Meet designing woman behind stately Laniakea

Quick: Can you think of a building in downtown Honolulu that is "stately, beautiful, yet radiating a friendliness of spirit and invitation of welcome?" That certainly doesn’t describe any of the rather sterile downtown high-rises. Maybe it could be the C. Brewer Building, but that historic structure is more of a bungalow.

Time’s up. That quote is from The Honolulu Advertiser on the dedication of the YWCA on Richards Street on June 19, 1927.

When you climb the few steps to enter the YWCA today, one of the first things you notice are the flowers (plumeria, hibiscus and orchids) hand-carved into 10 panels on the original teak doors. From there, the entire building is a delight. Your eye then may be drawn to the elegant arches that pull you toward a two-story walkway (or technically a loggia) that leads to a sun-filled outdoor seating area on the left and to a sparkling swimming pool on the right that is enclosed on three sides.

The story of who designed Laniakea — as the YWCA is called — and how she did it is amazing. Many books and articles have been written about Julia Morgan. And with good reason.

Consider that in 1894 she was the first woman to earn an engineering degree from the University of California, Berkeley. As if that wasn’t enough, she went on to be the first female graduate in architecture from the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. With those credentials she became — what else? — the first woman architect licensed in California.

It seems only right that a facility dedicated to women would be designed by a woman. But Julia was so successful in her work that she designed many YWCAs, and in fact, was the architect of record for 700 private homes, public buildings and commercial properties during her roughly 50-year career. Perhaps her best known work was tycoon William Randolf Hearst’s rambling 115-room mansion called San Simeon on the California Coast.

What is interesting to note is the contrast between the classic, "stately" YWCA in Honolulu with the rather splashy, rambling manse Hearst had her design for his whims and fancies. He must have been an important client because she worked on San Simeon for 21 years starting in 1919.

With such a bustling practice — and most of her weekends devoted to San Simeon — she only came to Honolulu once for the Richards Street YWCA. In fact, she designed the building and supervised its construction from 2,500 miles away in her San Francisco office. All that long-distance effort without fax machines or computer-aided drawings sent over the Internet or communications by Facebook. How did she do it so successfully?

In a book titled "Julia Morgan, Architect," author Sara Boutelle says Morgan put one of her mainland office engineers in charge of the Hawaii project. Morgan made her only visit to the Honolulu YWCA in December 1925. However, "she remained in control of the operation," Boutelle says, "by requiring that her architectural representative, Edward Hussey, write, in duplicate, full daily numbered reports to be mailed by the weekly boat….(which usually took 10 days to two weeks) along with a roll of eight exposures of film and annotated and dated floor plans." To remain in control, her ablest draftsman, Thaddeus Joy, took a ship out periodically to consult, as did her engineers.

For emergencies, radiograms were sent to JulmorganSF. How would that be for a Twitter handle today?

Architect Bill Brooks of Ferraro Choi and Associates says his firm has been involved with a serial renovation of the YWCA starting with an Existing Conditions Report it did in 2001. For preservationists, Brooks says, "There is a surprising amount of original material and design at the YWCA. From the exterior, about everything you see is original — the splendid teak doors, of course, but also the wooden casework on the left as you enter. All the metal windows and ornamental grillwork are original."

From the beginning, the leading ladies of Honolulu were members. The YWCA’s archives show membership cards for Queen Liliuokalani and Mrs. Walter Dillingham. Today, men can join.

A little known fact about Laniakea is that the landscape was designed by Catherine Thompson and once extended to Alakea Street. "It is fitting that a building housing a national women’s organization was both designed and landscaped by women," according to a 1969 booklet titled, "Old Honolulu, A Guide to Oahu’s Historic Buildings."

Keep Hawaii Hawaii is a monthly column on island architecture and urban planning. Robert M. Fox, president of Fox Hawaii Inc., studied architecture in California and Japan. He was one of the founders of the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation in 1974. David Cheever, owner of David Cheever Marketing, has served on the boards of the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation and the Hawaii Architectural Foundation. Send comments to keephawaiihawaii@staradvertiser.com.