Words Sabine Hrechdakian  Photography Martien Mulder

Published in No 13

Beauty, it has been said, lies in its own vanishing. Until my visit to George Nakashima’s compound in New Hope, Pennsylvania, on a chilly afternoon in April, I had only appreciated this Japanese concept within the pages of a book or by looking at a collection of objects. I’d never experienced the essence of wabi-sabi within an interior, much less a constellation of structures. It was this evasive Zen Buddhist aesthetic philosophy that embraces imperfection and impermanence, which led me, a decade ago, to finally stop waging my futile war against entropy.

After meeting Nakashima’s daughter Mira and photographer Martien Mulder and her partner, we made our way to the Reception House for lunch. Intended as a retirement villa for George and his wife Marion, who chose to remain in their more humble home next door, this building was instead used to host and entertain clients, partly because it was the only home with a dishwasher. We removed our shoes in the traditional Japanese genkan or vestibule, with its heated stone floor, and despite the refinement of materials (some of which had been imported from Japan), I was immediately struck by the simplicity, humility and restraint of the interior.

The warmth of untreated wood and stone contrasted with the luminescence of white plaster walls and shoji screens to create an atmosphere of tranquility and silence similar to what one feels on solitary walks in nature, where you tap into the enormity of creation, the miracle of it, as well as the sadness that it is all ephemeral. For those of us in the West, reared on the relativism and nihilism of post-modern ideas, it felt radical to be in a space free of irony or artifice. One that can express both the truthfulness of proper materials and workmanship along with the melancholy nature of transience, an elusive quality Mulder captures in her hauntingly beautiful photographs. To experience buildings not as critiques or parodies, but as timeless structures capable of meeting our deepest longing to belong to the world, makes one understand the transformational potential of architecture.

Although primarily known for his pioneering contributions to the craft of woodworking, Nakashima’s training as an architect is evident in his furniture and in the fifteen stunningly inventive buildings clustered on a wooded hillside. Built over a roughly thirty-year period, as needs for a woodshop, showroom, gallery or home arose, each structure gave him an opportunity to experiment with designs, especially warped-shell construction. The infamous Conoid Studio, built in 1957, known for its thin, gravity-defying, scalloped-shaped concrete roof held up by a single arch, looks like a half-lidded eye rising from the ground; while the Minguren Museum’s plywood hyperbolic paraboloid, built a decade later, gives the impression of a spaceship about to take flight. These futuristic designs — reverential of tradition yet experimental in form — are evidence of Nakashima’s iconoclastic sensibility.

Like many first-generation immigrants born in the U.S., Nakashima was an amalgam of ancestral and adopted influences. He was also a seeker who, after graduating from MIT with a master’s degree in architecture, spent formative years living abroad in Paris, Japan and India. A practicing Roman Catholic and devotee of integral yoga, he was equally influenced by Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion, in which wind, rain, mountains, rivers, and trees are seen as sacred spirits.


Derided by some furniture makers for his overly spiritual and essentialist approach, which was considered more nature worship than design, their Western perspective fails to consider how deeply he was influenced by Japan’s reverence of nature and its aesthetic potential. At the same time, when I ask Mira what is most misunderstood about her father, she replies that he was American and not Japanese. It is these contradictions that made him an innovator, able to synthesize multiple influences and integrate American and Japanese vernaculars to create his own dialectic with modernity that was less either / or and more both / and. Something unlikely to have emerged in a purely traditional culture.

Born in 1905, in Spokane, Washington, Nakashima’s life spanned nearly the entire 20th century, a time of great upheaval, world wars, and rapid industrialization that led many in the worlds of art, design and architecture, during the post-war years, to discard oppressive traditions in favor of more innovative approaches and materials. While modernism’s egalitarian goals were noble, Nakashima found the turn to mass-production and headlong embrace of technology to be, ultimately, dehumanizing, leading to buildings conceived more as machines meant to seal us in instead of organic structures that interacted with the natural world.

He wasn’t alone in his disdain. Although not a fan of being identified with a particular group or style, Nakashima is nonetheless considered a major figure in the American studio craft movement, where craftspeople, not machines, controlled all aspects of production from conception to creation. They championed utilitarian objects made by their own hands and considered natural materials, like fiber, wood, and clay, worthy of veneration. So did their wealthy clients, who paid handsomely for bespoke pieces. This is a familiar trajectory for utopian reactionary movements which, in their rejection of the status-quo, eventually become regarded as elitist.

In 1946, as modernist architects were building temples of glass and steel, Nakashima began his humble homesteading experiment by building a single room with mostly salvaged materials, after a year spent living in a tent. Inside this main room, slabs of walnut flooring and a dropped-ceiling of chestnut-colored persimmon planks, fastened with wooden pegs, give the impression of being inside of a boat. A well-used Franklin fireplace, the only source of heat for many years, anchors one corner under a wall of ochre and slate-colored fieldstones that Mira and Marion collected around the property. A thick, uneven slab of English oak burl, once used as ballast aboard a ship used for transporting wood, was transmuted into an expressive coffee table burnished into the color of molasses upon which sit pieces of driftwood, wooden boxes and other mementoes.


After his son Kevin was born, Nakashima enclosed an exterior porch and expanded the original footprint beyond the modest kitchen, to accommodate his children’s growing needs. “The house was more open, there used to be more light but over the years it became more enclosed,” Mira recalls wistfully as we make our way down the narrow hallway into what used to be her room. Inside, I notice what appears to be a mural peeking from behind two large filing cabinets. Curious, we roll them away to find a Quaker homestead complete with farm animals, horses, barns and a stream. Evoking fusuma, the traditional Japanese sliding door paintings, Mira had painted linen panels covering two closet doors, when she was eight years old. Along with details of her mother feeding chickens and her brother on his rocking horse, there is a carefully drawn stone house with a bright red roof, evidence of the drafting skills that would serve her well in her architecture studies and future role as her father’s collaborator.

When I ask what it feels like to be inside this house, Mira replies, “Like an old friend I’ve known a really long time.” It is a question I posed in each building we visited, although no other evoked such potent memories. It’s not surprising given that her mother, Marion, choose to remain in this home where she raised her family and cooked countless meals, while Nakashima’s son Kevin, except for a brief period spent in Japan, spent his entire life within its sheltering walls.

Layered with family history and treasured objects, each developing patina over time, in Nakashima’s universe, there is no separation between the animate and inanimate. Houses expand and contract with those living inside. Furniture is seen as a member of the family. So are trees, many planted by Nakashima’s father as seedlings, half a century ago, which now gracefully provide shade and companionship.

Walking among the majestic forests of the Pacific Northwest as a boy, Nakashima understood, early in life, what scientists have recently confirmed: trees are not solitary individuals but a dynamic community of interdependent beings that flourish together. The rootedness and continuity one feels walking these grounds, which have sustained generations of family and collaborators, is not unlike that of an old-growth forest rich with diversity and complexity. It is a remarkable counterpoint to our transient culture where property is seen as a disposable investment rather than a shelter capable of nurturing a legacy, one that Mira is now solely responsible for preserving since her brother passed away.

The last building we visit is the Pole Barn, the only onsite structure designed by Mira, which houses thousands of boards that Nakashima selected and had milled over his lifetime. They had been stored offsite and needed a new home after his passing. “Wood is his legacy. I didn’t want it to be thrown away,” she says as we step inside. Able to accommodate a forklift, it is a massive one hundred by fifty-foot structure which, despite being inspired by Pennsylvanian barn vernacular, feels more like a cathedral. There is something holy about being surrounded by these silent totems who in their former lives witnessed centuries of human history and now await their transfiguration into another form. “Everywhere I go, I feel my father’s presence,” Mira says. Like the imperfect and gnarled burls he favored, Nakashima’s own life, full of adversity, wonder and curiosity, continues to inspire.

Sabine Hrechdakian writes about art, culture, travel and food for UD, Afar and Vice.

Photographer Martien Mulder is a regular contributor to UD. She is repped by wschupfer.com