Remember when: A celebrated artist created Atlanta's most creative playground
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PhotoL Courtesy of The Noguchi Museum Archives, 02173. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society
On the western edge of Piedmont Park, there's a reminder that playgrounds can be artful and art can be playful.
Driving the news: Built in 1976, the one-acre modernist playground designed by prominent sculptor and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi is one of Atlanta's most widely used and creative works of public art.
Details: The playground is striking for its simplicity and use of color: a 20-foot-tall cylinder with a blue spiral slide, swings hanging from right triangles, and a jungle gym that's easy to climb and get lost inside.
Catch up quick: The $225,000 gift to the city from the High Museum of Art — first suggested three years earlier by a museum volunteer named Frankie Coxe — replaced what the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine called a one-acre "decrepit, little-used" playground.
Of note: Noguchi died in 1988, and the Piedmont Park playground was the only one built during his lifetime.
What they're saying: "While the simple fundamental forms of the Playscapes often leave adults today undazzled in a world of McDonaldized and themed playgrounds, children immediately get it," artist Jinger Simkins-Stuntz, who helped petition the city to update the space, told the AJC in 2009.
- "They get to really do what they often don't get a chance to do anywhere else in the urban landscape — slide from the treetops, swing into the clouds and conquer the king on the mountain."
State of play: The city spent $350,000 in 2008 to scrub graffiti, add several coats of paint and make slight adjustments to Noguchi's design for safety concerns.
- In 2014, it underwent a $21,000 glow-up funded by modern furniture maker Herman Miller's philanthropic arm.