The Noguchi Museum opens its doors today on a new photographic exhibit, “Shin Banraisha: A Cultural Memory.” The show is an attempt to revive interest in a visionary, but destroyed fusion of art and architecture designed by Japanese-American sculptor and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi.

The Banraisha — which translates roughly to “the hall for 10,000 visitors to come” — was a one-room social club on the campus of Tokyo’s Keio University. Created in Japan’s early Meiji period, nearly three decades before Noguchi’s birth in 1904, the room became known as a center for intense debates and cheerful social gatherings for the school’s students and faculty.

After the room was destroyed during World War II, Noguchi was asked to design Shin Banraisha — meaning “new” Banraisha — in collaboration with Japanese architect Yoshiro Taniguchi. Completed in 1952 and dedicated to Noguchi’s father, Yonejiro — who was a prominent Japanese poet and professor at Keio — Noguchi’s masterful modernist creation was for more than 50 years a profound reminder of the optimism of Japan’s postwar reconstruction period. With its powerful minimalist vocabulary of shapes and its warm, welcoming wood composition, it was a chamber that had a strong psychological impact.

But despite the room’s halcyon atmosphere — evoking supreme simplicity and calm, with its picturesque view of a garden with Mount Fuji in the distance — the chamber eventually fell into disrepair and disuse. The room meant for 10,000 visitors fell silent and nearly forgotten, tucked away in a poorly accessible university building. Meanwhile, at the university, space was at a premium.

Consequently, the university’s president announced in 2002 that the Shin Banraisha was incompatible with plans for a new law school construction project. The room and the adjoining garden would have to be dismantled if those plans were to be carried through.

Art and architecture specialists lodged protests with the university. Noguchi enthusiasts filed a doomed legal injunction against the university. At one point, the university suggested moving Shin Banraisha to a new site, but it was not an appropriate move.

Ultimately, the room was destroyed in 2003. Its components ended up as a scattered collection of stone pillars and wood benches around Keio’s campus.

None of those pillars or benches are present, however, in the exhibit. Only photographs remain to pay homage to a welcoming space that surely served its function in beautiful form. The closest we come to furniture is a scale model at the center of the room of photographs.

But the story of Shin Banraisha is one full of unfortunate ironies. Foremost, Noguchi’s original room and garden were designed to encourage social activity. Over time, they were both abandoned. The university even erected a “no trespassing” sign.

“Noguchi was really seen as a kind of savior,” Ms. Rychlak said, but the work “didn’t have enough significance” to people at the university.

More troubling, however, is the issue of protecting modernist spaces, which the curators hope this project will illustrate. “It’s a sad story, and we’re trying to memorialize this site,” a curatorial associate, Carl Riddle, said.