ʻI Ka Wā Ma Mua, Ka Wā Ma Hope - (The Future Is in the Past)
The studio continues an ongoing collaborative effort to re-imagine the future of architecture in Hawaiʻi building on design studios co-led with Honolulu-based artist/architect/activist Sean Connelly (Kanaka Hawai‘i / Pacific Islander American). Connelly’s seminal work, Hawai’i Futures, will serve as a foundational resource for understanding concepts of place, land and environment in Hawai’i, one of the most remote archipelagos in the world. Through interdisciplinary conversations with cultural practitioners, scholars and design research focused on material experimentation, this work considers architecture as a medium to re-establish systems of care for ʻāina (land/that which feeds). This work also explores new models of architectural practice to support cultural resurgence, ecological recovery, and political sovereignty for Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) engaged in grassroots movements (ʻāina organizations) in Hawaiʻi. By re-grounding the discipline and practice of architecture in an oceanic worldview based on genealogical connections to place, we can navigate an uncertain planetary future with the wisdom of the past through continuities across space, time, and ancestral lineages.
Recognizing the knowledge systems and spiritual practices of Native communities that steward the land transcends the Western concepts of “Regenerative Design” or “Bio-Regional Design,” which draw on these innovative and timeless practices but seldom acknowledge Native sources, let alone advocate for the improvement of their material conditions. For Kanaka Maoli, land has always been the topic. When we center the spiritual, cosmological, and political relationships to land of Native communities, it reframes our understanding of architecture as not just a material system or a spatial practice but also a practice of care for the land and a political act of self-representation.
A Return to Embodied Histories
The studio will begin by studying the history of Hawaiian objects held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of Oceanic works, one of the largest in the world containing 2,800 works. As a tool of Western imperialism and world-building, the Met and its architecture spatialize the political entanglements that hold these artifacts hostage in a state of dispossession – disembodied and disconnected from their culture of origin. In anticipation of the re-opening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in the spring of 2025, we will learn about the archival infrastructure, conservation practices, and display systems that determine how these objects are cared for and presented to a public audience through conversations with key stakeholders.
From the Met, we will shift our focus to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, which offers an alternative history of the encyclopedic museum. Built in 1889 in honor of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop by her husband, the museum is now located in the ahupuaʻa of Kapālama. It is the largest museum in Hawaiʻi and has the world’s largest collection of Polynesian cultural artifacts and natural history specimens. During this process, we will be guided by Kanaka Maoli scholars and cultural practitioners familiar with processes of repatriation to understand the objects’ provenance and the embodied histories of their meaning, making, and use.
Architecture for ʻĀina (Land/That Which Feeds)
The history of food, land, and architecture are inseparably embodied in the material culture of Hawaiʻi. Today, Hawaiʻi imports 90% of its food and energy resources. Before it became the Indo-Pacific Command Center for the US military, masked as a global tourist mecca, Hawaiʻi didn’t import food to survive. Kanaka Maoli designed the ahupuaʻa resource management system, described by Mary Pukui as “utilizing the resources of sustenance to a maximum.” More than a land division system, the ahupuaʻa is a lifestyle; a mountain-to-ocean connection; a nutrient system; a spatial configuration; a technology; and a way of knowing that is indigenous to Hawaiʻi. (Connelly)
By foregrounding the entanglements between these institutional and cultural contexts, the studio will speculate on how the architecture of an encyclopedic museum can dissolve as a container of objects to become a constellation of relationships that reanimates artifacts of Hawaiian material culture within contemporary cultural practice, ecological recovery, and food sovereignty. Disembodied objects and forms will give way to a multiplicity of bodily relations and sensations (smell, sound, taste, touch, movement, etc.) grounded in Hawaiian culture and its connection to the natural environment. Likewise, the process of worldbuilding and its architecture will become more porous, local, and adaptive through the specific understanding of place in Hawaiʻi—opening up material, structural, and environmental possibilities.
A Voyage to Hawaiʻi
Hosted by the Honolulu-based non-profit, Hawaiʻi Nonlinear, the studio trip will offer an embodied understanding of place and land from a Native Hawaiian perspective, connecting archival objects and abstract concepts of material culture to the lived experience of the ahupuaʻa resource management system from mauka to makai (mountain to ocean). Conceived as a voyage from the East Coast of the U.S. to the Ko Hawaiʻi Pae ʻĀina (Hawaiian Islands), students will engage with practitioners, scholars, and community members involved in cultural and ecological recovery.
Recommended Summer Reading List:
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. (PDF)
Meyer, Manulani Aluli. “Holographic Epistemology: Native Common Sense.” Te Wānanga o Aotearoa (Māori University of New Zealand), New Zealand. (PDF)
Connelly, Sean. HAWAI‘I-FUTURES: Interventions for Island Urbanism. New Media, After Oceanic, 2010. https://hawaii-futures.com/
Hobart, Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani. Cooling the tropics: Ice, indigeneity, and Hawaiian refreshment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023.