Moerenuma Park is one of the more unusual public spaces in Japan — a large park northeast of central Sapporo built on a reclaimed rubbish landfill and designed entirely by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as his final major work. Noguchi died in 1988 before construction began; the park finally opened in 2005, following his plans closely. What he designed is not a park in the conventional sense but a landscape you move through as though through a piece of sculpture: conical earth hills, a glass pyramid that serves as an event space, a water feature that looks like a frozen wave, lawns shaped by shallow curves that make the flat ground behave unexpectedly.
The scale makes it work. Moerenuma covers 189 hectares, and the ideas that would feel precious at garden size feel natural when you have that much space to move through them. The park is about 30 minutes from central Sapporo by subway and bus, which keeps it relatively quiet on non-summer weekdays. Go in clear weather — the interplay of the sculptural forms with the sky and the mountains visible to the west is what makes it. In winter the hills become sledding slopes, which adds a layer of practical use that Noguchi probably would have approved of.