LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- The Noguchi Museum will present Shin Banraisha: A Cultural Memory November 1, 2006 – April 1, 2007. The exhibition documents creation and destruction of masterpiece of post-war art and architecture. Some forty photographic panels, a model, and other items document the creation and destruction of the Shin Banraisha, a site-specific masterpiece of post-war art and architecture designed by Isamu Noguchi in collaboration with architect Yoshiro Taniguchi and interior designer Isamu Kenmochi. Created in 1952, the room and garden, located on the ground floor of a building at Keio University, in Tokyo, was destroyed by the University in 2003 in order to build a new law school. The only remaining trace of the work today is a “reconstruction” comprising artifacts of the original that have been incorporated into a newly created space. Shin Banraisha: A Cultural Memory raises important questions about such issues as the preservation of functional spaces and the primacy of the original work of art.

SHIN BANRAISHA Shin Banraisha (“Welcoming Space”)—set within a building of the same name—was designed in honor of Isamu Noguchi’s father, Yone Noguchi, a prominent Japanese poet and instructor at Keio University. The room and its contiguous sculpture-garden are internationally regarded as a milestone in the history of twentieth-century art. The ensemble was designed by Noguchi in collaboration with Yoshiro Taniguchi, architect of the building (and father of Yoshio Taniguchi, architect of The Museum of Modern Art’s recently expanded building), and interior designer Isamu Kenmochi, who helped with furniture design and fabrication of the room. It is a rare instance in which three masters worked together to create a seamless, cohesive space.

In 2003, over the protests of several organizations, including the Noguchi Foundations in New York and Japan; an international consortium of professionals established in order to save the work; and professors at the University, Keio University dismantled the room. Shin Banraisha was one of three public works that Noguchi created in 1951–52 and the first interior by the artist to be realized anywhere. One of the others, the Readers Digest Gardens, in Tokyo, was demolished in the 1950s. Another, comprising the hand rails of two bridges in Peace Park, in Hiroshima, is now the only surviving postwar public work by Noguchi in Japan.