George Nakashima

George Nakashima: The Architect Who Found His Calling in a Prison Camp

George Nakashima held two graduate-level architecture credentials and had already supervised the construction of a Modernist dormitory in India when, in March 1942, the United States government sent him to an internment camp in the Idaho desert for the crime of being Japanese American. It was there, under a fellow internee's patient instruction in traditional Japanese joinery, that an architect became a woodworker — and where the discipline that would define one of the most influential American furniture practices of the twentieth century actually began.

An Architect, Trained Twice Over

George Katsutoshi Nakashima was born May 24, 1905, in Spokane, Washington, to Japanese immigrant parents. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Washington in 1929, then a master's in architecture from MIT by 1931 — a formal architectural education few American furniture makers of his generation could claim. That same year he sold his car to fund a round-the-world steamship voyage, spending a year doing odd jobs in France, where he met Le Corbusier and bonded with him, by his own account, over the idea that architecture carried a moral obligation to society and functioned as a spiritual practice, not merely a professional service.

Japan, India, and a First Encounter With Furniture

From France, Nakashima traveled through North Africa to Japan, where he worked for the American architect Antonin Raymond, who had earlier collaborated with Frank Lloyd Wright on Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. In Japan he studied traditional building methods closely and met Marion Okajima, his future wife. Raymond then sent him to India, where from 1937 to 1939 Nakashima served as project architect supervising construction of the Golconde Dormitory at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry — a pioneering reinforced-concrete Modernist building in a climate and craft tradition that demanded real material improvisation. It was at the ashram, immersed in its spiritual teachings, that he made his first pieces of furniture.

Internment and an Unlikely Apprenticeship

Nakashima returned to the United States in 1940, settling in Seattle to make furniture and teach woodworking. In March 1942, following Executive Order 9066, he and his family were sent to the Minidoka internment camp in Hunt, Idaho, alongside more than a hundred thousand other Japanese Americans stripped of their liberty by their own government. There he met Gentaro Hikogawa, a fellow internee trained in traditional Japanese carpentry, who mentored him in hand-tool joinery. Under Hikogawa, Nakashima later said, he learned "discipline and patience, striving for perfection in every stage of construction" — the exact working method, forged inside a prison camp, that would define his mature furniture.

New Hope

In 1943, Antonin Raymond sponsored Nakashima's release from Minidoka and invited him to work on his farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Nakashima built a studio and workshop there that grew, over the following decades, into a full working compound: the Conoid Studio, built in 1957 with its distinctive curved conoid roof, and the 1967 Arts Building, whose plywood hyperbolic paraboloid roof drew on the same architectural training that had produced Golconde. He selected boards specifically for their knots, burls, and irregular figured grain — material most furniture makers of the era would have rejected — and became known for tabletops made from single or paired wood slabs left with their natural, unfinished outer edge intact, joined where cracks appeared with structural rosewood "butterfly" joints that turned a flaw into a visible, deliberate feature rather than something to be hidden.

From Studio Craft to Knoll and Rockefeller

Nakashima's furniture reached a national market through lines he designed for Knoll, including the Straight Back Chair, still in production, and for Widdicomb-Mueller, alongside a steady stream of private commissions from his New Hope studio. His largest single commission came in 1973, when Nelson Rockefeller ordered 200 pieces for his Pocantico Hills estate — a scale of patronage that placed a self-taught furniture maker's work inside one of the country's most prominent private collections. He described his own hybrid identity as "Hindu Catholic Shaker Japanese American," and drew explicitly on the Japanese tea ceremony, American Shaker design, and Zen Buddhist ideas of beauty as equally valid sources for the same body of work.

Why George Is Called a Genius

Nakashima's claim to genius is not a claim about invention of new forms so much as about material and craft judgment: an architect's trained eye for structure, applied to slabs of walnut, English oak, and Persian walnut that most furniture makers would have discarded as defective. Recognizing that a crack, a knot, or a live natural edge could become the organizing feature of a table rather than a flaw to be planed away required both a formally trained sense of structural integrity — could a butterfly joint actually hold the slab together under load — and an aesthetic conviction, closer to Zen appreciation of imperfection, that the tree's own history belonged in the finished object. That his most demanding technical discipline was learned not in a design studio but from a fellow prisoner in a wartime internment camp gives the skill an unusually hard-won, non-institutional foundation.

The honest counter-case is that this is craft intelligence, not conceptual originality: Nakashima did not invent live-edge woodworking or butterfly joinery from nothing, and his philosophy borrowed openly and explicitly from existing traditions — Shaker austerity, Japanese joinery, Zen aesthetics — rather than synthesizing an original theory of design the way an architect might claim a new structural system. What makes the case for genius hold up regardless is the sheer consistency of judgment across thousands of individual, non-repeatable pieces of wood, each demanding a fresh decision about where a joint should go and what should be left alone — a form of expertise inseparable from doing the physical work itself, over and over, for nearly fifty years.

Legacy

In 1983 Nakashima received the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Emperor of Japan. He is counted among the founding generation of the American studio furniture movement alongside Wharton Esherick, Tage Frid, and James Krenov. In 1984 he began the Nakashima Foundation for Peace, envisioning "Altars for Peace" for each continent as meditation spaces, one of which was completed at St. John the Divine in New York. He died June 15, 1990, and his daughter Mira Nakashima, who had worked alongside him since 1970, took over the studio, which continues to operate from the same New Hope compound — designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014 for its role in fusing Japanese and Western modernist traditions.

Achievements

• Fellow of the American Craft Council
• Trained at MIT School of Architecture and Planning and University of Washington