::Metropolis Tokyo :: INTERIORS

In celebration of the centennial of his birth, Trina O'Hara looks at the life and enduring legacy of Japanese-American designer Isamu Noguchi.

If you were walking around Minami Aoyama recently, you may have wondered why so many shop owners opted for window displays filled with paper lanterns. Not the ordinary round or square lantern variety, but modern, unusually shaped ones made of pleated paper and bamboo. The displays were not a marketing ploy or seasonal garland. They were a quiet, simple gesture to honor Isamu Noguchi, one of the world's greatest designers. He would have turned 100 this year.

Noguchi's designs are admired for their harmonious blend of Japanese aesthetic and modernist form. Pick up any book illustrating furniture or lighting icons of the 20th century and his dazzlingly simple, abstract and biomorphic forms, including the paper lanterns, are there. Noguchi sculpted in Paris, and designed stage sets and costumes for the New York City Ballet and Martha Graham Dance Company, as well as playgrounds, landscaped environments, gardens and memorials all over the United States and Japan. He was a truly universal artist.

Few people, however, know Noguchi's other trademark. His art illustrates the saying that "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Noguchi spent his life bursting with complicated identity issues. For every dark period in his life he created a light sculpture, for every lonely moment he created a bustling children's playground, and for every painful separation there is a full-sized couch to share.

Life style
Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904 to a Japanese father and an Irish-American mother. His father left before he was born, and when he was 2, his mother brought Isamu to Japan. Noguchi felt lonely and isolated at his Japanese school so his mother sent him to an English-speaking school in Yokohama. It didn't ease the pain, and at 13 he was sent back to the US. Soon after he arrived, Noguchi's third school was closed and the US had entered WWI. Noguchi would spend the rest of his life traveling between the two countries, not feeling at home in either one.

In 1940 Noguchi again found himself in the US during wartime. This time, Americans of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Noguchi, who was living in California but considered a legal resident of New York, was not forced into the camps but voluntarily entered Colorado River Relocation Camp near Poston, Arizona in an effort to help the detainees by conducting drawing and sculpture activities. When the guards put a stop to these activities, Noguchi decided to leave. But they refused to release him for seven months and Noguchi's identity took another blow. He later said he felt like a prisoner in his own country.

Noguchi, who died in New York in 1988, lives on in his pure forms that remain popular with designers and consumers alike. His tables, chairs and lights suit, among other styles, the modern, minimalist interior and the traditional Japanese interior.

The coffee table Noguchi designed in 1945 for the Herman Miller Furniture Company is, arguably, the world's most recognizable coffee table. Its slim-shaped wooden supports are two identically shaped pieces of wood placed in perfect balance with each other and joined at a single point with a pin. The supports and the kidney-shaped glass mix the clean lines of Asia with the 1940s American desire for mass-produced, cheap furniture, which could be shipped in parts and assembled on location.

Noguchi also explored his Japanese heritage through his Akari lighting designs. Akari is the Japanese word for "illumination" or "awareness." In 1951 Noguchi traveled to Gifu to study traditional lanterns. At the request of the mayor, the designer stayed and created several modern lighting designs to reinvigorate the area's paper lantern industry. In the 25 years that followed, Noguchi produced hundreds of lantern variations. To this day they are still handmade by the original manufacturer in Gifu.

Turning the tables
To help celebrate the centennial of Noguchi, retail prices for his designs have gone down, both here and abroad. Douglas De Nicola, director of merchandising at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation in New York, wants to return to the Modernist ideal behind Modern furniture?that is, all good design should be within the reach of the masses.

De Nicola has lowered the prices of Akari lamps as much as 20 percent.
"I wanted them to be under $100, so different sorts of people could buy them. We have made up in volume what we might have lost in profit margin," he says, noting that he's trying a similar strategy with Noguchi furniture.

So if you're trying to create a home interior that expresses your own bold "East meets West" look, now is the right time to experiment with Noguchi, who provides options different from the usual combination of Buddha head, scroll, orchid and red feature wall mixed in with angular, minimalist furniture.

Noguchi designs offer an Asian fusion style that is both subtle and sophisticated; for example, the curvaceous 9-foot-long Freeform Sofa and matching wool-upholstered ottoman. Noguchi designed this set in 1946, again for American furniture manufacturing company Herman Miller, and it remains stylish today. The sculptural organic forms feel like the concepts of yin and yang embodied in furniture. The original set sold at a recent auction in the US for $250,000, but you can buy the new version for a lot less.

Best of all, these designs create a space and feeling guaranteed to put your mind at ease after a challenging day. Noguchi created his lights, tables and chairs partly to balance his own internal commotion, an effect that works on users of his furniture and designs as well. The serenity of Noguchi's work provides an added benefit in a world that can appear increasingly wild and hectic.

Photo Courtesy of KnollStudio, Herman Miller American Furniture Manufacturing Company, Vitra Design Museum