Noguchi Table White Ash by Herman Miller

Herman Miller® & Noguchi Table White Ash

The perfect balance—literally—between art and furniture. Sculptor Isamu Noguchi created his distinctive table by joining a curved, wood base with a freeform glass top. The ethereal result does not diminish the practical design—a sturdy and durable table. This marriage of sculptural form and everyday function has made the Noguchi table an understated and beautiful element in homes and offices since its introduction in 1948.

The table is just three pieces. A 3/4-inch plate-glass top rests on two curved, solid wood legs that interlock to form a tripod for self-stabilizing support. This delicate balance is not surprising, given that from 1942 until his death in 1988, Noguchi designed all of choreographer Martha Graham's sets. Although it looks delicate, it is solid, perfectly balanced, durable. It's also a good size: 15-3/4 inches high, 50 inches wide, 36 inches deep.

When a piece of furniture is so distinctive and desired, copycats come out of the woodwork. To let you know that your table is authentic, the signature of Isamu Noguchi appears on the longest edge of the glass top and on a medallion to the underside of the base. Under the medallion, his initials are stamped into the base.

Ordering & Shipping Information

Ships within 4 to 6 weeks.

Herman Miller History

Founded in 1923 and recognized today throughout the world as an innovator in office and residential furniture design, Herman Miller has been ranked since 1986 among the top ten in Fortune Magazine’s annual list of the 500 most admired companies. Their pioneering research into producing environmentally responsible furniture has earned them GreenGuard Indoor Air Quality certification for most of their products. Aesthetically, many of Herman Miller’s iconic designs, particularly from the 1940s and 1950s, are valuable collector’s items and on permanent display in museums such as the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1933, new furniture designs created by Herman Miller designer Gilbert Rohde exhibiting the smooth lines and unembellished shapes of the emerging mid-century modern furniture style were exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1944, Rohde’s successor George Nelson designed such enduring icons as the Platform bench, and was famously responsible for teaming the company with such influential design artists as Alexander Girard, Isamu Noguchi and Charles and Ray Eames. Charles Eames, widely regarded as a genius in contemporary furniture design, produced one of Herman Miller’s most successful products in 1956, the elegant Eames Lounge chair. In 1994, Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf introduced a new office chair called Aeron (derived from the word aeration, which describes how the mesh suspension promotes comfort), which became an immediate worldwide success and earned a spot in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as well. Today, Herman Miller continues to attract world-famous designers like Jeff Weber, Jerome Caruso, the Studio 7.5 Design Team in Berlin, Yves Behar, Mark Goetz and many more.

If the purpose of design is to solve problems, and the relationship between design and business is synergistic, then Herman Miller today continues to be in the vanguard of design as a fundamental part of strategic planning.

Isamu Noguchi

“Everything is sculpture, any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.”
— Isamu Noguchi

Prominent Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles and educated both in Japan and in the United States. His artistic career spanned six decades and ranged from sculpture to stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, from mass-produced furniture pieces to landscape gardens, but he applied his sculptural sensibility to everything he created.

Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Paris, he was introduced to renowned sculptor Constantin Brancusi and worked as his assistant. While in Paris, he also met and associated with Alexander Calder, Morris Kantor, and Stuart Davis. Back in the United States, Noguchi collaborated with such visionaries as Buckminster Fuller and Martha Graham, for whom he designed sets, a partnership that lasted 30 years.

His relationship with Herman Miller came about when one of his designs was chosen to illustrate an article written by George Nelson called "How to Make a Table." No more serendipitous design could have been chosen than Noguchi’s perfectly balanced, sculptural, organic piece. Delicate and ethereal in appearance, the Noguchi table is design distilled to its essence and reflected on itself. It is also practical, solid, balanced and durable, and has earned a place among the elite designs in American industrial design history.

In 1948, Noguchi collaborated with George Nelson, Paul Laszlo and Charles Eames to produce a catalog for the Herman Miller Company containing what is often considered to be the most influential collection in all of modern furniture design.

“I like to think of gardens as sculpturing of space.”
— Isamu Noguchi

Noguchi came to believe that the sculptor's task was to shape space, to give it order and meaning, and that art should "disappear," or be as one with its surroundings. In the 1950s, Noguchi's began focusing on gardens, recreating the ancient Buddhist stone gardens he had loved in Kyoto at Lever House in New York in 1951. In all, Isamu Noguchi would create twenty gardens, plazas, and playgrounds.

In retrospect, it can said that all of Noguchi’s design work -- playgrounds and gardens, stage sets, interiors, home furnishings -- were part of a unified artistic project, the sculpture of spaces as a transformative art meant to reveal the beauty and balance inherent in all of our natural surroundings.

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