Along with the postwar period of rebirth and industrialization came an obsession with design, a faith in its power to reshape the way we live. Not surprisingly, social objects like martini shakers, radios, and barbecues were objects of attention. The brilliant Isamu Noguchi, in the mid 1940s, was already ahead of the game, working on the perfect ashtray. This online exhibition focuses on Noguchi’s concepts for two families of ashtray—one biomorphic and shaped by hand, the other “an American expression of the machine age.” —E.C.