Photo: George Nakashima Woodworkers.

"While most followers of the arts and crafts movement held socialist or utopian ideals, George Nakashima really walked the walk."—Alice Fisher, The Guardian, September 22, 2020.

Born in Spokane, Washington, George Nakashima (1905 – 1990) trained in architecture at the University of Washington. After receiving his master’s degree from MIT in 1930, he worked briefly as an architect for the Long Island State Park Commission, a position that would not survive the deepening Depression. He then set off to see the world, travelling by tramp steamer to Paris—where he met Le Corbusier, the two sharing a vision of the role of the architect in society—and then in 1934 to Japan, where he joined the office of American architect Antonin Raymond, 

George Nakashima as a young man.

who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright as project architect on the Imperial Hotel. It was in Japan that he came face to face with Japanese architecture and design and met, Marion Okajima, also an American of Japanese descent, whom he would marry in 1941.

Nakashima would make his first furniture in 1937 while serving as the primary construction consultant for a Raymond-designed project at Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India where he would engage deeply with the sect’s spiritual teachings. He returned to Seattle in 1940, intending to teach woodworking and make furniture. But in early 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he would find himself imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho along with 13,000 other Americans of Japanese ancestry. At Minidoka he would meet Gentaro Kenneth Hikogawa, a master daiku who taught him traditional Japanese methods of joinery and how to use traditional Japanese hand tools.

George Nakashima, Conoid chair, c. 1970, American black walnut, and hickory, 35¼ h × 20¾ w × 20 d in . Photo: Rago Wright, LLC.

Promising a job for Nakamura on his chicken farm in New Hope, PA, Antonin Raymond was able to secure his release from Minidoka in May 1943. In 1945, Nakashima opened his first workshop in the garage of a cottage in New Hope, where he soon began to design furniture for Knoll. Reacting against the “20th-century modern,” he sought to reclaim the philosophy of periods past in which the maker’s eye and hand determined his world in relation to the universe. His life and travels had imbued in him an appreciation of his own, distinct identity, describing himself, according to his 

daughter Mira Nakashima, president and creative director of the George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop, as a “Hindu Catholic Shaker Japanese American.”

In 1946, he acquired the current property on Aquetong Road and begin construction of his shop and furniture business, with his wife Marion as his business partner. New buildings would be constructed on the site over ensuing decades as his business and family grew. In 2014, the compound was both designated a National Historic Landmark and included on the World Monument Fund's 2014 Endangered Sites Watchlist. 

The Arts Building, George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop. Photo: Shuvaev, Wikipedia.

George Nakashima With His Children Mira and Kevin in the Workshop at New Hope, 1980s. Photo: George Nakashima Woodworkers

During our visit to Nakashima woodworkers, we will tour the following, led by Mira Nakashima:

The craftspeople at the George Nakashima Woodworkers continue to be informed by George Nakashima’s guiding philosophy, celebrating the wood’s purity and natural character, and, not least, it imperfections. The furniture is free of ornamentation, highlighting and characterized by the natural beauty and contour of the wood used in its construction. Cracks within and gaps between planks are not hidden, instead bridged by butterfly joints. Oil finishes highlight the wood’s natural grain.