🪚The Greats

Kongō Gumi outlasted every dynasty, war and fire that touched Osaka, rebuilding Shitennō-ji again and again — including after American incendiary raids leveled it in 1945. In the twentieth century the firm was even headed by a woman, Yoshie Kongō, who took over as the thirty-eighth-generation leader in an industry that barely admitted women on site. Only in 2006, weighed down by bubble-era debts, did it become a subsidiary of Takamatsu Construction Group — after 1,428 years in business, still repairing the same temple.

Parliament's 1714 Longitude Act offered £20,000 — a fortune — for a practical way to fix a ship's east–west position. Harrison, with no clockmaking training, spent five decades on the problem. On the 1761–62 trial voyage to Jamaica his H4 sea watch lost only about five seconds in 81 days at sea, yet the Board of Longitude paid out in grudging fractions; he received his final award in 1773, at eighty, only after King George III personally took up his case.

The Director was a commercial gamble: 160 engraved plates sold by subscription at a price aimed at aristocrats. It worked — subscribers ranged from dukes and earls to fellow cabinetmakers, and copies reached Catherine the Great's Russia and Louis XVI's France. Yet Chippendale remained a tradesman to his clients: at Harewood House, where his workshop supplied the marquetry Diana and Minerva commode for £86 in 1773 — several years of a laborer's wages — he still had to chase the aristocracy for payment like any village joiner.

Lacy served through the Seven Years' War as a carpenter's servant aboard HMS Sandwich, then completed a seven-year shipwright apprenticeship in the royal yards, keeping her identity secret through shared quarters and brutal timber work. When rheumatism ended her career in 1771, she petitioned the Admiralty for a pension — in her own name, as Mary Lacy. Remarkably, the Admiralty granted it, £20 a year, effectively acknowledging a woman's service in a trade that legally excluded her. Her 1773 memoir, The History of the Female Shipwright, told the story publicly.

For the Yakushi-ji rebuilding, Nishioka insisted on hinoki cypress more than a thousand years old — trees Japan no longer had — and sourced them from Taiwan's mountains. He had blacksmiths reforge the yariganna, a spear-shaped plane obsolete for centuries, by studying the tool marks on Asuka-era timbers. Against skeptical engineers he argued that thousand-year timber was still alive, still moving, and could serve a thousand years more. His precepts came down orally: buy the mountain, not the timber; assemble the trees as they grew.

In 1942 Nakashima, his wife and infant daughter were interned with other Japanese Americans at the Minidoka camp in Idaho. There he met Gentaro Hikogawa, a carpenter trained in Japan, and used the imprisonment to learn traditional joinery and tool discipline. Sponsored out of the camp in 1943 by architect Antonin Raymond, he settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and built the studio his family still runs. Late in life he began the Altars for Peace — enormous walnut altars placed on several continents, the first at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1986.

For The Tag Project, completed in 2012, Maruyama and hundreds of volunteers hand-replicated the paper identification tags issued to the roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War — her own relatives among them. Strung into ten hanging bundles, one for each camp, the tags toured American museums alongside her carved cabinets. She built that body of work while adapting her shop practice around the cerebral palsy and partial hearing loss she has had since birth — and around a field that had told her generation the workshop was no place for women.