George Nakashima
George Nakashima did not so much design furniture as excavate it — cutting into a log the way a diamond cutter approaches a stone, searching for the one ideal use each board was destined for before he ever picked up a tool.
Trained as an architect at the University of Washington and MIT, Nakashima abandoned the profession when he concluded it kept him too far from the material itself. He wanted work he could see through 'from beginning to end.' Morentz presents original Nakashima works, selected for their authenticity, condition and expressive character.
From an internment camp to a workshop in the Pennsylvania woods
Nakashima studied forestry and architecture at the University of Washington, spent a scholarship year at the École Américaine des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau, and earned a master's degree in architecture at MIT around 1929–30. He then worked in Tokyo for Antonin Raymond — Frank Lloyd Wright's collaborator on the Imperial Hotel — before serving as on-site architect for a dormitory at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, the country's first reinforced-concrete building. It was in India that he first turned seriously to furniture.
Back in the United States, Nakashima and his family were interned at the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho in 1942 as Japanese Americans. There he learned traditional Japanese carpentry from fellow internee Gentauro Hikogawa. Sponsored out of the camp in 1943 by Antonin Raymond, the family settled on Raymond's farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Nakashima built his home, studio and workshop largely by hand — a complex now protected as a National Historic Landmark.
Letting the wood dictate the design
Nakashima's signature pieces are large tables built from single, live-edge slabs — irregular natural edges left intact, cracks and voids stabilised with rosewood butterfly joints rather than concealed. Each board, in his own words, could have 'only one ideal use.'
A founding figure of the American studio furniture movement, Nakashima ran his New Hope workshop as a family enterprise that never sought to grow beyond a dozen or so craftsmen, working for private clients including Nelson Rockefeller. His daughter Mira Nakashima has directed the studio since his death in 1990, continuing production to his original designs and techniques.
Each flitch, each board, each plank can have only one ideal use. The woodworker, applying a thousand skills, must find that ideal use and then shape the wood to realize its true potential.