The Paper Lamps Isamu Noguchi Made Light Out Of

Isamu Noguchi designed a lamp you can walk into. His Akari PL1 stands about 8 feet (2.4 metres) tall and is made of four billowy sheets of paper, and Artsy dates it to around 1965.

Noguchi, an American sculptor and designer with Japanese roots, made the Akari series in the early 1950s. The name is the Japanese word for "light." To Noguchi, it suggested both illumination and weightlessness, according to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York.

The story starts with a small town. Artnet News reported that a small-town mayor in Japan asked Noguchi for help, and that the request led to the lamps. The first Akari, dating from 1951, was a modern lamp made for export. It used washi, a traditional Japanese paper.

Washi is made by hand. It comes from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, which is pulped, spread and dried into thin, strong sheets. Light passes through it softly, which is why the lamps glow the way they do. The shades are still made in Japan by Ozeki & Co., a family-owned company founded in 1891 in Gifu. The shades use mulberry bark washi stretched over bamboo frames.

Noguchi did not stop at plain paper. Japanese custom had long linked white lamps with death and with veneration, the honouring of ancestors. Noguchi answered that by adding colour and script to some designs, according to the Noguchi Museum's digital history of the lamps.

For anyone who has ever lit a lamp in a room, the Akari idea is simple. A light source can be folded paper and a bamboo frame, made by hands that have been doing the same job for generations. The lamps are sold as furniture and as sculpture, and they are still being made.

A lamp meant for export became one of the best-known pieces of Japanese-inspired design in the world. The lamps still do the job they were made for: they give light to a room.