Alfred Preis

Becoming an In-between Place

Like most emigres, Alfred Preis found himself in an unfamiliar, strange place upon his arrival in Honolulu. The languages, cultures, and blend of ethnicities were significantly different from the cultural melting pot of Vienna was at the time of his youth. For him, Hawai‘i also had an alien climatic landscape. All of this created a sense of displacement for the young Preis. But his initial bewilderment was quickly replaced by an awareness of opportunity and curiosity. Bringing with him a cosmopolitan and Eurocentric Viennese architectural training and knowledge, he was now exposed to a geographically isolated and relatively insular society.

Seafaring Polynesians first arrived around 400 C.E. on the Hawaiian Islands, settling initially on Hawai‘i, the Big Island. With them they not only brought skills in fishing and farming, but somewhat feudalistic social structure.  Land was distributed in long parcels of arable and jungle land called ahupua‘a, dividing the land into fruitful territories for each group owned and ruled by chieftains, known as ali‘i. This parcellation was significantly different to the rather geometric, bureaucratic form of land sub-division later introduced by Western settlers.

The Hawaiians’ rich, practical, and artistic cultures that Preis, as Director of the Foundation of the Culture and The Arts, would later attempt to preserve, included printing elaborate kapa cloth, exquisite clothing made of tropical birds’ feathers reserved for ali‘i; petroglyphs; symbolic tattooing; hula dances and mele (songs and chants).

Architectural influences on Preis’s work are with no doubt indigenous-built structures such as lanai (open-sided work and gathering spaces made of wood with heavily thatched roofs), hale (homes, also of wooden poles and thatch), and heiau (outdoor temples) of lava rock and wood. Preis soon developed a sincere interest in the beauty of nature and its preservation. He believed strongly in the advantages of Hawaii’s trade winds for cooling, and in the raising of buildings from the floor to combat rodent and pest intrusion. These interests gradually informed his regional version of modernism but also paid tribute to a reverent view of the ‘aina (the land) that provided the original settlers their bounty.

Preis, of course, did not encounter a pristine indigenous society. By the time of his arrival in 1939, Western culture and economy dominated. With the arrival of British explorer Captain James Cook in 1778, Hawaii’s culture and society would forever change. Cook’s anthropologists and scientists extensively documented Hawaiians’ ways of living and the islands’ natural environments. Soon, many other countries, from England, to France, and the United States became interested in Hawai‘i as a source of raw materials, such as its prolific stands of sandalwood trees. It was also a prospective shipping hub between the East and West. Only King Kamehameha, who by 1810 conquered all the islands, prevented through the unification into one kingdom, the colonization of a single foreign power—but only for the time being. Nonetheless, Christian missionaries and traders gradually transformed the islands through conversion to Christianity and the accidental introduction of devastating diseases that decimated the indigenous population. American interest began with colonists developing Hawaii’s commercial agriculture into a sugar-based economy. Other crop development, such as the vast pineapple fields, soon followed. Because Americans almost solely controlled the Hawaiian economy, they were able annex the archipelago as US Territory in 1898.

Upon this annexation, a third migration wave began with a new population brought in as plantation workers. Plantation owners began to import laborers from other countries in successive waves – first by bringing in Chinese immigrants, then laborers from Japan, Germany, Portugal, the Philippines, and Korea. After completing their years-long labor contracts, these immigrants elected to stay and to try their prospects on the islands rather than returning to their home countries. Chinese, Portuguese and Japanese former plantation workers would form core societies in Hawai‘i – and also become Preis’s clients – thus informing major parts of his understanding of the different cultural lifestyles and living habits. Although white civilians still dominated island business, politics, and “high” culture for much of the first half of the twentieth century, a vigorous multiethnic labor movement eventually began to bring down the power of those plantation owners and shippers. By the 1950s, Japanese and other civilians would ultimately become significant leaders in Hawaii’s politics.

Because of this history, Hawai‘i has occupied a complex physical and psychological space “in between” the Pacific Islands, the continental United States, and Asia. The archipelago’s remote geographical location, along with its colonial and post-colonial social, economic, and cultural histories have generated a vivid intersection of Eastern, Western, and Pacific Island cultures – not quite fully expressing any one of them predominantly. In response, Preis equally adopted a very in-between consciousness of the Hawaiian environment, culture, and economy, introducing – in reverse – a Viennese aesthetic and social-liberal mindset.

A Changing Culture of Belief

Prior to Western contact, indigenous Hawaiians worshipped both in their daily life practices and in outside heiau. Heiau were large platforms or walled enclosures often constructed of volcanic stones.  With the arrival of New England missionaries in the early nineteenth century, most Hawaiians were eventually convinced to convert to the Christian religion.

Since the first missionaries to Hawai‘i were from New England, their early religious architecture followed New England church styles, using locally available materials – oftentimes from dismantled heiau. Through the mid-nineteenth and into first decades of the twentieth century, other forms of Western historical revivalism, such as the Gothic Revival, became common in Christian religious architecture on the islands.

With the growing acceptance of modernism during the interwar period, many Christian denominations started to update their church styles. Not only were modernist churches more likely to attract younger congregants, but also many church officials believed that religious architecture should evolve in order to better represent the contemporary era. On the mainland, some of the first modernist churches and synagogues began to appear in the early 1940s, before the war interrupted most construction. Pietro Belluschi, a West coast modernist and regionalist, was one of the first US designers to create distinctively modern churches that also evoked a sense of place by using local materials. After the war, Eliel Saarinen’s Christ Church Lutheran (1948) in Minneapolis, Minnesota was a landmark of modern US church design. Alfred Preis’s religious architecture on the archipelago paralleled some of the most avant-garde mainland worship spaces that were designed in the first years of the 1950s.

Because of the islands’ ethnic and cultural diversity, modernism in religious architecture was ideally suited to local congregants. Modern design seemed, perhaps, to be a more culturally egalitarian option, because it mitigated more overtly European and colonial historicism. In Hawai‘i, (as on the mainland US) the Jewish community was one of the first groups to embrace architectural modernism for this reason. Classical and Gothic Revival historical languages, for example, often represented the very Christian communities who had long oppressed the Jewish people. This understanding built the foundation for Alfred Preis’s novel approach.

Preis’s First Methodist Church from 1953 was formidably modern – and not only for Hawai‘i, but also for the United States as a whole. Using elements from an earlier abandoned synagogue design and decidedly using Hawaiian typological influences, he revolutionized and inspired the future of church design in Hawai‘i. Although modernism in mainland religious architecture began to take hold in some progressively minded congregations by the late 1940s and early 1950s, it would not be until the middle and late 1950s that modernism was more widely adopted in religious architecture. But with Preis’s design for First Methodist – and the many designs for island modernist churches that followed – Hawai‘i was on the vanguard of culturally and regionally-sensitive architectural design for religious buildings.

Postwar Housing: Architecture for All

After World War II and before Hawai‘i was granted statehood in 1959, Alfred Preis recognized that housing crisis caused by Hawaii’s rapidly increasing population in the postwar boom was dire. Already between 1930 and the war’s end in 1946, the population of the county of Honolulu grew by over fifty percent; a baby boom increased this number still further. The new availability of commercial air travel also brought thousands more people to the islands, and hotel and amenities businesses exploded. In Waikiki, through the 1950s and 60s, architects designed high-rise hotels, resorts, restaurants, Hawai‘i-themed shops, tourist vacation apartments, and seasonal condominiums at breakneck speed, and in the process destroyed much of what Preis deemed god-given beauty in nature. Many of Preis’s articles in collaboration with his colleagues of Associated Architects concern themselves equally with the novel idea of preserving the natural beauty of the island and establishing larger planning strategies for affordable housing.