In 1956, Isamu Noguchi was invited by the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design a monumental sculpture for the new International Arrivals Building of New York’s Idlewild Airport, the first large-scale international airport in the world. R. Buckminster Fuller seemed to acknowledge the appropriateness of Noguchi working in the context of an airport, “… Isamu has always been inherently at home—everywhere. He has to-and-froed in his great back and front yards whose eastward and westward extensions finally merged in world encirclement…