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Isamu Noguchi was born, an illegitimate child, on the 17th of November 1904 to Yone Noguchi (a Japanese poet) and Leonie Gilmore (an American writer) in LA, California. He spent his childhood (from 1906 - 1918) in Japan and adolescence in America. In 1922 after his graduation he joined as an apprentice to Gutzon Burglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, but was told he did not have the talent to be a sculptor. So he joined the Columbia University in 1923 for pre-medical studies. In 1925 his course was reset by his mother who urged him to join the Leonardo-da-Vinci Art school in New York to study sculpture. This time he won a scholarship and moved to Paris where he worked with the abstract artist Constantin Brancusi. And hence started the journey of one of the most successful artists/sculptors of American history.

The thirties saw the first of Isamu Noguchi's furniture designs. Initially he made a table for the home of the president of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1940 he designed his first coffee table for Robsjohn Gibbings, this design was stolen by Gibbings and presented as his own. So Noguchi revised the design; he made the base out of interlocking, identical wood pieces set at right angles. This signature Noguchi table lives to this day as the most loved coffee table of all times. Between 1944 and 1945, Isamu Noguchi made a three legged lamp as a gift for his sister. Life the coffee table, this piece of furniture also reflected a unique biomorphic sense of design. Knoll Associates produced this lamp for 10 years upto 1954.

Earlier in 1943 Noguchi has also started his first 'lunar'. This was basically a curving, undulating sculpture over light bulbs. However the lunar was further improved in the fifties when in 1951 Isamu Noguchi visited Gifu, Japan where he fell in love with the materials used in the manufacture of lamps, Bamboo and Mulberry bark paper. He too made his first design using these elements and called them Akari, which means weightlessness or as light as illumination. In 1948, Isamu Noguchi produced his first and only sofa; a padded couch, incorporating metal legs and a smooth free-flowing body.

Knoll Associated manufactured Noguchi stools between 1954. The stools actually rocked slightly in all directions. It was made out of two wooden circular plates attached with stainless steel rods. The stool's production was ceased in 1959 but revived recently by the Noguchi Museum Store. All of Isamu Noguchi's furniture is biomorphic in nature. His work is the very essence of harmony - between Western and Eastern art forms especially the Noguchi table. Isamu Noguchi died in 1988 but his work lives on.

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