The New York Times
Thursday, December 11, 1986

The idea of creating an 'Altar for Peace" from a 125-foot English walnut tree came to the woodworker George Nakashima in a dream.

"There has appeared an extraordinary natural phenomenon, something that occurs only once in a lifetime or perhaps only once in the history of a nation or in all time," the 81-year-old Mr. Nakashima wrote to his friends three years ago, after the dream, "It is a great walnut tree. It is a tree that should be a symbiosis of nature and man in the deepest spiritual sense. It is now on hand."

Though Mr. Nakashima had spent a lifetime "listening to the cries of wood," creating furniture that seems to unlock the hidden souls of trees, he had never encountered a piece of timber such as the one that began life as a sapling two or three hundred years ago on a Long Island estate.

"I felt the peace movement needed something tangible, a sort of symbol, something you can put your hands on," Mr. Nakashima said recently, clad in leather moccasins and a hanten; the traditional Japanese wrap coat. "It was a great tree. Trees with this character should have a special meaning and special use."

This New Year's Eve, the great tree—the one that took a whole week to cut down, the one so massive there was only one type of saw powerful enough to hew boards from it—will be dedicated and installed in its new incarnation at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at the fourth annual Concert for Peace, to be conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

For the renowned woodworker, the heart-shaped altar is the embodiment of a life's work and the result of a saga that began three years ago, after one of Mr. Nakashima's loggers procured the tree.

For New York City, it is a special Christmas gift. For if trees really do lead "joyous lives" that are expressed in their grain, as Mr. Nakashima likes to say, then the city is receiving a song of joy in wood. Like a still pool in a river, its surface looks smooth at first but is alive with patterns that dance and swoop, ebb and flow.

Mr. Nakashima's altar is "a testament and monument to the eternal qualities of craft," says the Very Rev. James Parks Morton, the Dean of the cathedral who spent an afternoon with Mr. Nakashima scouting locations within the vast Gothic space. They chose the nave, where the altar will be used in interfaith worship services and as a place where people can pray for peace. At St. John the Divine, where contemporary stonemasons and carvers are being trained in an ancient art, "he looks at his craft as a spiritual phenomenon," the Dean added.

"George is not just making furniture," said Mr. Nakashima's old friend George Wald, the Harvard biologist and Nobel laureate. "He's making what would be dead live again."

Mr. Nakashima's work is represented in the permanent collections of the American Craft Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and others.

Anne d'Harnoncourt, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said: "George Nakashima is a national treasure. He has an extraordinary feeling for wood in all its fantastic variations."

The altar, which weighs three-quarters of a ton, is to be transported to the cathedral on a 40-foot flatbed truck. It is currently at Mr. Nakashima's self-built Japanese compound in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a serene village-like place where the only disturbances seem to be deer dining on Mr. Nakashima's bok choy.

The quiet refuge is a reflection of its maker. A self-described "Hindu Catholic," Mr. Nakashima was born in Seattle, to Japanese parents. His grandfather was a samurai. He earned an architectural degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then spent seven years traveling around the world—to Paris, Tokyo and, finally, to a Hindu ashramin Pondicherry, in southern India. "I had more to learn than I had to give," he explained, "so I gave up my salary to become a monk."

There, he studied with the spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo, a relationship that was to have a lasting impact. Unlike many modern furniture makers, whose esthetic judgments are often molded by the marketplace, Mr. Nakashima's designs are based on a belief in "the relationship between material things—nature—and the human spirit."

A reverence for nature pervades Mr. Nakashima's work. Much of the drama of his designs comes from a willingness to accept and exploit a tree's knots, gnarls, worm holes, fissures and whatever other deformities nature might yield. Known widely for his construction methods, Mr. Nakashima combines mechanized cutting and planing with elegant hand-made details. In the "Altar for Peace," which resembles a gigantic table, delicate rosewood butterfly inlays are used to span natural crags between two three-inch-thick walnut surfaces cut from the same log. His approach to wood is non-interventional: the edges of the altar are ripply and follow the natural shape of the tree trunk.

Although Mr. Nakashima has designed distinctive works of architecture, such as the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Albuquerque, N,M., most of his life has been devoted to furniture, an activity perfected under traumatic circumstances during the 1940's, when Mr. Nakashima and his family were sent to a Japanese internment camp in Idaho.

After their release, the Nakashimas settled in Bucks County, where Mr. Nakashima has been pursuing his craft ever since.

The altar, too, is a survivor. The tree was hauled to North Carolina and back after a mill there informed Mr. Nakashima there was no saw on the East Coast that could handle the job of cutting it into boards. Not to be deterred, Mr. Nakashima consulted a sawyer friend in California, Scott Wineland, who specializes in walnut. His eight-foot-long dual-engine Alaska Mill chain saw in tow, Mr. Wineland flew to Philadelphia to cut the tree trunk, what Mr. Nakashima called a "delicate and adventure-some process," which lasted an entire week and was performed mostly in a blizzard. There were some anxious moments. For instance, when the saw hit a huge concrete pipe, put in by a tree surgeon 75 to 100 years ago to aid drainage. Fortunately, the pipe was buried in only a small portion of the walnut trunk.

The altar has been paid for largely by Mr. Nakashima, who estimates he has spent around $10,000 on the project. Six months ago, a fund-raising committee was formed by a band of Nakashima admirers to further Mr. Nakashima's goal and to provide funds for maintenance. The group is headed by Steven C. Rockefeller, dean and professor of religion at Middlebury College, who acted as an intermediary between Mr. Nakashima and the cathedral.

Soon, the great walnut tree will make its pilgrimage to Manhattan to begin its new life. In the vast reach of Mr. Nakashima's life, it is the perfect butterfly joint—not so much a piece of furniture as an ecumenical symbol of peace.

Mr. Nakashima hopes one day to build other ''Altars for Peace" in Nagasaki, Japan, and elsewhere. "Beauty has become a bad word these days, and there's a real tedium in our environment,''' he mused recently. "But in earlier periods of history, there was a spirituality attached to art. In 13th-century France, for instance, some little guy got up and carved a gargoyle in a cathedral. He wasn't even a stone sculptor, but he produced a work of art." "I'm not a moralist," Mr. Nakashima added. "But if the spirit is there, it comes out right."