They come in every material (wood, steel, iron, concrete) and pattern (leaves, sails, surfboards) imaginable. The neighborhood’s railings alone could fill a coffee table book.
Some of the seemingly unremarkable walk-up apartment buildings have architectural pedigrees of their own, like the uber-retro Darlani Apartments, designed by the architects who would later help realize the Hawai‘i State Capitol building. Gump Building built 40 years earlier in 1927, now a store for Louis Vuitton. On Kalākaua Avenue, Wimberly’s Waikiki Galleria Tower from 1966, with its arching, tessellated, Escher-like façade, sits next to Hart Wood’s Asian-influenced G.
Still, a surprising amount of significant works remains. Augustine Church By the Sea, a relic of atomic-age architecture, were built a Burger King and an ABC Store, severing the church from the street and beachfront. Fuller’s dome, which had served as a nightclub and venue for performers like Don Ho, came down three years later.īeachfront property reached such a premium that even tiny parcels were sold off for development. The Waikikian closed in 1996, its fantastical lobby and restaurants demolished. Many of Waikīkī’s iconic structures were torn down to make way for ever-larger resorts. Hotel rooms shrank accordingly and were perched higher and higher in the sky.
#Breezeblox walkthough full#
Large suites with full kitchens, once de rigeur, were no longer needed. If this glut resulted in more utilitarian architecture, it also changed what a hotel was. Between 19, visitors increased sixfold and began staying for shorter periods. In the 1960s, advancements in commercial air travel shortened the flight time from the West Coast to Hawai‘i from nine hours to less than five, making the islands more accessible than ever.
It was as bold as Waikīkī ever got, an outgrowth of post-World War II optimism and Hawai‘i’s increasing prominence in the American imagination. The year before, George “Pete” Wimberly, who went on to design the Sheraton Waikiki-which, in 1971, was the largest resort in the world-had given Waikīkī its most iconic structure to date: the hyper-modern, tiki-flavored Waikikian Hotel, whose lobby featured a dramatic, hyperbolic paraboloid roof that curved in two directions and dipped nearly to the ground. In 1957, Buckminster Fuller built one of his famous geodesic domes on the grounds of what is now Hilton Hawaiian Village. And yet once upon a time, the area was the playground of the architectural vanguard. Unlike some tourist destinations, such as Palm Springs or Miami Beach, Waikīkī isn’t known for its architecture. It’s walkable, and it’s dense, and personally, the combination of tall buildings and mountains gets to me.” “People often clap back at Waikīkī as an inauthentic place, but I’ve never felt that way. Some of her favorite buildings, like the Waikīkī Theater, have been demolished in recent years, she said, “but I’m pleased to see that most of the low-rise apartments still have character. “It’s walkable, and it’s dense, and personally, the combination of tall buildings and mountains gets to me.” “People often clap back at Waikīkī as an inauthentic place, but I’ve never felt that way,” she wrote. Not long ago a friend of mine, an architectural historian who lived in Hawai‘i for several years, sent me a note unbidden. Since the late 1800s, Waikīkī has also been a place people have called home, slowly evolving into an urban neighborhood with a population of some 20,000 people and a tireless energy. The wetlands disappeared with the construction of the Ala Wai Canal in the 1920s, creating acres of prime beachfront property that soon were populated with hotels and taverns. Its name means “spouting waters” and refers not to the ocean but to the stream-fed wetlands that made the area an agricultural hub even as members of the royal family built residences there.
Waikīkī is and always has been many things. With every step, it seems, you encounter a different era: the 1920s with its grand, ornamental architecture, or the 1950s with its tiki modernism. But like most places, Waikīkī reveals itself slowly, haltingly.Ī stroll through its streets is a walk through time, though not a linear one. Seen from a distance, Honolulu’s famous beachfront strip appears as a homogenous blob of blocky beige towers, as if extruded from the sand, the overall effect one of bland repetition. Here, everything is bathed in a cool blue light. The sun is up, but it hasn’t yet reached the cluttered back streets of Waikīkī.
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