History & Handcrafting on Crosby Street

Underneath a bank of skylights in her Crosby Street loft, with all her tools arrayed on a butcher block work table, artist Jill Platner makes her signature feather-like metal jewelry by hand. She’s developed a method for joining pieces of metal so that it drapes like fabric, and she has an acute feel for the material and knowledge of the tools of her trade. And she does all this inside a Federal style house in NoHo that practically radiates American history. Originally built in 1823 as a townhouse for James Roosevelt, an ancestor of FDR, in the 1850s the building housed a hospital run by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to earn a medical degree. With her sister Emily, also a physician (the sisters were the first and third women in America to earn medical degrees, respectively) Blackwell rented the building in 1857 and made it the home of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. With the help of wealthy benefactors, many of them Quaker, the Blackwells ran the first hospital in America that was staffed entirely by women. 

The hospital ran by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell that occupied the Crosby Street building in the 1850s.

Platner is fascinated by the building’s past, and her painstaking work renovating the building has revealed tantalizing pieces of its history. When she first toured it as a young designer in need of studio space in the 1990s, she noticed details like the chisel marks on the wooden beams—clearly the handiwork of a skilled craftsman—and recognized something of a kindred spirit. Platner made the light-filled top floor her studio, then expanded into the adjacent carriage house which is where she fabricates jewelry and makes large-scale metal sculptures.

The original flooring before being salvaged and milled by The Hudson Company.

In 2007 when she was preparing to buy her space, Platner discovered the story of the Blackwell sisters. Her top-floor studio was once the dormitory for the physicians and interns, while the lower floors were devoted to the maternity and illness wards, the pharmacy, and the waiting area. By 2012, when Platner became a part owner of the building, it was badly in need of repairs. There were bulging bricks and the roof was in dire straits. But she was committed to keeping intact as much of the building’s original material as she could, and that’s where The Hudson Company came in. Underneath some particle board, she discovered ten-inch wide boards that were original to the house. Well worn and quite uneven, Platner arranged to send the salvaged boards up to Pine Plains where they were milled and finished, then reinstalled. Now even and uniform, but still full of history and character, the floors are back where they belong on Crosby Street. “It looks incredible,” Platner says. “You can feel history in it.”

Jill Platner’s Studio. Photo credit: Aundre Larrow for The New York Times.

Inspiration in Imperfection: Reclaimed Wood and JB Blunk's Handcrafted Legacy

JB Blunk’s home on the Inverness Ridge with Redwood Enry Arch, 1976. Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

J.B. Blunk’s art career was probably inevitable one form or another, but it was a chance encounter with Isamu Noguchi in a Tokyo craft shop that put him on course to become one of the most innovative American craftsmen of the 20th century. It was the early 1950s, and Blunk—then a soldier in the US Army, stationed in Korea—was browsing at the craft shop when he met Noguchi who was there with his wife. Yamaguchi Yoshiko. Prior to his tour in Korea, Blunk had been a student at UCLA where he became fascinated by ceramics, and Noguchi decided to introduce him to the Japanese artistic polymath Kitaoji Rosanjin, who made exquisite, rustic and colorful pottery inspired by historical Japanese ceramics, as well as lacquerware and calligraphy. Blunk apprenticed himself to Rosanjin, became a skilled potter in his own right, and later worked for artist Toyo Kaneshige, a Living National Treasure. Returning to California in 1954, he was now energized and inspired to embark on a life in which craft shaped every corner of his life. Blunk’s name isn’t synonymous with midcentury style, and he’s not a household name. (Yet.) But with exhibitions in major galleries, including Kasmin and Blum & Poe, introducing his work to new audiences, his legacy seems to be getting the second look it deserves.

J.B. Blunk in his studio, c.1968. Courtesy: J.B. Blunk Collection

Interior of JB Blunk’s home with river stones and artworks by Blunk. Untitled painting, c.1990, and Redwood stool, c.1965.
Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

J.B. Blunk (1926–2002) was born in Ottawa, Kansas, and studied physics before switching to ceramics in college. Like Wharton Esherick, Blunk was an artist who didn’t make much of a distinction between home and studio. And like George Nakashima, he found much inspiration in the natural structure of wood—its knots, grain, colors, and textures. Blunk settled in the town of Inverness in the mid-1950s, and decided to build a cabin there himself. Now known as the Blunk House, the home was described in T Magazine as “a cottage from a midcentury-modern fairytale.” There’s a potter’s studio with three kilns, and a woodshop. Maria Nielson, Blunk’s daughter, and the author of a book on Blunk’s work, spends time at the house, where her father made everything from the sleeping loft to the ceramics in the kitchen by hand.

Woven into the fabric of the landscape and the house itself is redwood. The table in Blunk’s kitchen is crafted from a gigantic slab of redwood, and they dot the mountainous landscape of Inverness as far as the eye can see. Blunk was active in a variety of media, including clay and cast bronze, but his primary medium was wood. Sometimes a chainsaw was part of the picture. Blunk’s favored wood species was redwood, though he occasionally used cypress. Redwood’s characteristic color and natural softness gives it working properties that are almost clay-like. Blunk would salvage chunks of redwood on the landscape that had been discarded by loggers, and make use of his findings in the ways that best suited their scale. Using his chainsaw, he’d carve chairs out of single pieces of wood, sometimes creating “seating sculptures” that seemed to hover somewhere between sculpture and furniture. According to Mariah Nielson, even the bathroom sink in the Blunk House bears chisel marks.

Interior of JB Blunk’s home with artworks by Blunk, sofa by Max Frommeld, and cushions by Christine Nielson and Nancy Waite Harlow.
Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

From his time studying ceramics in Japan, Blunk was steeped in the aesthetic and philosophical principle of wabi sabi, which is difficult to translate precisely, but in an artistic context means accepting transience and imperfection, finding beauty in it, and not trying to “fix” anything about an object. Wabi sabi had a powerful influence on both historical Japanese crafts and on mingei, the Japanese craft revival movement that emerged there in response to industrialization in the 1930s, and was several decades underway when Blunk visited Tokyo.

A wabi sabi approach to craft could mean embracing asymmetry, or a nick or a scratch, or a perceived flaw in a piece of wood—like a discarded burl of no interest to commercial loggers. Blunk took the lesson of his craft training and applied it to working with reclaimed wood. Natural “flaws” became centerpieces, and odd shapes were just another form of inspiration. A major work entitled “The Planet,” completed in 1969, can be viewed at the Oakland Museum of California. It’s made from a single, the enormous root structure of a redwood—the only remains of a long-dead tree. It was typical of Blunk to salvage something that others had overlooked, and to create from it something unique, odd, and beautiful, that seemed at once ancient and modern. Perfection isn’t easy. But imperfection, at its best, is even harder to achieve. It seems safe to say that J.B. Blunk nailed it.

Wishbone, 1977. Sculpted Redwood, 110h x 54w x 35d in.
Image via Jason Jacques Gallery.

A Thousand Skills: George Nakashima

You’ve probably seen George Nakashima’s furniture in the pages of shelter magazines, at auction, and in museum and gallery exhibitions across the country. His aesthetic influence is everywhere: your favorite cafe might have an eye-catching espresso bar with a live edge, or you might see a midcentury-style bench you like at a mass-market furniture retailer that ‘echoes’ one of Nakashima’s designs, to put it diplomatically. Or you might have heard his name and seen photographs of him with his family in an episode of the series Artbound on KCET, “Masters of Modern Design: The Art of the Japanese American Experience,” which tells the story of some of the renowned artists and designers who spent time in internment camps during World War II. Writing in Curbed in 2017, the architecture critic Alexandra Lange examined the connection between American design history and Executive Order 9066, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed in 1942. The order granted authority to the military to transport citizens to “relocation centers” in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. We call them internment camps today, and about 119,000 people—most of them Japanese immigrants or Japanese-Americans—were sent to live there for several years during World War II. George Nakashima was among them, as were the artists Ruth Asawa and Isamu Noguchi.

Nakashima was already a citizen of the world prior to the war, having spent a year traveling abroad on a round-the-world steamship ticket after graduate school. Born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington to Japanese emigré parents, he grew up hiking and camping in the forests of the Pacific Northwest with the Boy Scouts. He studied forestry at the University of Washington-Seattle, but was drawn to design as well, and graduated with a BA in architecture in 1929. He earned an MA in architecture from M.I.T. in 1931, and embarked on his world tour, spending a bohemian year in France, then traveling to North Africa, and finally to Japan. Nakashima met and eventually worked for the American architect Antonin Raymond, an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright, and he toured Japan studying building techniques and design. In the late 1930s, he was the project architect on the Golconde Dormitory at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, where he discovered two practices that would shape his life: yoga and furniture-making.

He returned to Japan in 1940, where he met the woman who would become his wife, Marion Okajima, and the two settled in Seattle after marrying in Los Angeles. But in 1942, now with a new daughter named Mira, the Nakashimas were sent to Camp Minidoka, an internment camp in Hunt, Idaho. Incredibly, he used the time there to apprentice himself to a woodworker named Gentauro Hikogawa who had been trained in Japan. Hikogawa taught Nakashima to work expertly with Japanese hand tools and helped him master Japanese joinery techniques. He used whatever wood scraps he could find to practice his craft and develop his first designs for furniture. In 1943, his old mentor Antonin Raymond sponsored the Nakashimas for early release, and offered them his chicken farm in rural New Hope, PA as a place to stay. Mira Nakashima recalls that her father believed the name of the small town—which was becoming a mecca for woodworkers at the time—augured well for a fresh start. Nakashima quickly made connections with Knoll, for whom he designed several furniture lines such as the Straight Back Chair, and he designed a sofa for Widdicomb-Mueller which has gone back into production.

But most of Nakashima’s works were unique. He was famous for using butterfly joints, which allowed him to select unusual, asymmetrical pieces of wood and transform them into inviting dining tables and coffee tables. Nakashima had numerous lifelong clients, and he often signed their names in ink on boards that he selected especially for them. The largest private collection of Nakashima furniture was, for a time, that of Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, who owned over 200 works that Nakashima had designed for their Pocantico Hills estate. His passion for architecture, like his passion for forestry and trees, never wavered, and he was able to weave all three activities together at his home and studio. He designed buildings on his property, and was especially enamored of parabolic shapes, which led to the creation of a line of chairs called “Conoid,” with gently curved backs, which were named for the dramatic roofline of a building he called the Conoid Studio. In a sense, Nakashima didn’t believe in flaws. In his 1981 book The Soul of a Tree, which offered a glimpse at his philosophy and his technique and life story, he wrote: “Each flitch, each board, each plank can have only one ideal use. The woodworker, applying a thousand skills, must find that ideal use and then shape the wood to realize its true potential.”

Nakashima’s Conoid Studio in New Hope, PA. Courtesy of George Nakashima Woodworkers.

The George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop is now a United States National Historic Landmark and a World Monument, and although it’s temporarily closed as of July, 2020 due to the pandemic, the site is generally open to visitors. Today, Nakashima’s daughter Mira, who is an accomplished designer herself, works alongside a team of highly skilled woodworkers to produce both classic and new designs. A grant from the Getty Foundation has helped in the preservation and conservation of the site and its many unusual structures. There’s a museum and gallery in the city of Takamatsu, Japan where Nakashima once had a studio. In 1983, the man who once jokingly referred to himself as a “Japanese Quaker” was presented with the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese government. A key figure in American Modernism who spent most of his life in Bucks County, PA, Nakashima deftly combined the woodworking and design traditions of the United States and Japan. Despite his harrowing wartime experience as a Japanese American during the conflict that pitted the two countries against one another, he seemed to remain deeply rooted, aesthetically and philosophically, in both worlds.