Sunken Garden 1964

Isamu Noguchi’s “Sunken Garden” brings the calming atmosphere of a Japanese Zen garden to downtown New York. The garden, installed below the Chase Manhattan Plaza, contains basalt rocks from the Uji River in Japan, and granite tiles from Vermont. The garden becomes a fountain in the summer. When it was first built, people added goldfish to the pond. Noguchi, a New York-based sculptor, often collaborated with architects, including Gordon Bunshaft, the architect of 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza. This plaza has been compared to Noguchi’s Beinecke Library courtyard at Yale because both spaces are visible from above and around the garden at the underground levels of the buildings.