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The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, photo by Junzo Yoshimura
Sunday, October 13th, 2024
10:00 AM – 3:00 PM
Meet at Raymond Farm Center for Living Arts and Design (Google Maps >>)
$175 Members | $200 Non-Members
Join us for an up close and personal view of the Raymond Farm Center for Living Arts and Design and the Nakashima Woodworking Studios. Meet us in New Hope, PA, about 45 minutes northeast of Philadelphia for a day of exploration and learning.
Admission: To receive a JASGP Membership discount, be sure to sign in at the top of this page first to see the discount automatically applied. Email us at info@japanphilly.org for any questions. Order Tickets Here >>
Schedule: The tour will meet at Raymond Farm Center for Living Arts and Design at 10:00 AM for a tour of that site first, followed by a bento box lunch at 12 PM, after which participants will travel to nearby Nakashima studios for a tour starting at 1 PM and ending at 3 PM.
Bento lunch options: Beef, chicken, and vegetarian. If you have any special dietary restrictions please notify us via our email info@japanphilly.org at least one week before the event.
Raymond Farm Center and Nakashima Woodworkers in New Hope
Shofuso’s architect, Junzo Yoshimura’s mentor, Noemi and Antonin Raymond settled at Raymond Farm in 1939, and modified a 18th century Quaker farmhouse with Japanese architectural elements. In 1943, the Raymonds vouched for George Nakashima and his family from the internment camp. A few years later, Nakashima established Nakashima Woodworkers in New Hope near Raymond Farm. George Nakashima designed and built this studio and residence with his knowledge and experience working at the Raymond’s architectural firm with Junzo Yoshimura in Japan.
The intertwined history of the Raymonds and Nakashima is one reason JASGP has made the New Hope tour a recurring event. These are not museums in the conventional sense — Raymond Farm remains a working creative space, and the Nakashima studio continues to produce furniture under the stewardship of George’s daughter Mira, who has carried forward her father’s design philosophy for decades. Walking through the grounds, visitors encounter the same dovetail joints, butterfly keys, and free-edge slabs that made Nakashima’s work iconic in mid-century American craft.
The tours regularly draw a mix of design professionals, hobbyist woodworkers, and members with no craft background at all who come for the cultural history. Past groups have included a UPenn graduate student writing on Edo-period joinery, a front-end developer from a sweeps coins casinos company in Center City who took up hand-planing as an antidote to screen fatigue, and a retired landscape architect who had visited the Raymonds’ Tokyo office decades earlier. That range is part of what JASGP aims for — events accessible enough for newcomers but grounded in enough historical depth to reward repeat visitors.
For many attendees, the Nakashima studio is the emotional center of the trip. The workshop smells of walnut and cherry, and the large slabs leaning against the walls still bear the chainsaw marks from the trees Nakashima selected personally from lumber yards across the eastern seaboard. His belief that each piece of wood contains a form waiting to be revealed — a principle rooted in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi — guided his work from the earliest commissions and remains the animating idea behind the studio’s output today.
The bento lunch between the two sites gives participants time to compare notes before the afternoon session. Past attendees have remarked that the transition from Raymond Farm’s architectural scale to the intimate detail of Nakashima’s furniture is one of the tour’s most effective contrasts — moving from the way Japanese design principles shape a building to the way they shape a single chair.
Raymond Farm Center for Living Arts & Design (Photo by Elizabeth Felicella)
George Nakashima Woodworkers (Photo by Elizabeth Felicella)
