99% Invisible - 351- Play Mountain

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

Even if you don't recognize a Noguchi table by name, you've definitely seen one. In movies or tv shows when they want to show that a lawyer or art dealer is really sophisticated, they put a Noguchi table in their waiting room. Noguchi was a world renowned sculptor and he had huge ambitions. His largest and most personal concept was a giant public sculpture that took the form of a massive pyramid. Try to Imagine a cross between a Mayan temple and a mountain. It pushes out of the earth with a long slide sloping down with steps on two of its faces. Noguchi thought of it as a playground, and he called it Play Mountain. Noguchi’s ideas - about imagination, and freedom to play - have left a deep mark on playground designers, and are continuing to shape the playgrounds all around us. Play Mountain

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. You may have seen a Nukuchi table. Actually, I know you've seen it. It's like the coffee table. In movies or TV shows when they want to show that a lawyer or an art dealer is really sophisticated, they put a Nukuchi table in their waiting room.

And it is really a beautiful table. Two curvy wooden legs interlock and support this heavy slab of glass, which seems like it's almost floating above them. That's reporter Jackson Roach. Since the Naguchi coffee table was introduced in 1948, it's become one of the emblems of mid-century industrial design. It has its own Wikipedia page, and there's a thriving Instagram hashtag hashtag f-y-n-c-t which stands for F**k Your Noguchi Coffee Table which basically means F**k Your Fuji Klee Che interiors Which is ironic because like all eventual Klee Shays

Noguchi himself was quite of unguard Noguchi was a prodigy, a sculpting prodigy Isamu Noguchi was a sculptor, and he was so much more than that. Choreographers and fashion designers and art directors, and a whole lot of different people across a really wide creative swath looked at Niguchi as a point of inspiration. This is Dakin Hart, Senior Curator of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Noguchi himself built this studio in Queens to house a lifetime of his abstract, evocative experiments in stone and metal.

Hart says Noguchi was challenging himself with every sculpture. Can I make something hard feel soft? Can I make something heavy feel light? Can I make something heavy feel light? Can I make something far away feel like it's right next to you? You know, to make rock feel fluid that way. Noguchi's sculptures seem to twist and balance on themselves, undulating with form and texture, but this is all his later work.

Back in the 1930s, before Noguchi had a signature museum and a namesake coffee table, he was a struggling artist in New York City. He paid the bills by sculpting busts of rich people. He called it headbusting, and he did it just to make money. Or he said he did it just to make money. But in truth, he used it brilliantly as a way to social network.

And it was a way to romance the people who were his patrons. Noguchi was as great a networker as he was a sculptor, but headbusting wasn't exactly fulfilling. He wanted to think bigger. Here's Noguchi in an interview from the 70s. In 1933, about having done some more heads and so forth and being disgusted with doing heads, one has desire to get away, you know, to another dimension, I suppose the same thing that makes us go to the moon, desire to get away.

Nuhuchi wanted to make art that would live in the world, not just in a rich person's home or on a gallery wall. He wanted to change the physical landscape that people moved through. Noguchi said that he wanted people to feel like the first person on Earth, the first person to explore Earth. And so he started to think of a concept for a giant public sculpture. It looked like a massive, massive pyramid. Imagine a cross between a Mayan temple and a mountain

pushing up out of the earth with a long slide sloping down it and steps on two of its faces. It is a step pyramid, essentially, but on each side, the steps are different heights and they're regular, They're asymmetrical. But it wasn't just a sculpture for a museum or a bank plaza. Noguchi thought of it as a playground. He called it play mountain.

So he talked about play as the primer for a purposeful approach to space, trying to teach people to be more mindful of space and how we occupy it, and how it works. This giant ziggurat wouldn't come with any specific instructions. We'd have no rules, no single obvious way to play with it. Neguchi wanted Play Mountain to be a strange new landscape that would dare children to imagine other realities, so that perhaps they could grow up into creative, open-minded adults. And I think Niguchi hoped that by making playgrounds, he could impact people at that key stage in development.

In fact, the inspiration for Play Mountain came to Niguchi when he was at this key stage himself, when he was a little boy. Asamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904. His father Yone was a famous Japanese poet, and his mother was a white American writer named Leoni Gilmour. They met when she answered an ad he placed in the paper for a translator and assistant.

Pretty much as soon as Asamu was born, Yone abandoned them and went back to Japan. Naguchi and his mother eventually followed, but his father had already started another family by then. So Naguchi and his mother moved to a countryside town where Naguchi's bright blue eyes marked him as an outsider to the other kids at school. His childhood was pretty lonely. But from their little house in the little town they lived in on the seaside, they did have a great view of Mt. Fuji, but Fuji quite far away, so like just the perfect little pyramid. So you can imagine that view that's a little boy has every day going down the stairs seeing Mt. Fuji.

That idea of his own Mt. Fuji stuck with Niguchi. It followed him when he moved to Indiana as a teenager. It followed him to Paris where he apprenticed with the sculptor Brancuzzi. And it came with him to New York City. The place that he decided would become his home. So it was like imagine taking Mount Fuji and turning it into a giant place structure. I think that's what Play Mountain was. Niguchi wrote, Play Mountain was my response based upon memory of my own unhappy childhood, the desolate playground on a cliff in Tokyo, which I approached with dread.

It may be that this is how I tried to join the city, New York, to belong. Nuguchi wanted to move the mountain from his lonely childhood and reincarnate it as a place for gathering and playing, as a kind of gift to the children of New York. And after years and years of carrying that concept in his head, he got his big break. In 1934, one of the fancy people Noguchi had made a bust of helped him get a meeting

with Robert Moses, the newly appointed commissioner of the New York City Parks Department. Moses had said his number one priority was to build more playgrounds in the city, which at the time had very few. So Noguchi decided to bring him his idea. Noguchi brought Moses a model of play mountain, two feet square made of white plaster on a wooden frame, designed to take up an entire New York City block. Nguncgi carries this miniature mountain

to Robert Moses' office and thunks it down on Robert Moses' desk. And says, what if we built this for the children of the city? This is Alexandra Lang, architecture critic at Curved and author of the design of childhood. And Moses' like no way. The playgrounds Moses envisioned were simple. Asphalt or dirt surrounded by chain link fence

with the four S's of playground equipment. Swings, slide, sandbox, seesaw, all made out of steel. Moses was planning just to plonk these four S's in vacant lots all over the city by the hundreds. And here comes Neguchi with this massive, ambiguous, otherworldly urban mountain, which would have required the movement of huge amounts of earth and concrete, and probably would have cost a ton of money. And he just left his head off and threw us out more than he was. and all through his outlaw. Like, no way, dope. Like, I, for S's, I'm just going to order them.

And like, we're going to have, you know, 400 playgrounds by tomorrow. Robert Moses did end up erecting 658 playgrounds in New York as part's commissioner. But from this moment on, he and Nguci became lifelong enemies. He took his model and went home, fuming. And he fumed about it for the rest of his life, really.

The concept of play mountain remained very close to Noguchi's heart. As Noguchi himself wrote, play mountain was the kernel out of which have grown all my ideas relating sculpture to the earth. Play Mountain represented this idea that Noguchi had. The children didn't need instructions to play. With, say, swings or a slide, there's only one way to use them. And kids just do the same prescribed activities over and over again. But if you give children an abstract, surreal landscape,

they can interpret it however they want. They can make up stories and have adventures and use their intuition to play in a thousand different ways. This philosophy would later be called non-directive play. For Noguchi, this was the way that sculpture could be out in the world and really change the way people move and think. He wasn't going to give up on it so easily. In 1939, Noguchi offered to design a playground for Honolulu's

Ola-Muana Park. But that fell through. Still not discouraged, Noguchi pitches his Hawaii playground ideas back to the New York Parks Department. Again, again he gets rejected. But Noguchi is relentless. And so Noguchi, still excited by the challenge went off in design contour playground. Contour playground is really gentle. Basically a smooth, abstracted landscape of sloping hills and dails and riverbeds. It's still a non-directive playground, but it's very subtle. This time, the New York Park's department actually seems open to it.

They even start talking about finding a spot in Central Park to build it. But by then, the year was 1941, and Noguchi's plans were about to change. Noguchi was in California, visiting a friend, and he was out shopping for some onyx for a sculpture. In fact, I was on my way to San Diego, and I happened to know the radio, and that's where I headed. he was out shopping for some onyx for a sculpture. Nisei or Americans born to Japanese parents. With the US entering World War II, Contrard playground was forgotten by both the Parks Department and Ngochi. There were bigger stakes now.

I thought I would be able to help in some way. Ngochi started to link up with other Nisei, looking for ways to make it clear to the government that they were firmly on the American side of the war. So we had these meetings and we know that our intention was that we would counteract the bad press to stop kind of hysteria and this developing. But that hysteria was quickly coming to a head. Barely two months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed executive order

9066. Executive order 9666 gives the American military the right to declare martial law in any of part of the country that it deems necessary to protect the homeland. And that's with the understanding that in the Western United States they would round up the Japanese American population. Evacuation orders with fast approaching deadlines started landing on people's doorsteps. And we had to get out of California, you know, everybody had to get out. Including me, I had to get out, a higher abandon my car and Los Angeles and flew out, came to New York.

Nuguchi had always been good at finding exactly the right person for the moment. In this moment, he needed someone to help him take action, and so he found him in Washington, DC. So I went to Washington, you know, went around inquiring whether or not I can do. Finally, I happened to bump into John Collier. John Collier was the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Because the government needed to build the internment camps in large, open areas of federally controlled land,

they decided to build two of them on Native American reservations, which meant that the actual undertaking of building and running these camps would fall to John Collier's department. John Collier was relatively progressive. He wanted to give tribal governments more autonomy and support Native American culture. And then suddenly, he had been given the task of designing and building prison camps on reservation land. Ngu Chi reached out to him. Ngu Chi and Collier started talking about what they could do with this assignment,

now that there was no way to prevent internment from happening. They cooked up and this is going to sound so crazy, but in a way they cooked up what was a utopian scheme, because from their point of view if it's going to happen, let's make it as good as it can possibly be. Naguchi drew up a suite of plans for the largest of the camps being built, the one at Poston, Arizona. I made plans for the park development and this and that and the other, to make it into a park like this. Noguchi took the rigid grid of a military style camp with rows and rows of tar paper barracks and cut an avenue right down the middle of it, lined with public services, schools and

gardens, a hospital, restaurants, a department store, and a movie theater, and a church, and a cemetery, and a zoo, botanical garden, sports fields, and a mini golf course, and playgrounds. What you're looking at is what he thinks the key parts of civilization are. You have a huge population of people who have been removed from their lives and artificially plonked down in the middle of nowhere where they are expected to live. Quotum Quot, what does that mean? What is a life?

What does life consist of? How, what does it need to be real? To feel real? The playground is critical to it. The plans themselves are pretty unbelievable, but the really wild thing is that even though Japanese internment only affected people living on the west coast, and Noguchi was living on the east coast, Noguchi and Collier decide Noguchi should actually go to this concentration camp in Post-San Arizona,

voluntarily, and live there while he carried out his plan. And that's how I happen to go to Poston. The camp was being constructed in the middle of the desert, in the southwestern part of Arizona, on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. There was hardly anything for miles around just rubby brush and dust, mountains in the far distance. So Niyuchi got to post in like a week before it opened. So I was on the people getting the place ready. And all the people were coming in there to help,

you see. And I was among them. Nuguchi was given his own room and thought he'd soon be getting to work on realizing his vision for a utopian community. I mean, this was a guy who plonged play mountain down in front of Robert Moses and said, let's build this for kids. His strange hopefulness, new no limits.

But as soon as the camp opened, it became painfully clear to Nguuqi that the people weren't coming there for an endilic new lifestyle. They were prisoners. To the camp administrators from the War Relocation Authority, Noguchi looked just like another one of the prisoners. They wouldn't give him the time of day. And because he had some special privileges, the other in Ternese assumed he was this traitor

and kahuts with the camp administrators. He immediately realized he was sort of the worst of both worlds because he was just an attorney from the administration's point of view. And he was a turncoat like a spy from the other attorney's point of view. After about two months at Post-In, Nikuchi realized that the War Relocation Authority had no interest in making it a nice place to live. They ran it like a prison camp. Because it was a prison camp. Because it was a prison camp. All of John Collier's

and Nikuchi's idealistic plans were ignored. Seeing that there was no chance of doing what he'd come to do, Nikuchi decided to move on. He figured he'd just go back to normal life, being a famous artist and hanging out with his famous artist friends. And they wouldn't let him leave. Which was definitely not a part of the plan. He had no idea that he wouldn't be able to leave. So I was definitely going to get off of several monsters and I didn't let me be very uncomfortable. Neguchi was suddenly a prisoner. Having made enemies of internees and administrators alike, he spent most of his time alone with

nothing to do. Posting was a bleak, barren place. Almost every day there was triple digit heat and huge dust storms tearing through, coming in through the thin walls of the barracks, getting stuck in your bed and your mouth and your eyes. Noguchi wrote to one of his famous friends, the artist Manray, quote,

here time has stopped and nothing is of any consequence, nothing of any value. Neither are time or our skill. The world is nuts. After seven months and many, many letters and phone calls, John Collier was able to get Noguchi out. After seven months, I got out of the pass. And he never went back. It's hard to know what to make of Naguchi's failed mission to post in, and it kind of leads to this deeper question.

Does it even make sense to try to find joy or beauty or playfulness in a system that's just fundamentally awful? You know, trying to make a prison better when the prison shouldn't exist. Critic Alexander Lang again. Like he thought he could make this internment camp more humane, but it's an inhumane endeavor. The whole experience was painful for Neguchi. His goals had been so compassionate going in, but racism and fear and bureaucracy killed those dreams

and then imprisoned him when he tried to help. When I finally landed back in New York in 1942, it must have seemed wrong somehow. Like, how could you think about play when there's so much cruelty in the world? In fact, in 1943, the year after Noguchi gets out of post-in, he makes this sculpture called this tortured earth, which is like the nightmare version of his model for contoured playground,

a twisted landscape that looks like it's been stabbed and torn with a knife. But once he was back in New York, Noguchi put post in behind him. He threw himself into the art scene. He's designing furniture, he's making sculpture, he's building a career in New York City. Noguchi steps back from his utopian ideas about art and sculpture. And this is the period when he designed some of the things he's most famous for today, including the iconic coffee table. Niguchi's career in sculpture really took off, and he also got to design other kinds of

environments. He designed dance sets for Martha Graham and sculpture gardens for corporations like IBM and Chase Bank. He was schmoozing up the storm, becoming a household name and a real star of mid-century art and design. Still, Nukuchi has that hunger in his soul for something more meaningful than the New York art scene. He still wants to make something

that can transcend a gallery space. And that is because, again, I have this feeling that sculpture was an important part of the living experience, you see, and not something for electives to buy. After a decade of looking inward, indulging in the adoration of the art world and recovering from post-in, Noguchi turns his sights back to playgrounds. We couldn't shake that realization that he'd had, that playgrounds were actually the perfect

way for a sculptor to make real change in the world. So we tried two more times to build playgrounds for New York, once in 1950 at the new UN building, and another in the early 60s in Riverside Park. And again, Noguchi's playground plans were shot down by the city. But something was different in this round of rejections, because Noguchi was now mega-famous. Everyone in the art world had heard all about his rejected playground designs. They'd been written up in newspapers, and the models were displayed in museums. So other architects, artists, and designers started copying them.

So there are a fair number of people in the 50s and 60s making abstract concrete forms and saying that they are for children. It becomes a movement, a whole strand of playground design that Niguchi kind of founded. Alexander Lang calls this the abstractionist strand. You can play with an abstract form any way you want. And imagine it as anything you like. These shapes can become anything in your mind. In the 60s and 70s, designers, artists, and architects

build abstract playgrounds all over the world, climbing arches and stepping stones at Amsterdam, blobby triple slides in Austria, webs of steel and rope in Japan. And in the US, modular octahedrons and pixelated wooden landscapes, all made by famous architects, designing and building abstract, non-directive playgrounds.

Even Noguchi himself was able to build some abstract-ish sculptural playground equipment in the 60s and 70s. You know, Noguchi was one of the first people to say that and make those things and kind of taking children seriously as connoisseurs of form in a way. It would seem like the perfect time for Noguchi to build the thing he wanted his whole life. The true play mountain vision of something that could turn landscapes into massive abstract forms. But just as it seems, Niguchi's ideas are gaining traction,

it's cut short. As the 60s turn to the 70s and the 70s draw to a close, the abstract playground movement goes underground. Because in the 1980s, the entire world of playground design in the US changed dramatically. After the break, why the abstractionist movement went underground, and why your neighborhood playground probably looks very similar to every other neighborhood playground. After this. A two-year-old boy named Frank Nelson

was climbing a 12-foot tall slide in a Chicago park, because that's just how tall slides used to be. He slipped through the railing off the steps and hit his head on hard asphalt. And has permanent brain damage. Frank became paralyzed on his left side. He had problems with vision and speech and had to wear a helmet to protect his fractured skull. So there's this big lawsuit where the park system of

Chicago has to pay out millions of dollars. Nine point five million dollars to be exact. The accident was in 1978 and it changed everything. At the time, there were no laws or real industry standards even when it came to the safety of playground equipment. But Frank Nelson's fall was one of a number of lawsuits that led the Consumer Product Safety Commission to publish the Handbook for Public Playground Safety in 1981. Then another standards organization, the ASTM, published its own guidelines. Pretty soon these rule books were in the hands of insurance companies and parks departments and school boards across the United States. And now to this day, almost all playgrounds have to be approved by certified playground safety inspectors.

Hi, Craig Fetel with Safe to Play. Today I want to go over with you just a few of the things that I use to make sure that your playground is safe. This is a YouTube video that a certified playground safety inspector uses to advertise his services. He's standing on your typical modern playground and he has a bunch of these weirdly shaped metal objects on sticks. They're all different sizes, each approximating different child-sized body parts, a hand, foot, a head. Prove here, which could imitate head at nine inches, so the feet would go in and then the head would get stuck, so obviously we don't want that to happen.

And safety inspectors basically tried jamming these probes into every space or gap on a playground, looking for places where kids could fall or get pinched, poked or trapped. Obviously no one wants kids getting hurt on playgrounds. But as you might imagine, all these rules and regulations make the job of a playground designer a lot harder. Don't get me wrong, the job is fun as hell.

Tom Keller designs playgrounds. I look forward to coming in here every day because what a blast. But the more rules we have to adhere to, it just becomes more and more difficult, not impossible, but definitely more difficult to think outside the box. Tom works at landscape structures,

playground manufacturing company in Minnesota. And he says playground standards are so detailed that they end up ruling out almost all variation. In the cases of common playground equipment, swings, slides, springing equipment, and stuff like that, they truly create their own being because of the rules. It's going to look like this. A slide is a slide and your ability to alter that form is almost impossible. Theoretically, we love the idea of a special or unusual playground. Like, even within Tom's company, they want to manufacture beautiful new forms for kids to play on. Our executives, you know, they're like, well, we want a slide that nobody's ever thought of.

You got to be more creative than that. And I'm like, guys, you know what? You don't want to read the rule book because that's going to bore you to death. But trust me, it is what it is. So the playgrounds that you see everywhere in neighborhood parks and school yards, they still all look more or less the same. The majority of playgrounds on the market today are what we refer to as post-index systems. Post-index systems are also called post-implatform playgrounds. And with those, you have decks and you have stairs and you have pathways. The post-implatform equipment essentially combines swing slide and monkey bars into one piece of equipment. They're elevated platforms made of plastic parts in bright primary colors. Sometimes the parts are connected with pathways covered with roofs, sometimes with bridges,

but there are steps and slides and ladders coming off the platforms at every turn. Blocking kids from being able to just kind of step off the platform into space. That agglomeration is kind of in response to the safety standards. Post and platform playgrounds definitely have more variety than the four S's that Robert Moses was in too. On the Moses style playgrounds, kids were just moving from one repetitive activity to the next. At least with post and platform structures, kids can make some decisions about

how to get onto the platform and then how to get down from it again. But still, post and platform playgrounds are all remixes of the same basic kit. It's time for a change a little bit. This is Scott Rochie, creative director at Landscape Structures. In addition to the standard playground kits, Landscape Structures also designs custom playgrounds for the clients that can afford them. And actually one of Scott's big inspirations is the work of Isamu Noguchi.

Designs of today are echoing a lot of what what Noguchi's concepts were. The kind of abstract playgrounds that Noguchi inspired are starting to re-emerge. We're starting to bring them back in a lot of custom playground design. For these special projects, Scott works with a lot of landscape architects, moving earth around and experimenting with new forms. We've been to playgrounds that we've designed that are very abstract and where parents literally say, I don't know how this is supposed to work. That's the best.

And this goes back to Niguchi's concept of non-directive play. If adults are confused by a piece of play equipment, it often means that kids will be all over it. The kids are gonna figure it out. They're gonna attack it. They're going to go and have fun. They're going to make it play. We don't have to tell them how to do that. We can make it safe and last a long time and look beautiful, but man, let them play. This resurgence of abstract playgrounds is still developing, but special destination

playgrounds are experimenting with new materials and processes. They're able to make forms that would have been astronomically expensive to produce in Noguchi's time. Contemporary designers are now starting to push back against convention and play with more abstract shapes for communities that can afford custom playgrounds. That is. So I feel like there are people that are pushing the envelope. And, you know, it's expensive to start out with, but if more people adopt this equipment,

the price could come down. Although there are no playgrounds in New York City with Nuguchi's name on them, his ideas about imagination and freedom to play have left a deep mark on playground designers and are affecting the emerging playgrounds all around us. Noguchi could have never imagined the long shadow of his ideas. For all he knew, his greatest concepts had never been made.

That's a recording from 1973. At that point, Noguchi had only ever seen one of his playgrounds, kind of built in Japan. A few years later, he'd designed another one in Atlanta, but both of these were nothing close to his true play mountain vision. His own city, New York, had rejected him five times. Never found a way to break through in New York even after Moses was gone for various reasons.

There's always a reason, but, you know, hugely frustrating. This was his home. Noguchi's model for a play mountain remained on display in his studio in Long Island City, an unrealized dream in miniature. That is, until January of 1988. A man from Sapporo, Japan, comes and visits Naguchi and is going around his studio in Long Island City. And he says, you know what?

Like, I can get one of your playgrounds built in Sapporo, Japan. At this point in 1988, Naguchi is 84 years old. He goes out to visit this marshy site in Sapporo called Morinuma Park. It's just perfect. This is the spot where play mountain would finally live. Noguchi started designing play structures and earthworks for the park

with his longtime collaborator, the architect Shoji Sadau. But in the winter of that year, he came down with a cold. And when he came back to New York, it turned into pneumonia. And he died. Noguchi died on December 30, 1988, having designed the vast majority of the park. His collaborator, Shoji Sadau, continued to work on it. From Noguchi's death at the end of 1988, Maura Numa Park took 17 years to build. It finally opened in 2005. It's enormous.

454 acres. Bacon calls it Noguchi Disneyland. And it's actually five times the size of Disneyland. It is kind of an amalgamation, the greatest hits of all of Nogegu-Chi's un-executed, land, and playground ideas in one spot. It's this huge green swath of land tucked into a bend in the river. There are forests of his candy-like play equipment, mounds and pyramids and swooping paths,

an enormous conical hill to climb, a huge fountain that cycles through an hour-long water show. And we do feel like a tiny version of yourself in this alien city. But most satisfying of all, rising high above this alien landscape, is play mountain. It's totally amazing, it's totally amazing. is play mountain. It's totally amazing. It's totally amazing. Alexandra saw this mountain with her own eyes, a grassy, angular pyramid, surreal in its hugeness at a hundred feet tall. So I went to the Sepuro. It was in October and I parked my bike at the bottom of this flight of like 1000 steps. It's really windy, it's cold, I'm all alone,

I mean it's like, I'm all alone. I mean, it's like I could be on the moon or something. And I get to the top of the mountain and there's a memorial to No Guchi. And it says, he made this. Isamu No Guchi was never able to take in the view from the peak of his creation. The sculpture he'd spent his whole life dreaming about.

A mountain teleported from the wild alien planet of his mind. The one place Niguchi ever felt he really belonged. So it's extremely interesting to me people's place in the world, their sense of belonging, how we function in this planet Earth. I think I have that kind of feeling about sculpture, wanting to be inside the sculpture. It's not just looking at it, it's part of it.

It's your world, it's the world, and the world then becomes a sculpture. Noguchi wanted us to see the world as if we were visiting for the first time, to move our bodies through space as if the simple facts of gravity and contour were brand new delights, to look around with wide eyes, to feel without stretched fingers, and imagine infinite possibilities. In other words, to live like kids on a playground.

99% invisible was produced this week by Jackson Roach and edited by Avery Trouffleman, mix in tech production by Sri Fusef, music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is the senior producer Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Gellani Hall, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Audio of Niguchi comes from a 1973 oral history interview held by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Special thanks to Katie Swanson and everyone at Landscape Structures, Janine B. U. N.O.

and the Isama Niguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Dayana Wynn, Carlos Morales, and Marfa Public Radio. Tiffany Gomes, Liza Yeager, Marlene Chicagoa, and the Post-In-Community Alliance and Preservation Project, and the staff of the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation Museum. We are a project of 91.7KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent in the show on Facebook. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But your digital playground for design stories is at 9iPI.org. Radio Tapio from PRX.