NEW YORK, NY.- The Noguchi Museum announced that designer Jasper Morrison and architect Yoshio Taniguchi will receive the second annual Isamu Noguchi Award, given to recognize kindred spirits in innovation, global consciousness, and Japanese/American exchange. Motohide Yoshikawa, Ambassador of Japan to the United Nations, will present the award during a special ceremony at The Noguchi Museum’s annual Spring Benefit on Tuesday, May 19, 2015. This event is part of a year of celebratory programming in honor of the 30th anniversary of the Museum’s founding by Isamu Noguchi.

Jenny Dixon, Director of The Noguchi Museum stated, “We are thrilled to present the second annual Isamu Noguchi Award to Jasper Morrison and Yoshio Taniguchi, whose visionary work and extraordinary contributions in the fields of design and architecture exemplify Noguchi’s lifelong commitment to world citizenship and the practice of art with a social purpose.”

During a lifetime of artistic experimentation that included everything from sculptures and gardens to lighting designs and playgrounds, Isamu Noguchi (1904 - 1988) set a new standard for the integration of the arts. He was an avid collaborator, developing projects and friendships with some of the most important creative people of the 20th century, including Diego Rivera, Martha Graham, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Kenzo Tange, and Louis Kahn, among others. Contemporary artists today—from visual artists, designers, and architects, to dancers and musicians—continue to engage with and find inspiration in the wellspring of Noguchi’s diverse oeuvre.

Jasper Morrison is one of the world’s most influential industrial designers. His talent for creating objects that are defined by their simplicity and fit seamlessly within their surroundings, are just two of his many affinities with Isamu Noguchi. Morrison’s aesthetic, in particular his quiet respect for materials, is often described as Japanese, but like Noguchi, he is profoundly and purposefully cosmopolitan. He is as comfortable with the stonework of Italian marble quarries and the traditional wood and paper industries of Japan, as he is with the high-precision metal forming and electronics that he employs in his collaborations with companies such as Vitra, Alessi and Samsung, Morrison has also developed designs with Cappellini, Flos, Muji, Camper, Maharam and Emeco, and his designs have appeared in major museums, galleries and biennials such as Documenta 8; The DAAD Gallery, Berlin; and the Tate Modern, London. Morrison’s 1999 Air Chair—a light, elegant, durable, and relatively inexpensive molded chair made from a single piece of plastic using gas injection technology—is indicative of his openness to new materials and technologies. In another of his commonalities with Noguchi, Morrison’s designs are extraordinarily spatially aware and take into consideration all circumstances that they seek to affect. He is the rare designer whose work combines art with industry in the clear service of making a better world.

Yoshio Taniguchi was introduced to Noguchi at a young age by his father, Yoshiro (1904–1979), who was also a prominent architect and collaborated with the artist on the Shin Banraisha, a room and garden located on the ground floor of a building at Keio University. Noguchi was close friends with both father and son, and became an avuncular mentor to the younger Taniguchi. After establishing his own architecture firm in 1979, Yoshio Taniguchi collaborated with Noguchi on his first museum project in 1984: the Ken Domon Museum of Photography, Japan’s inaugural photography museum that houses the collection of the renowned Japanese photographer. Taniguchi designed four other major museums in Japan before redesigning the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2004. Since then, he has worked on significant projects in Switzerland, the United States, and most recently on the Heisei Chishinkan Wing, a new addition to the Kyoto National Museum, Japan. Among a handful of global architects known for taking an understated approach to museum design, Taniguchi excels in creating spaces with a humility and elegance that allows the art contained within to stand on its own. A master of imbuing his projects with a humane and universal refinement, he credits his sensitivity to the relationship between objects and spaces in part to his friendship with Noguchi. This quality of spatial serenity is highly evident in Noguchi’s own designs for his homes, studios, and of course in The Noguchi Museum. With compatriots such as Tadao Ando and Arata Isozaki— also friends of Noguchi’s—Taniguchi has been an enormously important conduit for Japanese aesthetics in the West.

Established in 2014 by The Noguchi Museum, the Isamu Noguchi Award is given annually to an individual or individuals who share Noguchi’s commitment to innovation, global consciousness, and Japanese/American exchange. Lord Norman Foster and Hiroshi Sugimoto were the first recipients of the award. Created by Peter Carlson, Noguchi’s fabricator for many years, the award was inspired by Noguchi’s iconic public sculpture Red Cube of 1968, located in the plaza of 140 Broadway in New York City’s Financial District.