Alfred Preis

The USS Arizona Memorial – the Memory Lives On

The roughly $500,000 USS Arizona Memorial of the Pacific was opened for dedication on Memorial Day, May 30, 1962 at 9:30 in the morning. It was a beautiful Honolulu morning and not overly windy, with blue skies and clouds passing in the warm breeze. Just days before the ceremony, workmen were still putting the final touches on the building, but all was completed in time. Congressman Olin E. Teague, chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, delivered the keynote address. In his address, he spoke forcefully against international war and the growing proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Surprisingly, the memorial’s opening was little covered in the US architectural press and given only a few mentions in national newspapers. The reasons for this are difficult to discern. It could be that the Arizona memorial was a memorial to a still-fresh wound. The Pearl Harbor attack was broadly considered to be an American embarrassment and failure in war planning. Despite the numerous small, public contributions for its construction, it may not have been something that non-veterans or their families wished to celebrate.

Through the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States was in an economic upswing, boasting the largest military power in the world. A memorial – however architecturally adventurous – to a terrible tragedy in the far-flung Hawaiian archipelago was unlikely to be a source of national interest and pride. Certainly, the form was unusual and its subject matter – a building floating over wreckage containing the bodies of men murdered in war – was deeply unsettling. The international architectural press also did not take any substantial note of the design or of Preis’s significant achievement. But again, this may have been mainly due to Hawaii’s geographical remoteness. Hawaii’s architecture was therefore ignored and infrequently published in overseas architecture journals.

Preis’s son, Jan-Peter Preis recalled in 2002, “initially, the memorial was criticized heavily by some people and equated to a smashed milk carton. At that time, it was a foreign piece of architecture, it was not the sort of thing that you see in Hawai‘i, and not in 1962.”

But at the same time, other experimental forms in Hawai‘i modernism were on the rise. Vladimir Ossipoff’s famed IBM building – another experimental use of concrete in expressive and abstracted forms – opened to critical acclaim in precisely the same year as the Arizona memorial. In fact, Preis’s memorial fit squarely into an overall trend toward modernist formal experimentation with concrete in the state. A Honolulu Advertiser article from late 1962 called the memorial “indescribably beautiful … a marvelous shape of white that crest[s] waves still black with oil floating up from the sunken ship.” So it is certain that there were many who felt quite positively about Preis’s design. For his efforts, Preis won a Certificate of Merit from the Hawaii AIA in 1962.

Since its opening, annual visitors have increased every year and now number at least one million – and sometimes more. Nearly every popular history of Pearl Harbor published since the 1980s has devoted several pages of attention to the effectiveness of its design and its ability to deeply move those who come to see it from both the United States and Japan, as well as from many other countries less familiar with the story it has to tell.