Hawaiian Architecture - Mission

Mission

Traditional Hawaiian architecture experienced its first revolution with the arrival of Congregational missionary Hiram Bingham. Presbyterian religious families followed suit and settled in the major port towns of Honolulu and Lāhainā. Upon their arrival, they erected the first frame houses in Hawaiʻi, employing a style derived from the simple Congregational meeting-houses and farmhouse vernacular buildings of New England.

They were simple homes with high-pitched roofs and overlapping weatherboards called clapboards. The simplicity and unassuming character of these structures were derived from the puritan ideals—that plainness was a virtue of true Christians. As years passed, the New England style morphed into a distinctive style called Hawaiian mission architecture. New England methods and materials were replaced by methods and materials readily available to Hawaiians.

Hawaiian mission architecture moved away from construction solely using wood and experimented with the use of coral blocks hewn from the reefs of the Hawaiian Islands. Coral seemed plentiful and were comparable to bricks used for construction in New England. When Queen Kaʻahumanu converted to the Congregational denomination of Christianity, she commissioned the construction of a major church in what is now downtown Honolulu. Kawaiahaʻo Church is one of the longest-lasting relics of Hawaiian mission architecture using coral blocks. Today, Kawaiahaʻo Church stands adjacent to the Mission Houses Museum, surviving examples of Hawaiian mission architecture using wood.

At the same time that Congregational missionaries went about the construction of Kawaiahaʻo Church, French Catholic missionaries of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary under the leadership of Bishop Louis Maigret introduced their own version of Hawaiian mission architecture. The difference was that their Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace project was based on simple French church architecture in the basilica form. The regional twist, like the adaptation that Congregational missionaries embraced, was the use of coral blocks from the reefs of Ala Moana and Kakaʻako. What the Picpus religious order succeeded in doing was creating the first instance of Hawaiian architecture based on continental European styles as opposed to the American puritan styles imported by the Protestants. The Picpus Fathers opened the doors to European architectural styles—classical, baroque, renaissance, rococo and neoclassical — that would become uniquely Hawaiian in the hands of local builders.