Blog

WATG's Honolulu office is in the midst of a very special partnership with a non-profit community organization, Te Taki Tokelau, Inc. Our role has been to take the first steps toward helping the group build or acquire a permanent community center and language school.

Tokelau is comprised of four coral atolls north of Samoa with a total land area of 3.9 square miles. While there are only about 10,000 Tokelauans in the world, about 1,000 live in Hawai'i.  The majority of them are here because of their forcible removal in 1953.  With no right of return to their homeland, the Tokelauan community in Hawai'i is committed to preserving its culture and language and needs a dedicated space for their operations.

Members of WATG's Honolulu office began  by helping the community start to imagine exactly what was needed.  Since most funders want to see what will be built before they award money, WATG was asked to produce initial concepts, rough building plans, and a sense of the architectural character.

While the designers at WATG are masters of creating projects that heighten the experience of a unique location, this process was different. Our challenge was to imagine a building that could transport people from an environment in Hawaii to a remote coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific where life is wholly dependent on the ocean and reef networks and whose highest point is a mere 2 meters above sea level.  In the islands of Tokelau the concepts of sustainability and community are not buzzwords; they are about survival.

We had 23 people donate their lunch hour for an in-house charrette. The schemes ranged from large-scale complexes to small, movable buildings (one even included a volcano).

Ten days after this first charrette, six WATG designers and their families spent a Saturday afternoon with the students, teachers, and elders of the Te Taki community.  We were greeted with traditional song and dance and deep appreciation from the Tokelauan families.  We ultimately ended up with three different schemes that used pieces from many of the initial charrette ideas: a smaller, easily-phased building; a bigger, more iconic building; and a more expansive and ambitious master plan should Te Taki encounter a larger piece of land available for community groups.

Over the next few weeks we will provide Te Taki with more refined options as well as some rough cost estimates provided by a local cost estimating firm that has donated its services.  This will allow them to have an accurate starting point to begin looking at potential sites and funding. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a longer relationship and a way for us to give back to the broader Polynesian community whose home we share here in the middle of the Pacific.  For those of us involved, the experience deepened our understanding of what Aloha truly is. Stay tuned for more updates as this process moves forward.