George Nakashima
Designer
In the workshop of George Nakashima, the soul of the tree was celebrated. "It is an art- and soul-satisfying adventure to walk the forests of the world, to commune with trees,” Nakashima said, “to bring this living material to the work bench, ultimately to give it a second life." Nakashima, an architect who trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered woodworking while in an internment camp during WWII. In 1943, he moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania and opened his studio. There he created pieces highlighting wood’s natural beauty, most notably by including the tree’s rough outer layer, or the “free edge”. Nakashima worked throughout the world; in India, he became deeply spiritual. He developed a goal to construct peace altars on every continent—the first, made of book-matched slabs of black walnut, was installed at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1986.
This chest of drawers was Nakashima’s earliest chest design. A rough model of this chest was made and sent to Knoll around 1945, possibly for manufacturing consideration. It was never produced by Knoll. However, in 1948 Florence Knoll designed a chest for production, also with louvered drawers, that’s clearly derivative of the Nakashima chest. After Knoll decided not to manufacture the chest, George refined the original 1945 rough chest design (never illustrated in his catalogue), and he offered it as a studio-made piece until sometime between 1948 and 1950, after which he discontinued the louvered drawers. It’s likely that Nakashima made fewer than 10 of this design. Only 5 are known to exist today. Materials: american black walnut/ maple.
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