"Burn down the Louvre."

So urged French impressionist Camille Pissarro, his caustic prescription for progress in the visual arts by casting aside the museum as a monument to the authoritative "academy."

Pissarro's devil-may-care advice seems apropos, though for less-rebellious reasons, to the Honolulu Academy of Arts' meticulous survey of modernist architect Vladimir Ossipoff's long career in Hawai'i, on view now in all its grainy, black-and-white photographic glory.

The exhibition is sumptuous with blown-up images and archival footage, and winningly brings Ossipoff's buildings indoors, so to speak, through creative exhibition design, scale models and video. While the show is a pleasure, it reads somewhat like a didactic review, recalling why architecture is so often ghettoized in art historical and museum discourse.

It's not that the other plastic arts have a monopoly on the expression and creation of cultural ethos. One needs only to enter a Gothic cathedral to understand how powerful a social conduit that collision of light and height and stone was. Architecture, more than any other art form, daily shapes our experience; to be human is to know its spatial language intimately.

But offsite, architecture's a tough sell. Its currency is space and light, land and weather. currency predicated on a visceral, human encounter with (in, outside) the built structure. Architecture is by nature inhabitable, but rarely conceived to inhabit another interior: How can a site-specific building be fully understood in two dimensions or writ small, wrested from its original intended land site and placed whole inside a second built space?

To enter this comprehensive Ossipoff survey, then, is less to experience architectural space than to comprehend visually how this particular modernist architect was one of a handful who, from their modest designs of private residences to their monumental public commissions, defined modern Hawai'i's streets, schools, skylines, and ultimately, its zeitgeist.

The Russian-born transplant's thoughtful, sustained contributions (he designed locally for seven decades, outlasting his seniors and many contemporaries who left the Islands) seem, in retrospect, not so much innovative as penetrative, distilling and propagating notions of colonial modernism in the tropics until those ideas became seamless with how Island residents actually live.

So go, by all means, to the academy's show, for rare and fascinating insight into why this place we all inhabit became what it is. Go to celebrate — or curse — how the landscape has evolved. Go to ponder what Hawai'i might look like (and be) if Ossipoff's full-scale "war on ugliness" had been successful. Go to marinate in modernism. Go, but don't expect to be viscerally enlightened by light's play on stone, or transformed by a building's enveloping, sculptural womb. For that, you'll have to take to the streets. The show makes a fine prequel/guidebook for the adventure.

THE UGLY POLICE

In the '60s and '70s, Hawai'i residents often referred to the ubiquitous metal construction crane as the "state bird." In that context, architect Vladimir Ossipoff created a civic campaign with a catchphrase only a developer could hate: "war on ugliness." Launched in 1964, his regional style-policing preached against overdevelopment, urging environmentally sensitive urban planning that would stay true to Hawai'i's roots without eschewing modern design and technologies. The agenda pressed for, among other things, mass transportation to address urban congestion, as well as buildings that adapted to the climate and didn't require excessive mechanical cooling. Now, with Hawai'i wrangling over mass transport, and the crane (and huge, cold, light-altering glass-and-concrete boxes) again dominating the view, Ossipoff's architectural agenda seems pertinent as ever.

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