Genius behind paper lampshade

If you remember the 1970s you'll remember Isamu Noguchi, even though the name will very likely mean nothing. You'll remember the light shades he designed, big paper spheres stiffened with thin wire hoops, which were everywhere. They were the emblems of the low-cost, ecoish, post-oil-crisis, mueslieating aspect of that decade which also went for cork and hessian. This style wasn't camp enough to be revived the way Boogie Nights kitsch was and 1980s postmodernism will be, but I expect your mum had one of the lights.

They were designed in the Fifties and Sixties but took a while to catch on. They seemed to represent that serene spirituality which, so the racial stereotype would have it, is what Japanese culture is all about.

They were nice, but you wouldn't cross town to see an exhibition of them, not even for the nostalgic buzz. But cross town is exactly what you should do, should you be unfortunate enough to live in west London, as the Design Museum's Noguchi exhibition is as compelling as a show of mute objects can be.

For Noguchi wasn't serene. He was tortured and restless and brilliant, and forever trying to recover from the ingenious mistreatments his parents thought up for him. Nor, even though his exhibition is part of the Japan 2001 festival, was he entirely Japanese, but a half-American who for a while was called Sam Gilmour. He was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese father who left before he was born, and an American mother who took him to Japan, only to send him alone back to the States, without having the money to follow him, or to bring him back. He returned to Japan as an adult, even though his father forbade him to, and forbade him to use the name Noguchi.

Nor was he just a designer of lights and chairs, of the kind you might normally expect in the Design Museum. He was a sculptor who worked under Brancusi, a designer of sets for the great American choreographer Martha Graham, and a creator of gardens and landscapes. In the exhibition, you're not always sure if you're looking at a sculpture, or a vase, or a model of a swimming pool for a movie moghul, that doesn't seem kidney-shaped so much as modelled on some weird inner organ you never knew existed.

One reason for this uncertainty is that the exhibits are not captioned. Instead you're given a paper sheet with little line drawings, a bit like the guides you get in boxes of chocolates that tell you that the knobbly ones have nuts in and the striped rhombuses are caramels. Except if they were chocolates they'd be called things like Incest Surprise and Castratrix's Crunch. There's Jocasta's Bed, created for a Martha Graham performance about the Oedipus myth, an object suggestive of male and female anatomy which is just as perturbing as it should be, given that it was the place where Jocasta unwittingly slept with her son. Ditto the tent in which Holophernes had his head cut off by Judith, after they had sex.

There's also Radio Nurse, a Bakelite baby intercom device from 1937, and an eloquent expression of Noguchi's less than-sunny experiences of childhood and parents. It looks like a faceless female Samurai, and if there are now some deeply disturbed sixty-somethings wandering about the States, the presence of this sinister object in their infant bedrooms will be to blame.

Noguchi's objects, even the purely functional ones, are always edgy and weird. He described himself as belonging "to that increasing number of not exactly belonging people", a feeling intensified when the two countries he belonged to fought a war with each other that had to be ended by dropping two atom bombs. The scattering of odd things about the Design Museum is like an alphabet of objects dropped from outer space, as part of some alien's desperate attempt to communicate.

I don't suppose your mum knew all this when she bought those lampshades - which are still selling today for around £5 - and you may wonder why anyone would want to invite the results of Noguchi's torments into your home. You may also still be wondering why the trip to the Design Museum's awkward SE1 location is worthwhile. The reason is that Noguchi channelled his torments into objects that are beautiful, and all the more so for being strange.

When he designed a sofa, he came up with something as mysterious and soulful as a sofa can be, while also giving child-like pleasure with its odd blobby forms. A designer interested only in form following function could never have created it.