In balance

Bob Handelman

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Bob Handelman

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Looking out at the sunken sculpture garden from the reading room of the Beinecke Library, a visitor sees what the artist, Isamu Noguchi, once described as a “landscape . . . purely that of the imagination.” Designed as an integral part of the Beinecke when it was built sixty years ago, The Garden (Pyramid, Sun, and Cube) is prized for both its form and its function. “The sunken garden is a lovely, lively, and evocative piece of art, and also serves the functional purpose of permitting daylight into the reading room and the offices adjacent to the courtyard,” says Michael Morand ’87, ’93MDiv, the Beinecke’s director of community engagement. His office looks out on Noguchi’s marble garden, and Morand appreciates the symmetry of inside and outside. “The reading room,” he says, “is a place of the imagination adjacent to and made possible by a landscape of the imagination.”