Hawaiian Modern: The Architecture Of Vladimir Ossipoff

Architectural Review, The, August, 2008 by Michael Webb

This handsome, scholarly survey of the productive career of a Russian-born architect who settled in Hawaii in 1931 and worked there until his death in 1998, accompanies an exhibition that was first presented at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and will travel to Yale in September and to Frankfurt next spring. Vladimir Ossipoff was a tropical Modernist, a leader in the shift from universality to regionalism in the Americas in the post-war decades. He helped transform the architecture of Hawaii as it evolved from a sleepy colony with a scatter of imported buildings to statehood and tourist hub.

Curator Dean Sakamoto and historian Karla Britton provide an admirable summary of Ossipoff's achievement. 'His architecture remains a benchmark for Hawaiian design,' they write, 'for the integrity of its execution, its unostentatious and human scale, its integration into the landscape and skilled framing of vistas, its manipulation of patterns of light and shadow,and its focus on the resources provided by cooling winds and the conditions of individual microclimates.'

The period photographs--and a few recent colour images--support this analysis. In the schools and public buildings on which Ossipoff collaborated with other progressive architects, and in his independent practice, there's an admirable fusion of local and Japanese traditions and natural materials, and a bold use of precast concrete and contemporary technology. Open-plan houses with flat or pitched roofs open up to lanais [the Hawaiian word for porches or balconies], and embrace dense plantings. In an era of cheap energy, they relied on natural ventilation. Ossipoff aimed to create the simplest of shelters but his wartime experience, working for the US military, gave him a mastery of large-scale construction, as evidenced in the airy halls of Honolulu International Airport, the bold geometry of Diamond Head Apartments and the gridded facade of the IBM offices. His best buildings still command respect--even in the generic metropolis that Honolulu has become, as well as the remoter areas that have not been despoiled.

Edited by Dean Sakamoto. London: Yale

University Press. 2008. [pounds sterling]35