Within this 100-hectare site, we encountered Isamu Noguchi’s first completed playscapes—Octetra and Maruyama—set among structures designed by leading figures of the Metabolism movement, including Takashi Asada, Sachio Ōtani, Kisho Kurokawa, Masato Ōtaka, Akira Suzuki, and Kiyonori Kikutake. The park is filled with rigorously imaginative forms designed for children themselves rather than for the approval of adults. While Noguchi’s works are well documented, the authorship of many other inventive play structures remains difficult to trace.
What stood out was how many of these designs—including but not limited to Noguchi’s—activate a primal sense of play. They resist fixed rules or single functions, instead offering forms that invite climbing, crawling, hiding, and improvisation. In their openness and rough materiality, they return play to its most elemental state: testing the body against space and inventing meaning through action.
Later in the trip, replicas of Noguchi’s Octetra and Maruyama appeared again on the terrace of the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. Encountering them first in Yokohama as lived playgrounds and then as sculptural displays in a museum setting underscored the difference between environments that host open play and those reframed as cultural artifacts.