Born in 1906 and still designing today, Eva Zeisel is continually intrigued by what she calls her "playful search for beauty." Zeisel is world renowned for her ceramics, and when she was in her early 80s, she started designing tables. The medium may have changed, but her Coffee Table (1993) is still very Zeisel with its whimsical lines and ornamental motifs. A person of delightfully defiant spirit, Zeisel was just beginning her career when she declared war on the fashionable avant-garde. "I didn't accept the purism of modern design," she says. "In my definition, if it gave beauty to the eye, it was beauty." Even when MoMA was an advocate of straight-lined Bauhaus design, Zeisel gave them curved feminine forms. The result of such an approach is a design that's truly timeless. "I always live life in the present," says Zeisel. "Eternity is only in the present." In 2005, Eva Zeisel was awarded the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement.