Posted on: Thursday, July 15, 2004

Edward Killingsworth designed Kahala Hilton

By Elaine Woo
Los Angeles Times

Edward Killingsworth, one of the last Case Study House architects, whose elegant, precise designs for small residences to Hawaiian luxury-class hotels made him one of the leading Southern California modernists of his era, died of natural causes July 6 at his Long Beach, Calif., home. He was 86.

Killingsworth was one of a handful of architects chosen to participate in the Case Study Houses, a post-World War II experiment in domestic architecture conceived by Arts and Architecture magazine editor John Entenza to promote the redefinition of the American home through modernist design and cost-effective materials and construction.

Entenza selected the architects, whose efforts resulted in 36 prototype homes that could be easily and inexpensively constructed during the postwar housing boom. Some two dozen of the designs were carried through to completion, of which the majority were built in Southern California.

Killingsworth's work on the Case Study Houses eventually brought him to the attention of Hilton Hotels, which hired him to design what became Honolulu's Kahala Hilton (now the Kahala Mandarin Oriental). Set on a private lagoon, the main building is a 10-story structure in the shape of two rectangles that Peggy Cochrane, writing in the book "Contemporary Architects," called a work of art distinguished by its overall "elegant informality."

Soon after its 1964 opening, the Kahala Hilton became a favorite hangout of royalty and the Hollywood elite and boasted occupancy rates well over 90 percent. Its success led Killingsworth and his firm to design several other resort hotels in Hawai'i, including the Halekulani Hotel, the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel and the Kapalua Bay Hotel, as well as the Bali and Jakarta Hilton in Indonesia and the Hilton in Seoul, South Korea.

In Bali, he employed Balinese sculptors and other local craftsmen to "create a great piece of Balinese architecture that will incidentally be a hotel," he once said, explaining the respect for indigenous architecture that was at the center of his philosophy of hotel design.

"It is so good to be in a space where the spirit can soar, and, with all of this, it must soar with the sense of balance and proportion set up by the spaces we create," he said in an essay for "Contemporary Architects." "What better goals in life can there be? To create a condition where you can really see the spirit soar?"

The effort to reflect local culture was a hallmark of his achievements as a hotel designer, according to Sam Hurst, emeritus dean of the University of Southern California School of Architecture and Fine Art, who worked with Killingsworth to design the school. "His work was more sensitive to individual cultural conditions, client conditions and environmental conditions," Hurst said. "His Kahala Hilton exemplified that. Anyone who went there had a strong sense of being in Hawai'i but being in a very distinctive, modern building."

Killingsworth, who was born in Taft, Calif., originally aspired to be a painter or sculptor. "I would rather paint than eat," he once told an interviewer. He painted as a USC undergraduate but wound up studying architecture, earning his bachelor's degree in 1940. During World War II, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and was awarded the Bronze Star.

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Laura; sons Greg and Kim; five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.