George Nakashima (1905-1990)
George Nakashima is best known as a furniture maker as well as one of the leading innovators of 20th Century furniture design and a founding father of what has become known as the American Craft Movement.
A master carpenter and woodworker, George Nakashima had a reverence for trees and their organic forms, flaws and imperfections, that became the intrinsic design element of his now famous furniture. Educated as an architect and trained by Japanese craftsmen in woodworking, Nakashima designed and built furniture with understated simplicity, exacting purpose and functionality, designed to seamlessly combine smooth and rectilinear shapes and surfaces with raw, unfinished edges, holes, fissures and rough, exposed natural wood grains. He celebrated the natural beauty of wood - walnut and redwood were among his favorites - and felt his furniture gave trees a second life, often uniting multiple slabs with his signature, inlaid butterfly joint.
George Nakashima was born in Washington state, the son of Japanese immigrants, descended of the Samurai on both sides of his family tree. From an early age, he felt an innate connection to the rugged mountains and indigenous forested surroundings of the Pacific Northwest, often wandering into the wilderness alone in a profound search for a sense of being. Initially a forestry major at the University of Washington, he graduated with a degree in Architecture in 1929.
He was also a gifted artist, interrupting his architecture studies briefly, to study, on scholarship, at the famed Fontainebleau, in France. There, he achieved distinction for his fine artwork, including his etchings, lithographs and watercolors. In 1931 he earned a Master's degree in Architecture from the most prestigious engineering and technical school in
the world, M.I.T. He went to work for American architect, Antonin Raymond, in Japan.
Raymond had once collaborated with legendary Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright on the earthquake-proof Imperial Hotel. This would mark the first connection between George Nakashima and Frank Lloyd Wright - also a furniture designer. Like Wright, George Nakashima was an organic architect who felt structures should be designed to appear to grow naturally out of the surrounding landscape, incorporating a spectrum of natural textures and materials such as stone, wood and brick. His furniture, likewise, is designed to complement a house's exterior and his unique style succeeds in bringing the natural world into every room. Today, with his signature style at an all-time high, George Nakashima is inspiring a new generation of furniture designers.
