Social Welfare

Belonging needs a clear invitation, or at least an absence of exclusion. At Chase the circle denies a front and distributes attention around the entire streetscape, seen just from the edges above or below. But there is still room to roam, below grade in the glass lobby, so this corporate threshold transforms into a shared ground in Lower Manhattan’s privately owned public space network, with visitors occupying the balcony or lobby rather than the interior of the garden (Yoshioka, 2006). Noguchi’s own language underwrites the choice: a garden composed as sculpture (Apostolos et al., 1994; Hoffman-Kuroda, 2020), made for interaction through sight, acting as a museum piece presented on pedestal, to be appreciated from 360-degrees only through the protective glass. Such clarity, however, invites lingering and mutual awareness rather than spectacle at distance, lowering social temperature at the parapet and making casual occupation feel warranted (Barlow Rogers, 2005).

The two vantage points, a public balcony along the street and an interior vantage from the lower lobby, fold passersby, office workers, and visitors into a unified congregation. From the sidewalk, a quick scan takes in the whole bowl and opposite lobby, while people at the rail become part of the scene for others across the way. From underground, the city slides by as a moving proscenium of faces and footsteps. This scenic and humanistic blurring is present throughout Noguchi’s work: at the Beinecke Garden (1960-64) at Yale University, layered spectatorship between terrace and court makes seeing and being seen a routine exchange. At Chase the public above and the bankers below are mirrored. Although the parties are separated by grade, the hierarchy between public and private is eliminated (Apostolos et al., 1994; Treib, 2003; Yoshioka, 2006). In a district coded by access and status, stacked vantage normalizes co-presence among office workers, tourists, and neighbors who might otherwise pass without acknowledgment. Read against the politics of visibility around Japanese American identity, this everyday recognition works to break down the class and racial barriers of the 20th Century, working towards Noguchi’s goal of reintegrating “the arts towards some purposeful social end” (Lyford, 2003; Hoffman-Kuroda, 2020, p. 43).

The edge, and its invitation to meander around the entire bowl, gives social cues. Earlier at the UNESCO Garden (1956-58) in Paris, in which one can physically enter, Noguchi composed terrace, path, and lower garden so that walking staged approach and encounter as part of the garden itself (Treib, 2003). Chase, on the other hand, condenses that sequence into a curvilinear promenade at the rim. A short walk along the balustrade, a pause at the parapet, a glance exchanged with viewers across the bowl: the choreography yields recognition and shared occupation without signage or access to the floor (Yoshioka, 2006). Public art pedagogy clarifies that when thresholds and cues are legible, or at the very least barriers remain absent, more people feel entitled to stop, look in, and stay, even on private land shaped to serve the city (Lasater Hill et al., 1988).

There are few physical elements but their structure is evident, echoing the same openness Noguchi refined in smaller sculpture and furniture, putting the viewer at ease. The tripod clarity of the Noguchi table and the luminous restraint of Akari model stability with certainty; at Chase the circle and bowl do analogous work for people along the rail, offering availability rather than control (Petkanas, 2004; Apostolos et al., 1994). In accordance with Iser’s notion of the viewer as co-author, viewers can see the garden near-circular infinite perspectives at each visit, alternating between high and low, the bowl dry and stoic or deluged and reflective, from any degree around the bowl, supplying a blank canvass that pedestrians complete through looking and return visits (Hubard, 2008). Plan removes hierarchy, section builds reciprocal seeing, and the parapet becomes a shared stage for everyday public life. What might read as corporate décor performs as an egalitarian civic room at the edge, composed with minimal means and open to the many (Yoshioka, 2006; Barlow Rogers, 2005).