In Praise of Caves: Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico

Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico by Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain

In Praise of Caves

Introduction

Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) had no particular interest in caves beyond the usual fascination with spectacular examples such as the ones on Elephanta Island in India, pictured on page 14, and Goa Gajah, near Ubud, Indonesia, pictured at right, which he visited and photographed. But he was profoundly invested, personally and professionally, in his “feeling for earth.” 1 That phrase comes from a description of his first sustained encounter with haniwa, the Japanese tomb sculpture associated with kofun, the ancient megalithic tomb mounds (tumuli) dating to the 3rd to 7th centuries CE found throughout the Japanese archipelago. Tombs (human-made caves) are among the original examples of what, in a very different but not unrelated context (with a 1966 exhibition of minimalist sculptures), would become known in sculpture circles as “primary structures.” 2 Tomb making, whatever form it takes—a mound or a pyramid, a hole dug in the ground, a recycled animal’s den, an adapted volcanic or erosional cave—is a universally human discipline of earth shaping that inspired Noguchi on the most fundamental level. His proposal for a Memorial to the Dead, Hiroshima (1951, unrealized) is a cenotaphic example of just such an earth-as-womb structure (see page 15). “I for one,” he wrote, “return recurrently to the earth in my search for the meaning of sculpture…” 3

Determined to help humanity come to grips with its scale vis-à-vis the natural world: “where we are and how big we are,” 4 as he put it, he set out to work with networks of relationships and systems of spaces. This rather unique perspective on sculpture led him to his well-known abiding interest in topography, the natural and human-made surface features of Earth, and functions we ordinarily associate with urban planners, landscape designers, and architects. His preoccupation with Earth’s invisible structures and motive forces encompassed rock (the proverbial bones of the Earth), root systems, foundations, and caves, as well as worms (his Worm Pyramid is the tip of the wormhole that is nematode civilization), wind, gravity, centipedes, and snakes. Some of these are the subject of the Museum’s concurrent exhibition Noguchi Subscapes (June 15, 2022 through September 3, 2023).

In Praise of Caves combines architectural and architectureadjacent projects by four Mexican artist-architects that reflect an interest in the structure, cultural history, and habitability of caves, under the broad rubric of organic architecture.5 What unites these visionary projects is an absence of nostalgia. These makers of modern Mexico view caves as a traditional technology worthy of modern development. Here are ideas about the adaptation of natural structures to modern living, the practical and

environmental benefits of moving underground, and about how we might reconnect with the essential happiness that living in concert with nature provides. Ranging from urban planning to contemporary myth making, they are intended to turn the Museum temporarily into a somewhat subterra nean environment.

The title of the exhibition is taken from a chapter in The Prodigious Builders: Notes Toward a Natural History of Architecture (1977), written by Noguchi’s friend, the cultural critic Bernard Rudofsky. It was a follow-up to Architecture without Architects (1964), which originated as an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The chapter is a full-throated defense of our cave-dwelling ancestors and contemporaries, whose lifestyle, he argues, we have turned into an insult out of stupidity and misplaced pride. Dispelling myths and attacking prejudice, Rudofsky introduces modern readers to examples of ancient and contemporary cave dwelling all over the world. There is nothing primitive or backwards, he says, about living in caves; quite the opposite. But the main thrust of his argu ment is that “the only way out of the human rabbit warren is, quite simply, down the rabbit hole.” 6 We will eventually have to move underground, he believed, once we have irreparably despoiled the surface of the Earth—so we might as well make peace with the eminently practical idea of inhabiting caves sooner rather than later.

Let “cave” be a metaphor: for our instinctive dust-to-dust returns to earth, for our inviolable connection to it, and let all of these snakes act as our surrogates and guides.

Dakin Hart Senior Curator

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum

1 Isamu Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World, foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1968, reprint, Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2004/2015), 20.

2 At the time of the exhibition, Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors (Jewish Museum, New York, NY, April 27–June 12, 1966), Mathias Goeritz’s El Eco Serpent was identified as a precursor.

3 Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 39.

4 Nancy E. Miller and Isamu Noguchi, transcript of “A Conversation with Isamu Noguchi,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery (July 8, 1977), 4. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_046_001.

5 Though Noguchi spent a lot of time in Mexico from the 1930s to the 1980s, and knew some of these figures, this show is about conceptual, not personal, relationships.

6 Bernard Rudofsky, The Prodigious Builders (New York: Harvest/ HBJ Book, 1977), 45.

FROM ABOVE Isamu Noguchi, photograph of Goa Gajah (“Elephant Cave”), near Ubud, Indonesia, c. 1950. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 147912

Isamu Noguchi, Floor Frame, 1962. Photo: Bill Jacobson. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 01958

A postcard of a cave painting at Lascaux (Montignac, France) sent to Noguchi by Denise Hare, April 11, 1963. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_COR_073_002

Mathias Goeritz

Mathias Goeritz was a German-born painter, sculptor, architect, teacher, and theorist who emigrated to Mexico in 1949 and became a naturalized citizen and an important figure in the postwar modern art scene there.

Goeritz was greatly inspired by the first artworks widely acknowledged to have been created by prehistoric man in the Altamira cave complex in northern Spain. In 1949, Goeritz co-founded a movement named after Alatamira to foster and explore a burgeoning trend towards primitivism in postwar art. In Goeritz’s own work, this back to basics impulse reflected a desire to re-achieve a more fundamen tal relationship between individual consciousness, the earth, and human civilization.

The large serpent Goeritz made for his Museo Experimental El Eco, a full-scale exhibition copy of which features in Area 1, was, he said, “a fever chart,” meant to “express the anguish of man in the universe.” 1 At El Eco, the serpent occupied the interior of a space designed to illustrate the principles of emotional architecture, with a narrow asym metrical hallway and a sloping floor at the entrance that made entering the building feel like slipping into the mouth of a slot cave. Here the El Eco Serpent shifts the scale and context of Noguchi’s rock garden. It also guards a nest of snakes in Area 14, featuring dim natural light and one of Noguchi’s water basins. The larger universe just outside the mouth of the cave is suggested by an installation in Area 8 of some of Goeritz’s many gestures towards the starry sky.

“The sculpture, such as the Serpent in the courtyard [of El Eco], had to become an almost functional architectural construction (with openings for the ballet)— without ceasing to be sculpture—linking and giving an accent of restless movement to the smooth walls. There are hardly any 90º connections in the building plan. Some walls are thin and wider on the other side. This strange and almost imperceptible asymmetry that is observed in the construction of any face, in any tree, in any living being, has been sought. There are no gentle curves or sharp vertices: it was all realized there, without exact plans. Architect, bricklayer and sculptor were the same person. I repeat that all this architecture is an experiment. It doesn’t want to be more than this. An experiment with the aim of creating again, within modern architecture, psychic emotions for man, without falling into an empty and theatrical decorativeness. It wants to be the expression of a free will of creation, which—without denying the values of ‘functionalism’—tries to subdue them under a modern spiritual conception.”

Mathias Goeritz, “Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional,” read at the opening of El Museo Experimental el Eco in September 1953, and published as “Arquitectura Emocional: El Eco,” in Cuadernos de Arquitectura no. 1, Guadalajara, 1954.

1 Mathias Goeritz, “The Sculpture ‘The Serpent of El Eco’: A Primary Structure of 1953,” Leonardo 3, no. 1 (1970), 63–65.

(German/Mexican, 1915–1990)

La Serpiente de El Eco (El Eco Serpent), 1953 (exhibition copy fabricated 2022). Painted steel (copy in wood). Original (pictured at left) in the Colección Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; reconstruction authorized by Daniel Goeritz Rodríguez. © Mathias Goeritz

Torres, variantes de la Osa Mayor (Towers, Variants of the Big Dipper), 1968. Painted steel. ESPAC Collection, Mexico City

Visionario [Cabeza de Orozco] (Visionary [Orozco Head]), 1951. Stone. Private collection

Hombre asustado (Startled Man), c. 1955. Stone. Collection of Gina and Salomon Grabinski Zabludovsky

Hombre asustado (Startled Man), 1955. Wood. Private collection

Estrella (Star). Wood. Private collection

Estrella (Star), 1973. Bronze. Private collection

Estrella (Star), 1973. Bronze. Private collection

Estrella, maqueta para un proyecto monumental (Star, maquette for a monumental project), 1973. Bronze. Private collection

Untitled, 1950s. Watercolor. Private collection

Serpiente dorada (Gilded Serpent), c. 1952/53. Wood, gold leaf. Private collection

Maqueta para la serpiente de Linz, Austria (Maquette for the Linz, Austria, Serpent), c. 1952/53. Steel. Private collection

Variante de serpiente (Serpent Variant), c. 1952/53 (cast later). Bronze. Private collection

Muro plegado [La Serpiente de El Eco, variante] (Folded Wall [El Eco Serpent Variant]), 1970. Bronze. Private collection Árbol familiar (Family Tree), c. 1941. Wood. Private collection

Pareja amarosa (Loving Partner), 1950. Wood. Private collection

Los amantes del alma (Soul Mates), 1954. Wood. Private collection

El otro animal herida (The Other Wounded Animal), 1954/55. Bronze. Private collection

Amantes (Lovers), 1950. Wood. Private collection

Four untitled works from the series Open Mind and Empty Head, 1950. Bronze. Private collection

Six untitled works from the series Open Mind and Empty Head, 1950. Gourd. Private collection

Two untitled works from the series Open Mind and Empty Head, 1950. Gourd. Private collection

Area

Copia de exposition de la maqueta por la serpiente de El Eco (Exhibition copy of the Model for the El Eco Serpent), 1952/53; fabricated c. 2014. Wood. Private collection

Serpiente de Linz (Linz Serpent), c. 1952/53 (cast later). Bronze. Private collection

Maqueta por la serpiente de El Eco (Model for the El Eco Serpent), 1952/53. Wood. Private collection

Variante de serpiente (Serpent Variant), c. 1952/53. Bronze. Private collection

Variante de Serpiente, n.d. Bronze. Private collection

Javier Senosiain Aguilar (Mexican, b. 1948)

Javier Senosiain, a renowned architect and historian, is the founder and principal of the architectural firm Arquitectura Orgánica in Mexico City.

Senosiain was Mathias Goeritz’s student at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), and then became a professor of architecture there. He is the leader of the second generation of Mexican organic architects and a principal practitioner, scholar, and proponent of what he calls bio-architecture. He is also a devoted champion and steward of his predecessors’ legacy, which explains why he produced the elaborate models of cave houses by Juan O’Gorman and Carlos Lazo included in the exhibition.

His own cave home, Casa Orgánica (Organic House), 1985, which he built for his family as an experiment in organic architecture—and which is now publicly accessible by appointment—has become an archetype of the possibilities of contemporary cave living. Senosiain’s almost incom prehensibly vast El Nido de Quetzalcóatl (The Nest of Quetzalcóatl), 1998–2007, in contrast to the domestic

comforts of Casa Orgánica, is a still-developing organic architecture theme park. Senosiain’s interest in building organically, which he does principally in formed concrete, extends to a wide range of models and systems patterned on nature. What they all share in common is a quality of emerging from, and/or nestling into, the earth.

“The idea was to look at the beginning of the human’s origins in nature and the organic space throughout history to develop suitable living spaces. Those spaces would be similar to the womb, an animal’s lair, a troglodytic dwelling, an igloo…They would represent not a return to the past but rather a premeditated reconciliation.”

Javier Senosiain, “The Organic Habitat,” in Bio-Architecture (Oxford, England/Burlington, MA: Architectural Press, 2003), 139.

ABOVE Javier Senosiain, El Nido de Quetzalcóatl, Naucalpan, Mexico, 1998–2007. © Javier Senosiain / Arquitectura Orgánica

Javier Senosiain Aguilar and Enrique Cabrera Espinosa de los Monteros, La Coata, 2022. Concrete, mosaic. (A version at the Mexican Consulate, Montreal, Canada, is pictured)

Model for El Nido de Quetzalcóatl (1998–2007), 2007. Fabricated by Enrique Cabrera Espinosa de los Monteros. Mixed media.

Model for Proyecto Viñedo Salamandra, 2007 (unrealized). Fabricated by Enrique Cabrera Espinosa de los Monteros. Mixed media.

Model for Proyecto Refugio Iztaccíhuatl, 2003 (unrealized). Fabricated by Enrique Cabrera Espinosa de los Monteros. Mixed media.

Model for Proyecto Albergue Pico de Orizaba, 2003 (unrealized). Fabricated by Enrique Cabrera Espinosa de los Monteros. Mixed media.

Model for Casa Orgánica, Mexico City (1985), 1984. Fabricated by Enrique Cabrera Espinosa de los Monteros. Mixed media. (The interior of the house is pictured)

Model for Casa Orgánica (1985), 2022. Fabricated by Enrique Cabrera Espinosa de los Monteros. Mixed media.

All works courtesy Javier Senosiain / Arquitectura Orgánica

Juan O’Gorman (Mexican, 1905–1982)

Juan O’Gorman was an architect and artist who first gained attention for his early functionalist buildings and later became a champion of organic architecture. His paintings, murals, and mosaics are notable for their nationalistic and anti-fascist themes.

O’Gorman’s prescience as a chronicler of humanity’s troubled relationship with the Earth and his desire to help rectify it are manifest here in two paintings of dystopian underworlds, as well as in his fantastical, truly grotesque, plan for a monument to Venus’s emergence from the sea. These complement original plans and a breathtaking new model (produced at the behest of Javier Senosiain) of the Casa O’Gorman, a (now tragically ruined) cave house that O’Gorman built for his family beginning in 1948 on and in the lava bed of a dormant volcano in the Pedregal neigh borhood of Mexico City.

He famously likened an architect’s home to a laboratory for his practice, and in the cave house he attempted, with the help of his wife Helen, a superb amateur botanist and botanical illustrator, to study what it meant to become part of the lava gardens landscape of Pedregal.

“Organic architecture implies the relationship between the building and the surrounding landscape. According to this architectural concept, human habitation becomes the vehicle of harmony between man and the earth… My house…is an original test, on a small scale, of the application of organic architectural theory in Mexico… The living room of the house is formed from a lava cave and architectural elements that harmonize with the shapes of the natural rock… [The house] was made as a protest against the prevailing architectural fashion in Mexico today that manifests itself in the box-shaped buildings and glass crates of the so-called international style… The house was built—we repeat—with the main purpose of being a cry of protest in favor of humanism in the mechanical desert of the ‘wonderful civilization’ that we live in today that tries to destroy all expression rooted in the humanistic nature of man.”

Juan O’Gorman, “Ensayo acerca de Arquitectura Orgánica, Referente a la Cas Ubicada en Avenida San Jeronimo No. 162, San Ángel, D.F.: Construida por Juan O’Gorman,” in La Palabra de Juan O’Gorman (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983), 155–56.

Juan and Helen O’Gorman playing chess in their cave home Casa O’Gorman (1948–54, partially destroyed c. 1969), Mexico City, c. 1959. Photo: Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock

Documentary model of the O’Gorman Cave-Studio House, 162 Avenue San Jerónimo (1948–54, partially destroyed c. 1969), 2021–22. Stone, acrylic, styrene. Created by Senosiain Arquitectos; Coordinator: Enrique Cabrera Espinosa de los Monteros; Collaborators: Marilú Martínez Tepecila, Angélica Ortiz Guerrero, María Fernanda Zarate Espinosa. The plans used to make the model come from Dr. Iván Arellano’s thesis “Casa O’Gorman Habitando la Cueva” (1949–69). Courtesy Javier Senosiain

Serpiente (snake), n.d. Stone. Collection of Luis and Karen Stephens (formerly in the collection of Juan and Helen O’Gorman)

Water basin, n.d. Stone. Collection of Luis and Karen Stephens (formerly in the collection of Juan and Helen O’Gorman)

Proyecto de monumento al nacimiento de Venus, 1976. Tempera on plywood. Collection Pérez Simón El reino mineral (The Mineral Kingdom), 1971. Tempera on panel. Collection Welbanks Family, Mexico City

Paisaje de la muerte, n.d. Tempera on masonite. Collection José Assa Masri

Dioses y símbolos del Mexico Antiguo, c. 1948. Pencil on paper. Private collection

Croquis de la casa-cueva, c. 1948. Pencil on paper. Collection Luis and Karen Stephens

Carlos Lazo (Mexican, 1914–1955)

Carlos Lazo was an architect and public official who, from 1952–55, served as the head of the Secretariat of Communications and Public Work (SCOP), overseeing Mexican state infrastructure projects.

The centerpiece of this installation of Lazo’s ideas about cave living is a recently constructed model of his La Casa-Cueva de la Era Atómica (Atomic Age Cave House), 1945–48, a hyper-modern cave home that has been described as a synthesis of the Flintstones and the Jetsons. (This model was also produced by Javier Senosiain.) It is accompanied by a display of images of Lazo’s other efforts to take modern living back to the future in his Cuevas Civilizadas (Civilized Caves) project, which was to have included 110 homes dug into a canyon wall in the Belén de las Flores neighborhood of Mexico City.

As an architect and urban planner working in an exploding metropolis and a quickly modernizing nation in an uncertain time, Lazo recognized the need to adapt to the

existing topography and take advantage of every natural resource. He is not well known because he died young without having built much. The remaining documentation of his work is scanty and poor. But there was a moment following the Second World War when he was among the most adventurous and progressive urban planners not just in Mexico but on Earth. Few planners in positions of real authority had a clearer grasp of the operable incongruities of a moment in which the past and the future collided.

“Modern architecture is above all the reconquest of essen tial joys. We must have sunshine again. We must return to green. We must have air, a return to nature without the noble savage. Without proposing to transform modern man morally, aesthetics and hygiene should be handed over to him. He should be made to live a beautiful and healthy life.”

Yolanda Bravo Saldaña, Carlos Lazo: Vida y Obra (México City: Colección Talleres / Universidad Autónoma de México, 2004), 9.

2

Carlos Lazo, Augusto Pérez Palacios, and Jorge Bravo, Programa Cuevas Civilizadas, Sur de av. Constituyentes en de La Torres, Belén de las Flores, Alvaro Obregón, Mexico City, c. 1953. Fondo Aerofotográfico Acervo Histórico Fundación ICA, A.C.

Interior and exterior views, Programa Cuevas Civilizadas. Fotografía del Archivo de Arquitectos Mexicanos, Fondo Augusto Pérez Palacios, Facultad de Arquitectura, UNAM

Documentary model of Carlos Lazo’s Proyecto Casa-Cueva de la Era Atómica (1948), 2021–22. Created by Javier Senosiain, Arquitectura Orgánica and María Fernanda Zarate Espinosa. Wood, plaster. Courtesy Javier Senosiain

Views of La Casa-Cueva de la Era Atómica (Sierra Leona No. 374, Mexico City), c. 1948

Drawings and plans for La Casa-Cueva de la Era Atómica, c. 1945

A Brief History of Architecture’s Emergence from the Cave

Javier Senosiain Excerpts from Bio-Architecture (2003)

Vernacular Architecture

Since vernacular architecture depends directly on its geographical surroundings, it’s almost as if it’s a natural product. It establishes complete symbiosis with the local ecosystem and it economizes on raw materials and energy. With vernacular architecture, natural materials are used and tools provided locally so that a semi industrial process is not needed. The shapes and forms used derive from well-defined needs, so they blend into the local landscape. Here, humans do not impose—they adjust. Those building today apply the empirical knowledge of their ancestors, though they learn from the mistakes of the past and add to the knowledge as new needs arise.

The Refuge of Neanderthal Man

The cave was our first shelter, the first place we felt that we both owned and were part of. This safe place, where difficulties with humidity and a lack of natural light were gradually solved over time, was also where the history of architecture begins and develops, to the point that we sought and created new shapes and methods for building shelters. The cave gave us housing and tranquility at the same time. To put this into perspective, we should remem ber the words of the Latin American storyteller, Horacio Quiroga: “...when the men were convinced that the beast would not enter, and the cave was consequently unassail able, the growls of the animal were met with flying stones and loud yells. Housing and peaceful sleep had been conquered forever.” 1

The Refuge of Cro-Magnon Man

The caves at Altamira are a series of winding tunnels, crevices, and chambers that were slowly sculpted over millions of years by rainwater penetrating the rocks and molding the sediments.

Imagine this: in these dark, silent caves, small shimmers of light can be seen coming from one chamber. The light comes from a weak flame in a rustic lantern on a rock. In the middle of this subtle splendor stands a man with long hair, dressed in skins and wearing a shell necklace, completely absorbed in painting. Most of his colors have been obtained from soft rocks in red, orange, yellow and brown tones, to which animal fat or blood has been added. He has placed these in large shells or hollow bones and then ground and mixed them together until he has achieved a thick, pasty paint. Now he soaks a piece of leather in the paint, removes it impregnated with color, and smears it on the rock jutting out above him. The painting begins to take on a three-dimensional quality that integrates with the cave itself, and little by little the picture emerges from the wall, blending with both rock and cave: Aesculapian— architecture, sculpture, and painting—become an organic whole.

Within the cave dwellings of Cro-Magnon Man, organic architecture makes its debut.

Troglodyte Architecture

The cave can be considered to be the starting point for the history of architecture; it was our first shelter. However, caves are natural formations and primitive humans made very few modifications to them. The transformation process really began with troglodyte architecture.

A cave was used mostly as a lair rather than as a home. Humans occupied caves principally in winter or during adverse weather conditions. The appearance of the ‘house’ as a daily habitat came later with agricultural development and the domestication of animals. Troglodyte architecture was the first answer to the problem of the dwelling within the new parameters of sedentary life. This was determined by the social organization of agricultural work. The troglo dyte habitat was made up of a group of ‘houses’; it was community architecture. These houses were below the earth, taking advantage of natural cavities or being dug by the inhabitants. With troglodyte architecture, humans began to create, transform and alter their physical surroundings in order to increase well-being, establishing a real symbiotic relationship with the environment.

It is easy to see why humans developed the buried home. Firstly, there was the climatic factor: troglodyte construc tions provided a wonderful answer in regions with extreme weather conditions because the thermal (earth) masses make it easier to maintain a relatively constant temperature. Secondly, strategically speaking, the subterranean dwelling ensured excellent shelter—a human’s reasons for living underground were similar to those of animals such as ants, moles, rabbits, and so on. Finally, there were structural and religious reasons.

The Mobile Dwelling

Although the building of the first housing came with the development of agriculture, a very important historical period existed between this new life and the old routine of the hunter-gatherer: the great migrations. Humans had to use their wits to find a safe, warm, dry place to spend the night during long journeys. As time passed, groups of nomads who followed the animals they were hunting were also confronted with the problems of finding shelter.

In the middle of unlimited natural space, it was necessary to create a closed, limited space for shelter: a portable dwelling. The tent appeared under these circumstances. The tent is, at least in evolutionary if not necessarily in chronological terms, an intermediate stage between natural shelters and the first distinctly human constructions…

The tent is one of the oldest artifacts which is still useful in the modern world; it is one of the most ingenious shelters humans have produced. Today, nomadic tribes use tents extensively in areas where natural shelters are scarce, such as the tundra, desert, steppe, prairie, unobstructed space and flat terrain.

1 Horacio Quiroga, El Salvaje y Otros Cuentos, pocketbook #903 (Madrid, Spain: Editorial Alianza Losada, 1982), 44.

Isamu Noguchi’s Affinity for Hidden Landscapes and Their Makers

“In 1945 I entered a competition with Edward D. Stone for the Jefferson Memorial Park in Saint Louis. In order to enhance the area as a park, the architecture was almost totally buried, with only mound shapes showing. I was much interested in prehistoric American Indian mounds at that time and had taken a trip to Ohio to see the Great Serpent Mound.”

Isamu Noguchi, “Into Living—Architecture,” in Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 160. Photo: The Noguchi Museum Archives, 06173

Isamu Noguchi, Set for Martha Graham’s Cave of the Heart, 1946

“Of course, the legend of Medea is more clearly defined in Martha’s Cave of the Heart, but it’s still an emerging cycle in which Martha wishes to portray an emotional state. Medea was left over from the female goddess period, where snakes prevailed. We started with the snake… On the horizon (center rear) lies a volcanic shape like a black aorta of the heart…”

Isamu Noguchi, “Cave of the Heart,” in Robert Tracy, Spaces of the Mind: Isamu Noguchi’s Dance Designs (New York: Proscenium, 2001), 67–68. Photo: Philippe Halsman. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 06732

“The evidence of the past attests to the place of sculpture in life, and in the ritual of communion with spirit, with tranquility. Precepts of the Buddha like the great temple of Borobudur are a symphony of sculpture. There is no vaster concept of sculpture than the temples of Elora hewn out of the mother rock.”

Isamu Noguchi, fifth draft of “A Sculptor’s World,” typed with Noguchi’s editorial notes. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_PUB_032_001.

Photo: Isamu Noguchi. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 148473

“I got this earth wall through wanting the space…But beyond the matter of merely getting space it ties me further into the soil, it is my pride, my whimsy, my poisonality (sic)!”

Isamu Noguchi, “Noguchi in Kitakamakura,” Interiors (November 1952), 116–121, 171–172. Photo: Isamu Noguchi. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 03225

Isamu Noguchi, Travel Photographs from Ellora Caves, Maharashtra, India, 1949

Isamu Noguchi’s Studio in Kita Kamakura, Japan, c. 1952

Attributed to the Early Woodland Adena culture (500 BCE to 200 CE), The Great Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio

Isamu Noguchi, Memorial to the Dead, Hiroshima, 1951

“The requirements specified that the core, or repository of names, should be underground. A cave beneath the earth (to which we all return), it was to be the place of solace to the bereaved—suggestive still further of the womb of generations who would in time replace the dead.”

Isamu Noguchi, “Project: Hiroshima Memorial to the Dead,” Arts & Architecture 70, no. 4 (April 1953), 16–17. Photo: Isamu Noguchi. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 08838.3

Bernard Rudofsky, “In Praise of Caves”

“Without doubt, the fact that most caves are gratuitously supplied by nature puts them beneath contempt. Snug and delightfully solid as most of them are—if one dis counts the occasional rattle of some unrecorded quake— they are not offered for rent or for sale, and the idea of inhabiting one never occurs to us. Despite the increasing unhealthiness of our surface life—the dangers compound ed of mephitic air and polluted water, not to mention the ever-present dread of atomization—real estate agents so far have overlooked some startling opportunities. They go on peddling the flimsy wooden crate, the plaything of floods and tornadoes, that promises no refuge from an angry Nature. Compared to the rock-bound cave, today’s house is as precarious as a canary’s perch.

In times past caves served as human shelter much like ordinary houses, although they may not have been regarded as personal possessions. However repugnant the thought of living in the naked cleft of rock may be to us, caves have often been selected by man as a retreat from the intemperance of the weather and as a hiding place from his enemies. It just happens that prejudice is stronger than fear or any practical consideration. To our way of thinking, caves are for cavemen only; troglodytism— living in caves—amounts to disowning one’s status as a human being. This calumny is spread by such scholarly publications as the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines troglodyte as ‘a degraded person like the prehis toric or savage cave dwellers.’”

Isamu Noguchi’s Conception of a “New Nature”

From a lecture at International University of Art, Florence, Italy, October 8, 1970

“[M]y point is that there are all kinds of possibilities in civic engineering and city planning as to what can be done by artists. I think one of the really challenging fields for the new generation of sculptors is this question of how to use the new technology and the new mediums not to mutilate nature, but to create a new nature—that is to say a man-made nature but one which is equivalent to the qualities that we associate with nature’s: that is, space and quiet and the aesthetic pleasures of being in such an environment.”

The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_028_005

LEFT Isamu Noguchi, Snake, 1952. Shigaraki stoneware, glaze. Gifted to Martha Graham in 1955. Private collection, courtesy Nicholas J. Sands & Company Fine Art, New York. Photo: The Noguchi Museum Archives, 09201

COVER Carlos Lazo, Augusto Pérez Palacios, and Jorge Bravo, Programa Cuevas Civilizadas, Sur de av. Constituyentes en de La Torres, Belén de las Flores, Alvaro Obregón, Mexico City, c. 1953. Fondo Aerofotográfico Acervo Histórico Fundación ICA, A.C.

In Praise of Caves is organized by Dakin Hart, Senior Curator of The Noguchi Museum, with exhibition consultant Ricardo Suárez Haro, whose idea it was to make an exhibition about organic architecture with these artist-architects. Special thanks to Javier Senosiain and his firm Arquitectura Orgánica, who are principally responsible for making it possible to do so.

Noguchi Subscapes (June 15, 2022–September 3, 2023) is a complementary exhibition.

©2022 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York. Works by Isamu Noguchi ©The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS) noguchi.org

From The Prodigious Builders: Notes Toward a Natural History of Architecture (1977)