deathw2 © 1999 Red Slider

"...commerce was a lively game in town
and down around the Santa Anna river,
the boys would whoop it up. . ."

- fr. Spirit in the Sky, 1999; Red Slider

California Scenario, located in Orange County's 'South Coast Plaza' was one of Noguchi's showcase works and the last to be built in the United States. It is an international prize-winner with a well deserved international reputation. Indeed, even the workers in the surrounding office buildings bordering this fantastic plaza swear the space has phenomenal healing powers. So far, no one that I know has been able to disprove this claim.

It took hundreds of workers, from lunch-time caterers to master stone-cutters to pull off one of the strangest on-paper/in-the-head designs to confront the shopping mall circuit in its entire history. But it really took three people with a single common and unique quality to pull the thing off.

C.J. Segerstrom is a well-known Orange County entrepreneur, philanthropist and one-time lima bean farmer. His family settled the area nearly a hundred years ago. A private man, I could find little about his personal life at the time of this writing. But one anecdote reported by Shoji Sadao, Director of the Noguchi Garden Museum, to Noguchi's biographer, Dore Ashton, stands out and is probably fairly accurate and typical of the man. When offering the commission for the project to Noguchi, Segerstrom is reported to have said, "I want an artistic dictator and you are it."

Roger Ledbetter is also a man with a reputation in Orange County. As one local architect put it, "Roger is a builder's builder." Ledbetter, as the lead on-site foreman for the project's general contractor, strikes me as the kind of person you give a job and stay out of the way. If its buildable, he'll get the job done, and do it right. An attending architect related this story about Roger at the ceremony celebrating the completion of the project in 1982. After dinner and several rounds of white wine, ledbetter asked one group of architects sitting at his table if they knew what the meandering canal in the plaza symbolized. When no one could hazard a guess, Ledbetter enlightened them, "That's Mr. Segerstrom's good money going down the drain."

The third person is Noguch himself. But even for Noguchi, I think California Scenario required an extra measure of the singular attribute that joined these three men. As I review what information I have on the project it seems, more than ever, that Noguchi himself was at times uncertain about the ultimate meander of his almost disturbingly space-sensitive design. It is not a quality easily set to exact description. But I can imagine Noguchi describing it in these terms: 'If you make a cut or place a stone, and you do it right, well then, that's it. It doesn't matter what anyone thinks, it doesn't even matter what I think.'

What I think these men had in common was a quality which signals not only mastery of their craft, but a certain maturity of that mastership. Segerstrom no longer required market surveys and expert opinion to tell him what investments were worth doing. Ledbetter didn't need to understand what he was building to build it correctly. And, Noguchi was just as capable of producing a consumate work of art if the rock split in some entirely wild fashion as if it split exactly the way he intended.

That ineffable control over complex processes is what I think these three men, Segerstrom, Ledbetter and Noguchi, shared in common as the pieces of California Scenario were set in place. They were people who knew their job, did it right, and that's it.

This upcoming piece is a little tribute to Roger Ledbetter, but serves as well a tribute to all three...

. . .

. . . return path

To Noguchi Lobby