Almost invisibly water flows over this stone fountain. The fountain is one of the last sculptures by Isamu Noguchi, the American-born sculptor and designer. He created it, especially for this space in The Metropolitan in 1986. Noguchi made the fountain in Japan—the light stones you see in the fountain's bed come from the Ise River, the site of the most important ancient Shinto shrine in Japan. The dark basalt stone that Noguchi selected and carved to form the fountain itself is from Japan as well.

This fountain and its setting is an abstract garden meant to evoke the close relationship between interior and exterior space in Japan. The wooden screen represents an architectural convention that dates back to the seventeenth century, whereby an interior view is focused on a specific frame of a garden. Your view now is constructed as though you were inside a home or temple looking out, and the sculpture itself is an abstraction of a Japanese garden. Gardens often contained a stone basin to collect water from a nearby mountain stream. Ordinarily, water would be conveyed through a bamboo pipe into the basin, but here it emerges from the depths of the rock, uniting the disparate elements of water and stone.