George Nakashima
Minguren II Coffee Table, 1975

Material: English Walnut

An exceptional example of a Minguren II Coffee Table by George Nakashima featuring a highly unique, single English Walnut slab atop the dynamic, architectural Minguren II base.

“By the 1960s Nakashima was becoming increasingly interested in the play between vertical and horizontal planes, as seen in the intersection of the Minguren II End Table’s top and the back element. Cantilevering, which had been part of his chair design since the 1961 catalogue, was added to table designs several years later. Nakashima emphasized the cantilevered element in the Minguren II table by executing it in a richly organic free edge.

Much of his interest in cantilevered design may have originated in his architectural work. In the late 1950s, on his New Hope property, he completed the Conoid Studio, the roof of which was in a double reverse conoid form. The complex nature of this building contrasted considerably with his earlier architectural designs. These had been inspired either by International Style architecture of the 1920s, as in his work for the dormitory project in Pondicherry, India, in the 1930s, or by vernacular forms, as in his own residence of the late 1940s.

In the mid 1960s Nakashima constructed an exhibition building on his New Hope property. This, too, had an unusual architectural feature – a hyperbolic paraboloid roofline. The building was known as the Minguren Museum. The word Minguren was from the name of a Japanese craft revival group and mans “People’s Tool Association.” Nakashima used the same name for this table and many of the new designs he introduced in the 1972 catalogue. By that time he had established a rapport with members of the group in Takamatsu, Japan. Eventually many of Nakashima’s designs were produced in the Sakura shops in Takamatsu and sold at the Odakyu HALC Department Store in Tokyo” (‘George Nakashima Full Circle’, Derek E. Ostergard, 1989, p.131).