Noguchi was an American-Japanese designer who originally trained as a sculptor and brought a sculptural sensibility to everything he created: lighting, furniture, gardens and stage sets.

After dropping out of medical school, he studied sculpture in New York, and then in Paris (1927) on a Guggenheim Fellowship as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi. For the rest of his life, Noguchi applied his sculptural sensibility to everything he created: from his mulberry paper Akari lights and Martha Graham’s dance sets, to the mass-manufactured Zenith Radio Nurse and the stone gardens he landscaped at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters and Lever House in New York.

Noguchi sought to make sculpture useful in everyday life and his furniture and interior designs are an important part of this project. His most prolific period was the 1940s when he created furniture and interiors with the biomorphic imagery of his sculpture. 

Several Noguchi pieces of furniture designed for Knoll and Herman Miller have become modern classics eg the Tribeca biomorphic coffee table (Herman Miller, 1945). In 1946 Herman Miller produced a sofa and ottoman with a fluid, organic shape derived from Noguchi's sculpture. 

In the 1980s he established the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York as a space to view a wide variety of his work. The museum has traditional Japanese gardens as well as a collection of his sculpture and furniture.