Charles William Dickey


Charles William “C.W.” Dickey was an American architect famous for developing a distinctive style of Hawaiian architecture. He was known not only for designing some of the most famous buildings in Hawaii—such as the Alexander & Baldwin Building, Halekulani Hotel, Kamehameha Schools campus buildings—but also for influencing a cadre of notable successors, including Hart Wood, Cyril Lemmon, Douglas Freeth, Roy Kelley, and Vladimir Ossipoff.

Biography

Dickey was born in Alameda, California. His maternal grandfather, William P. Alexander, was an early missionary to Hawaii. His mother was Anne Alexander, whose brother Samuel Thomas Alexander founded Alexander & Baldwin with Henry Perrine Baldwin who was married to his aunt Emily Alexander. His father was Charles Henry Dickey. He grew up in Haikū on Maui, but he returned to California for schooling. After finishing high school in Oakland, California, he obtained a B.A. in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894, then worked with Clinton Briggs Ripley and E.A.P. Newcomb in Honolulu, Hawaii, before returning to open his own firm in Oakland. He died in Honolulu, Hawaii

Work

His initial designs in Hawaii were eclectic. Influences of the then popular Richardsonian Romanesque style can be seen in Punahou School's Pauahi Hall, the Bishop Estate Building on Merchant Street, the Irwin Block on Nuuanu Street, and Progress Block on Fort Street in Downtown Honolulu, the last now occupied by Hawaii Pacific University. One of his finest early designs was the Italianate Stangenwald Building on Merchant Street. Many of these are contributing properties to the Merchant Street Historic District.
Even while in Oakland, Dickey continued to design for clients in Hawaii. In 1920, he reopened an office in Honolulu, in partnership with Hart Wood, and then returned for good in 1925. This time he felt a stronger need to adapt his buildings to the local environment, declaring in 1926: "Hawaiian architecture is a type distinctive to itself and Mediterranean styles must be adapted to fit local conditions before they are at all suited to the islands." He favored larger open spaces and fewer walls, to allow the tradewinds to circulate, and roofs with projecting eaves in order to keep rain out without having to close the windows.
The shape of the roof and the projecting eaves became such a Dickey trademark that it became known locally as the "Dickey roof": a hip roof with a "double-pitch", that is, a shallower pitch at the eaves, as can be seen on the house he constructed in 1926. So many other architects have adapted this roof style over the years that it has now become a stereotypical feature of a "Hawaiian sense of place."
During the 1920s, Dickey designed guest cottages in Waikiki for the Halekulani Hotel that attempted to replicate the charm of Hawaiian grass houses. In 1930, he completed the hotel's Honeymoon Cottage, and in 1931 its main building. In 1931, he designed the Immigration Station at Honolulu Harbor while a young architect from California and new to Honolulu, Val Ossipoff, was working for Dickey. He designed the Waikiki Theatre in 1936. In 1940, he designed another new hotel at the edge of the Kīlauea volcano for Greek businessman George Lycurgus called the Volcano House.

Gallery

Family tree