Sunday, February 8, 2009

George Nakashima

George Nakashima was born and grew up in Spokane Washington. He attended the University of Washington and received his masters in Architecture. He learned woodworking while in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. From there, George opened up his own woodworking shop, the Nakashima Studio. He passed away in 1990 and left his studio to his daughter. While finding some brief information on George, i found this cool bench..

I find this "Conoid Bench with Back" pretty dam cool. Its different to see how he has integrated a Shaker furniture type of style with nature. He uses what he calls "Free Edges", which allows the piece to have free form edges that are shaped by the grain of the wood. It gives it a modern type of look.

1 comment:

Squerl said...

Now that is a cool piece. I like the east meets west nature of the work, and it seems like the more blatant reference to Shaker as well as the contrast it produces is more effective than the other middle of the road examples posted earlier. I wonder how comfortable it is? Squerl