This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

You may have seen a Nukuchi table.

Actually, I know you've seen it.

It's like the coffee table.

In movies or TV shows, when they want to show that a lawyer or an art dealer is really

sophisticated, they put a Nukuchi table in their waiting room.

And it is really a beautiful table.

Two curvy wooden legs interlock and support this heavy slab of glass, which seems like

it's almost floating above them.

That's reporter Jackson Roach.

Since the Nukuchi coffee table was introduced in 1948, it's become one of the emblems of

mid-century industrial design.

It has its own Wikipedia page, and there's a thriving Instagram hashtag, hashtag, F-Y-N-C-T,

which stands for F*** your Nukuchi coffee table, which basically means F*** your Fuji Klee

Shay interiors.

Which is ironic because like all eventual cliches, Nukuchi himself was quite avant-garde.

Nukuchi was a prodigy, a sculpting prodigy.

Isamu Nukuchi was a sculptor, and he was so much more than that.

Choreographers and fashion designers and art directors, and a whole lot of different

people across a really wide creative swath looked at Nukuchi as a point of inspiration.

This is Daken Hart, senior curator of the Isamu Nukuchi Foundation and Garden Museum.

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