During the design process, Noguchi created a total of over 100 handmade Shoji-paper models for the Akari lighting collection. Noguchi chose the name ‘akari’, as this word denotes brightness and light in his native Japanese. The lamps remain made in Japan, by hand, by master artisans.
Discover more of the Vitra Akari light collection.

Isamu 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. He studied sculpture, after dropping out of medical school, in late 1920s New York and then in Paris as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi.
Noguchi designed a range of paper Akari lights throughout the 1950s and 1960s, alongside the popular organic furniture he made in curvy sculpted wood now part of the Vitra Collection, such as the Freeform Sofa and Coffee Table. He was equally prolific as a landscape architect; he recreated the ancient Buddhist stone gardens he had loved in Kyoto at Lever House in New York (1951), UNESCO in Paris (1951), the Yale campus (1960) and Jerusalem’s Israel Museum (1960).