scale between them. It’s about the holistic interplay between the sculpted forms of marble or granite and the natural world from which they’ve been plucked. “Stone has a time passage, not unlike our own,” he once said. “The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature.” 

It’s a temporal experience—one modulated by changes in weather, by how time and erosion affect a sculpture left outdoors, the garden and its foliage, and the way all these elements relate. But also a personal one, there are no explanatory texts telling you what to think, just a list of titles—Seeking, Miharu, Tsukubai—and materials—Mannari granite, Manazuru stone, Roman travertine—and a space for contemplation.   

The museum—arranged over two floors, a garden, and a series of galleries—contains the work Noguchi treasured, never sold, and left behind after he died. As much as it is a repository of his work, the museum also serves as a way to understand the artist’s way of thinking. It’s a testament to his point of view. 

“I don’t only live today, but also yesterday and tomorrow.” 

This year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the museum’s opening, the second floor has been restored as closely as possible to the original installation proposed by Noguchi when the museum opened—reassembled from archival photographs. It consists of sculptures Noguchi made in Long Island City, works he considered to be personal stylistic breakthroughs. 

“I don’t only live today, but also yesterday and tomorrow,” Noguchi once said. It’s interesting now to consider, almost 40 years after his death, and as the artist’s “today” becomes our yesterday, the renewed relevance of Noguchi to us. His design remains everywhere, but also his influence on contemporary aesthetics has only deepened since his death.  

Architects such as Tadao Ando and John Pawson, to musicians like Ryuichi Sakamoto, have drawn on his meditative balance between material, space, and light. Even the pared-down aesthetic of Apple or Muji carries traces of his sensibility, in the belief that clarity, simplicity, and craftsmanship can be forms of spiritual calm. His floating fountains for Expo ’70 in Osaka, with their play of water, light, and rhythm, now resurface across design mood boards as icons of serene futurism. 

The way he sought to dissolve the boundaries between sculpture, design, and everyday existence, making beauty both functional and democratic and sensitive, feels increasingly relevant for how we understand, or should understand, creativity today.  

In a piece on the museum in 2009, as it celebrated its 25th anniversary, The New York Times suggested, pejoratively, that “Noguchi is about as relevant as Henry Moore.” I might suggest that’s still true today, but in a complimentary manner. Among the teeming, maddening bustle of life in 2025, Noguchi and Moore are perhaps more relevant than ever: loved for their simplicity, spirituality, and sense of calm and peace. The museum is a place of quiet reflection amid the city’s hypermodernism.