written by: graham hart
the work of philip fisk
One of our first residential projects as Kokomo was a remodel of a mid-century house that a couple in Kailua had recently purchased (check it out here). This was around 2019, recently after the Docomomo National Symposium that I co-chaired, and Brandon and I were asked to give a talk at the Charlot House for the Charlot Foundation annual meeting. The Charlot House was designed by Hawaii artist Jean Charlot with architect Pete Wimberly in 1958. Because of my work with documenting mid century residential architecture in Hawaii, and because of Brandon’s connection with WATG (Pete Wimberly’s former practice, which now focuses on large scale resort and hospitality projects internationally), the two of us were asked to speak to the history of the house, its design, and how it fits into Pete Wimberly’s larger body of work. It was an interesting moment to reflect on Wimberly’s residential work, and the few houses of his that are still around that we’ve had the opportunity to go see in person. The event was open to the public, and many people came just to see the Charlot House, which is typically closed off from visitors. After our talk we were approached by a wonderful woman who told us about her recently purchased home, its mid-century bones, and how she wanted to make some updates and changes, but wanted to do it in the most respectful and inconspicuous way possible. A project that sounded intriguing to us, and inline with both our interests and knowledge in that era of design, but also philosophically, as the new homeowner wanted to increase the indoor-outdoor connectivity and loved the way the Charlot House used its connective spaces to a maximum.
Shortly after, we visited the Kailua home and walked through the client’s initial thoughts: A larger kitchen, an outdoor bar on the lanai, and some rearranging of some awkward interior spaces. The house was originally an L-shaped, low-sloped ranch house: tongue-and-groove redwood single wall construction, exposed post and beam structure, and large sliding glass doors that connected the ample living room to a long exterior lanai. Unfortunately, at some point in the 60’s an addition was added on, clearing off one bay of the existing house and adding a sunroom, large office/guest room, and additional bathroom, making the house more of a C-shape in plan. Luckily, it was built in a similar manner, post-and-beam and redwood single-wall, but unfortunately, for some reason, they decided to change the structural grid and also made the addition much taller with a competing roof line. The two halves matched in material only, but were very incongruent functionally, spatially, and structurally. The other parameter was that the new homeowner wanted to expand the existing kitchen, which was grossly undersized and cut off from the rest of the house compared to today’s standards, in the direction of the 60’s addition. This meant reconciling different structural grids, different ceiling and roof slopes, and reconfiguring the awkward remainders that this left. Expanding the kitchen in this manner made the most sense in keeping the parts of the original 1950’s house as original as possible, but it wasn’t the easiest way. In the end, the new design is quite spacious, functional, aesthetic, and is a good marriage between mid century modern and contemporary. The kitchen wasn’t the only focus of this project, however, just the largest significant impact on the original design. By the end, nearly every part of the house had been touched. From restoration, to replacement, to reconfiguring, and also making the house better suited to its climate. Deeper roof overhangs, larger covered spaces, more openings, and a new cantilevered roof that shades a massive sliding door from Southern exposure and is completely hidden from the interior view. A challenge in itself, but worked out perfectly. Lots of little changes, that hopefully are unnoticeable to the unaware, but ultimately make the house more livable, and reconcile bad design decisions of previous additions (there was also a semi-attached garage addition that happened in the 80’s that was built within the setback that caused all kinds of headaches for us as were going through permitting, but that’s a different story).
This was a great project to start with, and in some ways, laid the groundwork for many of our later Kokomo projects. But even though this house had some great character and classic mid century Hawaii elements to it, we never knew anything about its history. There were no original blueprints or drawings. It had changed owners several times before the current owners bought it, and though there were some custom elements to it, it looked like it could have just been a 1950s Kailua track home. There were a few other houses on the block with similar rooflines, but none that were identical, so we had nothing really to go off of.
Fast forward several years later, and we get a call from another couple who own a house up on Roundtop/Tantalus along Forest Ridge Way (check out that project here). The wife of the couple had grown up on Forest Ridge, across the street from their current home, and her parents still live there. Forest Ridge is idyllic in many ways. Most of Tantalus and Roundtop are isolated homes tucked away from the road, up in the jungle, but Forest Ridge feels like the street we all wish we could have grown up on. We’ve had the opportunity to work on a few houses up on the mountain, and it's a different lifestyle than that of houses down by the beach. Dense vegetation, cool mountain air, bumpy roads, wild pigs, the smell of rain and dewy earth, its “mountain living.” One of the few places where fireplaces in Hawaii are a common sight, and where every house is on water catchment. There’s a roughness to the architecture up there. An artifact of not only the climate and context, but also the zoning and resourcefulness of the dwellers. Tantalus and Roundtop are zoned Preservation, meaning rules are much stricter than typical residential neighborhoods, and getting anything permitted, making upgrades or changes, or building, growing, or even fixing a house is much more inhibited. Which means that most houses are retrofitted and structures repurposed in creative ways. Some houses are very patchwork heavy, with a mix-match of materials and band-aids that prop up and prolong the lives of these structures which were probably built cheaply to begin with. But, because no new buildings could be built, or it's extremely difficult to make drastic changes to existing structures, many houses are left in original condition to when they were first built. And many of these were built in the years from pre-war to post-war, all with the earmarks of their regional character.
This house on Forest Ridge was an original Philip Fisk design. Original plans existed, and from what we could tell, the house started off as a one room cabin that was then added onto some years later with an additional two bedrooms and a bathroom. Both portions of the house were designed by Fisk, but the house has the size and program to be somewhere between a weekend home and a cabin for a family to stay in for extended periods. That is to say, it’s modest in size, but makes up for in views and privacy. This house also had some incongruent modifications to it over the years that seemed to make it harder to live in, so our scope of work was not only to fix some of these spaces, but also increase the amount of living space for the family. A new open kitchen design fixes the formerly bifurcated kitchen, extending an engawa out from the living room allows for floor to ceiling windows towards the view, a reconfigured bedroom suite adds a bit more square footage under the existing roofline, but also opens up the room to expansive views, but the biggest change is a repositioned entryway that sites between the existing house and a new living room addition. The intent is that it sympathetically responds to the character of the original Fisk design, but gives a bit more breathing room to the primary spaces.
But what were the original characters of Fisk’s design, and who was Fisk? I had heard the name quite a bit, but couldn’t name a single one of his buildings in Hawaii off hand, so I had to do some digging. Interestingly, Fisk was a key up-and-comer in the post-war era, along with Ossipoff and others. In fact, Fisk was classmates with Vladimir Ossipoff, Tommy Perkins, and Allen Johnson at UC Berkeley. Ossipoff came out first, invited Johnson, who in turn invited Perkins, and Fisk followed a few years later. The four of them, along with Viennese architect, Alfred Preis, hui’d up in the years after the war to go after some of the larger projects in a time when they were trying to build their own independent practices. Together, as “Associated Architects,” they would design educational buildings, civic buildings, and whole subdivisions. It was a time for these architects that I like to refer to as their “boy band era”, as they weren’t the master architects that we know them as today, but early, young graduates, starting their careers. Sometimes you needed to act like you were a big fancy architecture firm with many names on the door in order to get the bigger projects. Once they had enough of those under their belts, they went off in their own directions. Only Johnson and Perkins kept working together till the end of their careers.
There was another time that I had heard the name Fisk, and that was from Harry Seckel’s book, Hawaiian Residential Architecture, written in 1952 which showcased several exemplary residential projects from the era. In the book, Fisk's work is placed on a pedestal with his peers as being perfect representations of this idea Seckel was workshopping, called “environmental living.” Seckel’s thought wasn’t that material, climate, culture, or any other myriad of contextual factors was going to make a pervasive architectural style for Hawaii, but instead it was the way that people lived in Hawaii that was going to make consistency. A lifestyle that centered around living with the outdoors, embracing nature, dressing for a perpetual summer, and the easy-going laid-back lifestyle of the island inhabitants. Well designed architecture in Hawaii would reflect this. Fisk's work, and the work of Seckel, Ossipoff, Johnson, Perkins, and Preis, all reflect this.
So this house on Forest Ridge Drive was then painted in the context of Fisk’s other residential projects that had been published, and in the context of all the work that was coming out of Hawaii by him and his peers of that time period. Work that was built of redwood single-wall construction, post-and-beam structures, large expanses of glass and sliding walls and doors, a modernist rationale, but most importantly, a focus on indoor-outdoor living. Again, we were becoming familiar with Fisk’s work, but wondered why we didn’t know more about him.
After a deep dive on online newspaper databases, a more complex story unraveled. One of the first and most interesting articles on Fisk was from 1957, which had a whole page dedicated to Fisk’s design for his own home in Kaneohe. A steel framed house - very rare for Hawaii, with open web joists - also very rare for residential architecture, but presented as a house that was “framed for living.” An open plan where spaces are generous and blend from one to the other, uninhibited by walls or columns thanks to the long spanning steel frames. Lots of indoor-outdoor spaces, very much inline with the Environmental Living ethos, complete with photos of lanais littered with Walter Lamb chairs. But also, a space with spectacular views of Kaneohe Bay. The house is situated right on the water in part of the Kaneohe Yacht Club development, not only beautiful, but also convenient, as Fisk was an avid sailor. The next articles one can find of Fisk, are about his achievements in competitive sailboat racing in the Bay. Photographs of him and his family setting up sailboats in the water, or his racing team on the Victoria, a “Lightning” class boat, competing in various races, are scattered throughout the local papers from 1954 to 58.
On September 15th, 1958, the story took a turn. Fisk, 51 at the time, though an avid sailor, had a heart condition, and during the annual Kaneohe Yacht Club Race, collapsed from a heart attack. Onlookers from the shore were reported as saying that as soon as they saw Mr. Fisk’s boat had slowed down, they knew exactly what was going on. The 19-foot boat was then towed to the dock and Fisk was pronounced dead by a local doctor. His wife and sailing partner were on board when this all happened, and he was survived by his wife and their daughter, Victoria Fisk, for whom the boat was named after.
This tragic end gave context as to why Fisk’s body of work isn’t as well known, or as numerous as his peers. 1958, was early in all of their careers. For comparison, Ossipoff had only finished the Liljestrand House in 1952, the IBM Building wasn’t until 1962, and Thurston Chapel wasn’t until 1967. Ossipoff’s office would continue on a few years after his death in 1999, and Johnson and Perkins worked till their late years as well. Fisk’s body of work was literally cut short by tragedy, and we are left to wonder what other great masterpieces Hawaii was deprived of.
In this research about Fisk, who he was, what other projects he had done, and what else could be found out about him in the archives of newspaper articles, we came across an ad from 1956 for a new subdivision in Kailua. Advertised as “A New Dimension in Living” the “Hale Kai Homes” (House by-the-sea) were architect designed homes boasting maximum indoor-outdoor living. The first model home, not photographed, but represented with a hand-drawn perspective showing a low-pitched ranch house, with sliding glass doors, a large rear lanai, and a L-shaped plan, was the spitting image of our first Kokomo project. In fact, it was the same Kailua house - minus the 60s sunroom addition, and minus the 80s semi-detached garage addition. In this rendering a lifestyle was pictured: a woman stands in her yard walking through her garden (where a pool now sits). A swing set is set off to one side of the yard, and a mixture of palms and bushes frame landscaped areas around the house. A house that is centered around environmental living, around domestic life, around family, and around living with Hawaii, as much as in it. A good framework for Kokomo to start its practice, and a great legacy for Fisk to have left behind.