The Story of Octetra
Written by George Spence
This is the story of the circuitous journey of Octetra, a concrete sculpture, from New York to Italy, to Japan, to Georgia, to New York and back to Georgia. This is a personal experience story for me as I was intimately involved in a significant portion of the journey of my friend Octetra.
Octetra was designed by the world-famous 20th Century Japanese/American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in his Long Island, New York, studio. This art piece was strongly influenced by Noguchi’s very good friend and collaborator Buckminster Fuller, who coined the phrase geodesic dome and promoted its use.
Noguchi called Octetra a “play object.” When kids see it, they get it immediately. You see them climbing on, through and on top of the sculpture. The design, while complex, uses simple geometry. It is based on one of Archimedes’ “thirteen solids,” a truncated tetrahedron, with eight sides composed of four hexagon faces and four triangle faces. That suggests an octahedron and a tetrahedron. Eurika! . . . Octetra. Geometrically, it is a three-sided pyramid with its four points chopped off. In addition, each individual casting has a spherical void cast in its center. Five individual castings of the truncated tetrahedrons are assembled to create Octetra in its final pyramid shape.
The first exposition of Octetra was part of a Noguchi retrospective at the Whitney Museum in April 1968. This first prototype was made of fiberglass and gelcoat. That summer, Noguchi exhibited the first concrete Octetra in Spoleto, Italy for the 1968 Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds. This sculpture remains on public display in the cathedral piazza in Spoleto.
Noguchi’s second concrete Octetra was exhibited at the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan in 1973, where he was living and working in Japan at the time. And this casting remains on permanent display at the museum. My wife and I had the opportunity to visit Hakone in 1992 and see this casting. Seeing an Octetra that was personally cast by Noguchi was a thrilling experience for us. We could imagine him climbing in and out of it, checking all the details for perfection.
Noguchi had a long relationship with the High Museum in Atlanta, starting in 1975 when he worked with it to create and install his “Playscapes,” a public art project in Piedmont Park. The Park functioned as a children’s playground with slides, swings and other play structures, located at the 12th Street gate to the park. The “Playscapes” were renovated in 2008 to upgrade safety standards for playground equipment and playground is still in use today.
When the acclaimed architect Richard Meier’s design for the High Museum addition was being built in the early1980s, Noguchi donated an authorized reproduction of Octetra, to be displayed on the new grounds, but with the provision that the museum commission a local precast company to do the casting, using his molds he built to cast the first two Octetra sculptures.
This is when I became involved. I owned an architectural precast concrete plant.
Beers Construction, one of my good customers, was the contractor for this High Museum addition. The Beers project manager called me and wanted a price to cast the sculpture. He apologized for the unusual request. When he explained what it was, a Noguchi, I got excited. My wife and I have deep interest in the arts and had studied Noguchi’s work. I immediately said I would do it for free to get my name on a Noguchi. He said, “You’ve got the job.”
Noguchi had shipped his mold to the High Museum, and I had one of my trucks returning from Atlanta to detour by the High Museum’s warehouse and bring it back to my plant. I then scheduled the casting of the five pieces for the sculpture. My plant production managers and I were perplexed by the mold. It was nothing like what we had encountered before. We finally figured out how we would set it up for casting. The design was ingenious. I would never have conceived it myself. My plant staff was impressed and fascinated. They took great pride setting it up for casting the five pieces for the sculpture.
For politics or a personal grudge, no one knows, Richard Mier turned Octetra down in favor of a Calder sculpture, titled Three Up, Three Down. At the next meeting the owner asked, “What are we going to do with this one now?”
I said, jokingly, “I’ll take it.”
A couple of weeks later, I received a letter from Noguchi that stated, “I give you Octetra.” My wife Rhenda and I instructed my shipping crew to deliver Octetra to our house and added it to our sculpture garden in the lower yard. Our children, visiting friends’ children, neighborhood children loved climbing and playing on it. We even had art lovers, who heard about the Noguchi piece in our yard, drive in to see the sculpture. And, of course, we never tired of viewing Octetra from our living room windows. We were the proud owners of a significant piece of art.
We enjoyed the sculpture in our yard for the next twenty years when my wife and I discussed that we cannot take Octetra with us. We wanted to find it a permanent home. In 2008, we donated it to the Creative Arts Guild where Octetra could be enjoyed by the public. Every time there is an event at the Guild that includes children, like the annual fall Festival, I see kids (and adults) climbing all over Octetra in the Guild’s sculpture garden.
In 2014, Dakin Hart, the curator of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island, called me and said, “You are the only person we know in North America who knows how to cast Noguchi’s concrete sculpture Octetra. The Pace Gallery in New York is organizing a Noguchi respective next year and we would like to have Octetra displayed in the exhibit. Would you be willing to cast a new one?”
I said, “Yes. I would be honored to cast it.” The original mold was no longer available nor were drawings available. I took measurements from the Octetra at the Creative Arts Guild, prepared new drawings and had a metal fabricator build a new mold. I had sold my plant to a larger precast company, Metromont, where I was currently employed. I used Metromont’s Hiram, Georgia plant to cast the five pieces for the sculpture. We cast, finished and shipped Octetra to the Pace Gallery for the Noguchi Retrospective exhibit for the February 20, 2015 opening.
John Wieland of John Wieland Homes in Atlanta, a patron of the arts and significant supporter of the High Museum, received information about the exhibit at the Pace Gallery. He was taken with Octetra and purchased the one on display at Pace. He intended to place in front of his future condominiums One Museum Place, planned across Peachtree Street from the High Museum. Today, with the condos completed, travelers on Peachtree Street can see it easily, located between the sidewalk and the front gate.
While the condos were being constructed, Wieland decided to loan the sculpture to the High Museum. I worked with the museum staff to locate a place on the grounds and prepare a bearing pad to receive the sculpture. Octetra was placed, by my crew, in the High Museum piazza, directly in front of the exit from the parking deck elevators.
The High Museum held a formal ceremony May 12, 2016, to unveil Octetra finally displayed on its grounds. I was honored when the Board of the museum invited me to attend as the keynote speaker.
So it came to pass, some thirty-five years after he first donated his sculpture, Noguchi’s intent to display Octetra on the grounds of the High Museum had at last been realized.