The great untold story of 20th-century design is how the love affair between modernism and technology soured so soon for so many architects, decorative artists, and craftsmen. Among those who became disenchanted early on with high-tech modernism was a young American architect of Japanese descent named George Nakashima. Born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington, he came of age as the Machine Age was reaching its zenith with the heady promise that life would be immeasurably improved by new technology, After studying architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, Nakashima went on to MIT, where he received a masters degree in 1930, just after the Great Depression hit and brought architecture in this country to a veritable standstill.

During that troubled decade, Nakashima traveled the world, including stints working for the influential Czech-American architect Antomin Raymond in Japan and India. Raymond, who had been Frank Lloyd Wright's chief assistant on the building of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, was a leading transmitter of modern architectural ideas to the Third World. More importantly, he believed in balancing those advances in harmony with regional traditions. Raymond was also an advocate of Wrights principle of being true to the nature of materials, taking one's design cues from concrete, glass, stone, or wood rather than imposing preconceived notions on how they should be used. And Wright's profound respect for the classical culture of Japan, transmitted through Raymond to Nakashima, further deepened the apprentice's pride in his ethnic roots.

Wright was also a skilled designer of furniture (much of it frequently maligned as uncomfortable) and his ready embrace of that medium demonstrated his conviction that the decorative arts were not beneath the attentions of an architect. Among the many things Nakashima learned during his wandering years, that example sunk in with particular impact. He began to see handcrafted furniture as his true calling, and in 1940 started producing his own designs in Seattle. Over the next half-century, until his death in 1990, Nakashima established a unique niche for himself in the modern movement, one that used to seem quirky and isolated to some, but which now in retrospect seems far more significant.

A complementary pair of current exhibitions reflects the growing interest in Nakashima furniture, which has been stimulated in part by the wider reappreciation of mid-century modern design, 'The Nakashima Tradition Origins and Continuity" is a two-part event including a show of the artiste vintage works from the 1940s to the 1980s at the Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia, Twenty-five miles northeast, the Nakashima studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania, will display a new line of handmade furniture by the artist's daughter and professional successor, Mira Nakashima-Yarnall, some of which will also be on view at Moderne. Both exhibitions will continue through December 19,1998.

The biggest obstacle Nakashima being seen as a figure on a par with Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, and other giants or mid-century modernism is that the vocabulary he worked in was later so debased by third-rate imitators. Thus it was difficult to see the master's originals except through the distorting lens of bad approximations. The same thing happened to Mies van der Rohe, whose elegant, minimalist glass-and-steel skyscrapers were knocked off by cut-rate developers out to make a quick buck. In Nakashima's case, his rough-hewn wooden tables and chairs, carefully conceived to bring out the rich natural graining and expressive contours of the native cherry and black walnut he favored, were crudely caricatured in the redwood tree-stump furniture that became an embarrassing 1970s cliche. That "woodbutcher" style effectively butchered Nakashima's contribution in the eyes of an entire generation.

Now, however, with the perspective of time and greater interest in design that transcends cultural boundaries. Nakashima's furniture has at last escaped the stigma of the macrame movement Like his year-older fellow Nisei (second-generation Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi, Nakashima possessed what can only be seen as an innate gift for melding Eastern and Western artistic concepts in works that seem fully at home in either hemisphere. As with Noguchi's own furniture designs Nakashima's pieces assert a powerful sculptural presence that runs counter to the modernist preference for utilitarian objects that fit seamlessly into their rational architectural surroundings.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor and Americans entry into World War II Nakashima and his fellow Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast were rounded up and interned in concentration camps for the duration. With the intervention of Antonin Raymond Nakashima was released from detention in the Idaho desert and moved east to the tolerant Bucks County, Pennsylvania, town of New Hope, long an artists colony and bohemian haven. There he set up his studio in 1946 and set out to practice his forthright and inclusive design philosophy.

For all the obvious Japanese influences in his work, Nakashima also looked equally at the simple artifacts the early American furniture maker whose hands-on manufacturing and distribution techniques he emulated (Nakashima designed a few mass-production pieces for Knoll and Widdicomb in the 1950s, but neither was a conspicuous success, artistically or financially.) The classic Windsor chair English in origin but endlessly adapted in this country, served as the basis for his famous lounge chairs Nakashima's spare variations on that familiar theme emphasize how much the Shakers and the Japanese had in common with their economy of line gracefulness of form, and knowledge that humble materials can be more impressive and memorable than costly ones. That was perceived by such sophisticated clients as Nelson A. Rockefeller, whose Japanese-style house on his family estate in Pocantico Hills New York, was furnished in 1974 with a number of Nakashima pieces, it's a small world, Nakashima's designs seem to say, and s easy movement between the local and the global the contemporary and the timeless is the key to the appeal his signature style has more than fifty years after he devised its basic components.