Akari: The Isamu Noguchi Lamp

Noguchi was already an established sculptor by then, though not a wealthy one. He'd spent two decades making abstract forms in stone, metal, and clay. Nothing about his career up to that point suggested he'd become known for a lamp. But when he looked at the chochin, he didn't see an object that needed replacing. He saw one that needed almost nothing changed at all.

What Noguchi changed was smaller than it sounds. He swapped the candle for a light bulb, which meant the lantern no longer needed the accordion folds that let it collapse for storage between festivals. Freed from that constraint, he rounded the silhouette into something closer to the abstract sculpture he'd been making all along. Then he named it: Akari, a word that means light, in the sense of illumination, but also carries a second meaning of lightness, or weightlessness.

Noguchi partnered with Gifu's Ozeki Jishichi Shoten, a lantern maker founded in 1891, to produce the first Akari. Ozeki has built every authentic one since, by hand, in the same workshop. Through the 1960s and '70s, Noguchi struck distribution deals across Europe, with Wohnbedarf in Zurich and Basel, Steph Simon in Paris, Martinelli Luce in Italy, putting Akari on the same showroom floors as the continent's own modernists. Today it's considered, by more than one design historian's account, among the most recognized Japanese-American designs of the last century, a rare case of a functional craft object aging into the art world instead of the other way around.