George Nakashima

George Katsutoshi Nakashima (May 24, 1905 – June 15, 1990) was a Japanese American woodworker, architect, and furniture maker who was one of the leading innovators of 20th Century furniture design and a father of the American craft movement.

The beginning

Nakashima was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington. In 1931, after earning a Master's degree in architecture from M.I.T., Nakashima sold his car and purchased a round-the-world tramp steamship ticket. He spent a year in France living the life of a bohemian, and then went on to North Africa and eventually to Japan. While in Japan, Nakashima went to work for Antonin Raymond, an American architect who had collaborated with Frank Lloyd Wright on the Imperial Hotel. While working for Raymond, Nakashima toured Japan extensively, studying the subtleties of the Japanese architecture and design.

Woodworking

In 1937, Raymond's company was commissioned to build a dormitory at an ashram in Pondicherry, India for which Nakashima was the primary construction consultant. It was here that Nakashima made his first furniture. In 1940, Nakashima returned to America and began to teach woodworking and to make furniture in Seattle. Like others of Japanese ancestry, he was interned at Camp Minidoka in Hunt, Idaho, in March 1942. At the camp he met a man trained in traditional Japanese carpentry, and learned to approach woodworking with discipline and patience, striving for perfectionism in every stage of construction.

Nakashima's signature woodworking design was his large-scale tables made of large wood slabs with smooth tops but unfinished natural edges, consisting of multiple slabs connected with butterfly joints.

New Hope inspiration

In 1943, Antonin Raymond successfully sponsored Nakashima’s release from the camp and invited him to his farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania. In his studio and workshop at New Hope, Nakashima explored the organic expressiveness of wood and choosing boards with knots and burls and figured grain. Drawing on Japanese designs and shop practices, as well as on American and International Modern styles, Nakashima created a body of work that would make his name synonymous with the best of mid-century studio furniture.