Honolulu architect John Hara is honored for his holistic designs

Architect John Hara cut a slender, elegant figure as he strode briskly down Beretania Street past the colonnaded facade of the Honolulu Museum of Art. His white hair, parted to one side, covered the tops of his ears and collar, and although the hot afternoon sun shone directly into his eyes and the air was thick with traffic fumes, he did not flinch.

“The Art Academy gave me my first job in Honolulu,” Hara said of the museum, whose name was changed in 2012. He pointed at the bus stop waiting area: a bench set back against a green mound bordered by a low, curved concrete wall. “That was in 1973. It’s still here.”

A recent event had moved Hara, 76, to revisit this bit of public space he designed at the start of his career: In September, he received the 2015 Medal of Honor for Lifetime Achievement from the American Institute of Architects Northwest and Pacific Region.

This is the first time a Hawaii architect has won the medal, the highest award bestowed by the AIA on members in the region, which encompasses Alaska, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. The award recognizes “lifetime efforts in advocacy, protection and enhancement of both the built environment and the natural environment.”

In nominating Hara for the honor, his former professor and lifelong mentor, architect Romaldo Giurgola, wrote: “In a time dominated by fleeting and insubstantial trends, his places are measured and real, yet they radiate the open optimism of a wonderful continuity of idea, with form-making working slowly and quietly toward the truth of the place and the people among whom he lives.”

A pioneer of “green” architecture in Hawaii, Hara’s creations include Punahou School’s Case Middle School, a nine-building complex built in 2004 that won gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Design (LEED) program, and the master plan and first phase of buildings for the University of Hawaii-West Oahu campus, completed in 2012, which meets LEED standards and includes a greenway following the natural contours of Kaloi Gulch.

In 2008, when he renovated the earthquake-damaged Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, originally designed by Skidmore Owings &Merrill in 1960, Hara added new works by Hawaii artists to the original collection in the hotel’s public spaces. For the UH-West Oahu campus, he drew up a master plan for works of art, the first of which to be realized was the Library Tower in stained glass and light-emitting diodes by Carol Bennet.

After many lofty projects, the modest Beretania Street bus stop still matters to Hara. “We need more public spaces,” he said, his dark eyes, framed by wide metal-rimmed glasses, shining with conviction. While buildings are important, he said, so are “the spaces between.”

In his designs for Case Middle School and the UH-West Oahu campus, outdoor spaces were considered to be as important as the classrooms. “That’s where the students hang out,” Hara said.

Another “space between” is the white sweep of courtyard in the Luce Pavilion Complex that Hara designed at the Honolulu Museum of Art. The complex includes the museum cafe and the Clare Boothe Luce Wing, built in 1977.

“This was all a parking lot,” he reminisced while sitting at a cafe table facing the Henry Luce R. Pavilion, finished in 2001 and resembling a modern version of an Italian hill fort. Hara designed the fountain, which runs the length of the arcade, “to provide background noise” for the cafe across the courtyard.

Hara said his style has been contemporary since his student days at the University of Pennsylvania’s school of architecture. The museum’s pavilion complex is a contemporary addition that doesn’t mimic the 1927 architecture by Bertram Goodhue but respects the original as “the wellspring from which our designs evolved.”

Whether adding to existing institutions or creating something new from the ground up, a constant challenge has been to integrate Hawaii’s island environment and cultures while avoiding stereotype and myth, he said.

“The architectural language of our buildings changes,” he said of the designs produced by his firm, John Hara &Associates, “but they’re always intended to be contemporary — no frills.”

Hara stood and walked over to a corner of the courtyard where a rough-hewn, geometric stone sculpture stood partially concealed by bamboo plants. “This one’s by Isamu Noguchi. In 1977, he asked me to come and help him install it at the museum.”

Hara, then in his 30s and just launching his own firm, had made friends with the septuagenarian artist while designing the John A. Burns Hall at the East-West Center at UH-Manoa.

“Red Untitled,” made of red Persian travertine, “weighs tons, and Noguchi kept changing his directions to the crane operator. It had to be positioned exactly.”

Hara smiled. “He was one of the most difficult people I ever met.”

A hallmark of Hara’s work has been the integration of fine arts and artisanship into the places he designs, such as the Maui Arts &Cultural Center in Kahului, opened in 1994, with openwork-metal entry gates sculpted by Pat Hickman and a dry-stone masonry wall hand-built by Thomas Kamaka Emmsley in the Hawaiian tradition.

In 2012, Hara added the Yokouchi Family Pavilion, an open-air performance space, to the Maui center. The colonnaded, transparent structure has the modern yet timeless grace of the Hawaiian canoe hale and the Greek Parthenon. Transparency is another hallmark of Hara designs, whether it be in a latticework wooden gate at the museum or the glass-walled classrooms he created for the Mamiya Science Center at Punahou, which “make science visible” from corridors and courtyards while connecting learning spaces to the surrounding landscape.

“At first the teachers covered the walls with paper, but eventually they got used to the idea,” he said.

SINCE 1977, John Hara &Associates has occupied a three-story modern office building on Kemole Lane in McCully. Sitting in the conference room, Hara discussed the aesthetics, principles and highlights of his long career.

“Daylighting” — having light from windows penetrate throughout the interior of a space — is a basic green precept that not only saves energy but enhances learning and productivity, Hara said. The conference room, an interior space, receives daylight through clerestory windows.

“This is a very special place,” he said of Hawaii, where he was born and raised in a time when air conditioning was the exception, not the norm. (Another Hara must-have feature is natural ventilation, using windows that can open to cool buildings with tradewinds.)

One of Hara’s associates, his daughter Mayumi Hara Dao, stopped in to say hello. “I’m encouraging her to do her own thing,” her father said with a smile. His other daughter, interior designer Kasumi Hara, also works at the firm. Their mother, writer Marie Hara, completes the creative family team.

Dao, a LEED-certified architect like her father, said she is currently designing a space called the Connector, which will run between Schneider and Edmonson halls at UH-Manoa. “It’ll have a green roof,” she said with a smile.

Asked whether he was designing any modern skyscrapers for Kakaako, Hara shook his head.

“Kakaako is being built by large developers from the mainland who use mainland architects. They’ll build, develop and leave. Now in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, the city skylines all look the same.” He worries that this will happen to Honolulu.

Hara admits that being a modernist in Honolulu can be frustrating at times.

“When I was hired to design the School of Architecture at UH-Manoa, they said they wanted something in the neoclassic style of the rest of the campus.” Giurgola, his mentor, helped Hara appreciate the theory of proportion that linked modern and neoclassical styles. Hara crowned the building with a modern touch, integrating a work of art at the roofline.

“We used James Carpenter’s glass rim that changes with sunlight, and that took it out of the realm of being neoclassic,” he said.

Hara shook his head when asked about whether his own residence followed his modernist principles. He and Marie Hara live in Makiki, in her mother’s former house, which he hasn’t altered in any way except for remodeling the kitchen.

A SON OF Honolulu architect Ernie Hara, John Hara had not planned to pursue his father’s profession. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study music. While playing oboe in the student orchestra, he met flute player Sue Ann Kahn, daughter of prominent architect Louis Kahn.

Hara found his vocation through studying with Kahn, Giurgola, Robert Venturi and other leading architects of the Philadelphia School. One summer, he worked for another Penn architecture professor, Leon Loschetter, near the town of Grasse, France, where the cane used to make reeds for musical instruments grows in the marshes. Hara, who carved his own oboe reeds, loved purchasing them directly from the farm.

After graduation, he worked in Zurich and Paris and traveled to see buildings made by his idols Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier.

As a newlywed, Hara was offered jobs in Seattle and Philadelphia. He turned them down. He said he was happy working for Honolulu architect John Tatum, and “I’ve never thought of living anywhere else. Home is home, I guess.”

Hara is now working on a 2022 master plan for the Honolulu Museum of Art and its school. He foresees another arcade and a new gallery that will preserve the feeling of the Kinau Courtyard while providing a “transition from something which is Goodhue, contemporary but still respectful and in a different scale because the art has changed” and will, of course, keep changing.

At a side entrance to the museum stands a wooden bench, the lone survivor of several that had been made from a Hara design for the central courtyard in 1973 . It is made of solid koa, now faded and deeply scarred.

“It was beautiful. But it was eaten by termites. I don’t know why they keep it,” he said.

Looking at the simple, craftsmanlike design of the slender but sturdy bench, one can understand why.