The Japanese-American sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, was invited in 1951 to design a memorial to all those who died when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on this day, 70 years ago. (Nagasaki was bombed three days later on 9 August). Never built, the dramatic cenotaph for Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park was to be made of black granite and, according to Noguchi, equated “birth and death, the arch of peace with the dome of destruction”. Most of the memorial would have been underground where in a cave would have been a coffer recording the names of the dead. The dramatic design was eventually rejected by officials, partly because Noguchi was an American and also because the site was in effect a burial ground, the Japanese artist Okazaki Kenjir explains in an essay written to accompany his new model of the unbuilt memorial, which was unveiled earlier this year at the Noguchi Museum in New York.
