Noguchi: Useless Architecture

Noguchi: Useless Architecture is an exhibition of around fifty works mostly drawn from the Noguchi Museum’s collection and occupying its second floor galleries. In 1949 and again in 1960, Isamu Noguchi visited India’s Jantar Mantar in Delhi and Jaipur, two of the original five campuses of astronomical devices created on a grand architectural scale by the 18th-century Maharaja Jai Singh II. Noguchi described the conglomeration of instruments at each site—so large as to be more recognizable as monumental sculpture or architecture than as functioning devices—as “useless architecture, useful sculpture.” The exhibition was directly inspired by this phrase.