George Nakashima

Architect and furniture designer

• Born: May 24, 1905
• Birthplace: Spokane, Washington
• Died: June 15, 1990
• Place of death: New Hope, Pennsylvania

Japanese American architect and furniture designer George Nakashima became one of the most esteemed woodworkers of the twentieth century. His preference for organic forms and traditional Japanese style influenced twentieth-century American furniture design.

Areas of achievement: Architecture and design

Early Life

George Nakashima was born in Spokane, Washington, the oldest of four children. His father, Katsuharu Nakashima, was from Tottori, Japan, and worked as a journalist. His mother, Suzu Thoma Nakashima, had served under Takeko Horikawa, official court taster for the Emperor Meiji. Suzu Thoma came to America having never seen her future husband except in a photograph.

As a boy, Nakashima developed a love of nature by roaming through the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. He joined the Boy Scouts in 1917, and his scouting activities provided the chance for long hikes through the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. Nakashima eventually attained Eagle Scout status.

After briefly exploring a career in forestry, Nakashima decided to study architecture at the University of Washington. Except for his first visit to Japan in 1925, he spent most of his summers working on railroad maintenance gangs and later in the salmon canneries of Alaska. In 1928, Nakashima won a scholarship to spend a year abroad. He earned a diploma at L’Ecole Américaine des Beaux Arts in Fontainebleau, France, and won the prestigious Prix Fontainebleau in recognition of his skill with architectural drawings. Returning to the University of Washington, he graduated in 1929 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture.

After earning a master’s in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1930, Nakashima worked for several years in New York as a mural painter and architectural designer with the Long Island State Park Commission. When the work dried up in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, Nakashima spent a year in Paris. In 1934, Nakashima moved to Japan, staying at his mother’s ancestral home in Kamata, on the outskirts of Tokyo, and he found work at the Tokyo firm of the Czech American architect Antonin Raymond. Three years later, he travelled to India to continue his architectural career. Nakashima adopted Raymond’s idea that architecture was a total art that required skilled craftsmanship. Raymond, a protégé of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, also introduced Nakashima to Wright’s philosophy on architecture. However, Nakashima retained a lifelong distaste for Wright’s indifference to practical knowledge, deeming it disrespectful to nature.

Life’s Work

Nakashima met Marion Okajima, also a Japanese American, in Tokyo. They married in Los Angeles on February 14, 1941, and settled in Seattle, where Nakashima worked as an architect for Ray Morin. He also made furniture part time. The Nakashimas had just had their daughter Mira when they were forced into an internment camp during World War II. They were assigned to Camp Minidoka in Idaho. Nakashima claimed that his wartime experience left no scars and that, as a citizen of the world, he could rise above prejudice and persecution to embrace the Japanese culture and aesthetic. He managed to leave the camp and became a worker on Antonin Raymond’s farm near New Hope, Pennsylvania. Nakashima remained in the area after the war, building a home for his family and a workshop.

By 1945, he had gained a national reputation as a furniture designer. Typical of many woodworkers, Nakashima viewed wood as having personality. He believed that he fulfilled a tree’s desire for a second life by fashioning its wood into something that harmonized with the rhythms of nature. To Nakashima, each piece of wood had only one ideal use and the woodworker had the task of finding that use. A devout Catholic, Nakashima nevertheless embraced aspects of Zen Buddhism, particularly its rejection of conventional ideas about beauty and ugliness. He rejected the perfect in favor of an irregular, free-form beauty.

Nakshima stored thousands of pieces of wood on his New Hope property. He tried to keep all the boards from one log together, in the order in which they were sawn. Before a board came to his workshop, it would be air-dried for a year after sawing and treated with dry kiln heat. Nakashima used chalk to work out a pattern for cutting the wood. Once he decided on a pattern, he would make the lines in pencil and cut. He did not sign any of his architectural drawings or furnishings until 1980, because he thought that doing so was egocentric. He believed that good craftsmanship alone should identify the maker. He reluctantly began to sign only because so many people had begun to imitate his work. Nakashima suffered a stroke in 1989 that ended his career. He died in 1990.

Significance

Nakashima’s furnishings with their simple proportions and materials are often considered part of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Yet Nakashima also continued the Japanese mingei, or folk art, movement in the United States by emphasizing Japan’s ancient craft traditions and controlling production from beginning to end. The success of his business demonstrated that handcrafts could survive in the age of mass production. Nakashima also rebelled against the sterile, computerized method of design that reflected fashion rather than nature and left behind mounds of garbage. By doing so, he influenced current designers who emphasize their “greenness” by working with nature.

Bibliography

Nakashima, George. The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections. New York: Kodansha International, 1981. Print. Nakashima’s autobiography focuses on the process of woodworking as well as the artist’s views of wood.

Nakashima, Mira. Nature, Form, and Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima. New York: Abrams, 2003. Print. A heavily illustrated biography of Nakashima written by his daughter.

Ostergard, Derek E. George Nakashima: Full Circle. New York: Weidenfeld, 1989. Print. An exhibition catalog for a show of the same name held at the American Craft Museum; includes two essays by Nakashima about his relationship with nature and with materials.

Skinner, Tina, and Steven Paul Whitsitt. Esherick, Maloof,Nakashima: Homes of the Master Wood Artisans. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2009. Provides a brief biography of the artist and many photos of the buildings and furniture designed by Nakashima at his complex in New Hope, Pennsylvania.