Island Architecture
Reviving Hawai'i Hall

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Renovation plans for Hawai'i Hall began in the early 1980s but were continually deferred because of budget cuts. Advertiser library photo • April 26, 1959

"It's been at the core of the campus since the very beginning," said Michael Graves, a special assistant to the UH executive vice chancellor. "We want to bring the building back to life to serve the campus in the same way for a long time to come."

Once Hawai'i Hall was the only building on the Manoa campus. When it was built in 1912 for $50,000, it housed the entire college's operations: administration, library, animal husbandry lab, classrooms, art studio, an athletic locker room, even a kitchen and dining room for the school's 145 students. For at least a decade, it was simply called the Main Building.

For generations of students, the rock-solid, three-story building has been an anchor for some of the university's most important programs: arts and sciences, student services and administration. It played host to theatrical events, boring lectures, fashion shows, long lines for class registration, exercise classes, homecomings and an infamous student death in 1923 that led to a curtailment of freshman hazing. For many years, commencement ceremonies were held on the building's steps facing the still unfinished campus quadrangle.

As the university grew, the stately building lost its role as center of campus life and began to deteriorate physically. Even in 1957, a reporter with the campus newspaper Ka Leo O Hawaii could refer to the once-proud campus landmark as a "pillared and pilloried example of the declining days of the great classical revival movement."

Newspapers reported plans for a general renovation of the building as early as 1980, but the work continually was deferred by budget cuts and shifting priorities until they got back on track in the late 1990s.

"We pretty much have to gut the entire building inside in order to preserve it," said Stan Yasumoto, an architect with Architects Hawai'i, which came up with the plan for the renovated Hawai'i Hall. "The challenge is to put everything together again."

Putting it together means not only renovating and reviving the building, but restoring Hawai'i Hall to its rightful symbolic place at the center of the university's mission, Graves said. With space at a premium throughout the UH system, administrators had to think long and hard about which departments and offices would end up going into the renovated space, he said.

The result is a fine academic and political balancing act. Each of the four corners of the new Hawai'i Hall will house the deans' offices for four colleges: Arts and Sciences; Languages, Linguistics and Literature; Natural Sciences; and Social Sciences.

To make sure that students don't feel left out by all that administrative attention, the ground floor will be home to new offices for Arts and Sciences student advising and nonacademic services, Graves said.

"The university is making an effort to come back to its core values of undergraduate education," Graves said. "This is one vehicle to help us in that direction."

First though, there's a lot of construction work ahead.

Because the building was in such poor shape, officials chose to clean everything out but the sagging walls and foundation. Even those might have gone if not for the insistence of state historic preservation officials that the building retain its original facade and the ground-floor lobby plan.

"That's pretty much what these historic renovations are about," Yasumoto said. "You try to preserve as much as you can and mesh all the contemporary needs into the old parts. It's a little like putting 10 pounds of things into a five-pound bag."

Graves said the university hopes to see Hawai'i Hall come alive as a modern building inside a historic structure. Renovation plans call for new air conditioning, telecommunications, elevators and mechanical systems.

"In the end, we hope it will look pretty much as it did before, except it will have all the amenities of a modern building," Graves said.

Nearby Crawford Hall, opened in 1938, also is being renovated at the same time as Hawai'i Hall. Eventually, Graves said, all the buildings in the historic quadrangle area of the university will be renovated and a new landscaping plan will be put in place, completing the revitalization of the school's most historic areas.

Mike Leidemann writes regularly about architecture and historic buildings. He can be reached by phone (525-5460) or e-mail (mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com).