The Howard Hughes Corporation is no newcomer to the master plan. Since the 1950s, the company has overseen the development or expansion of some of the country’s best communities, including Summerlin, Nevada (named after Hughes’s grandmother, Jean Amelia Summerlin); The Woodlands, Texas, which boasts 143 parks and 212 miles of nature trails; and Columbia, Maryland, 50 this year, celebrated for its social and economic diversity and where mailboxes arranged in groups, rather than on individual houses, are meant to encourage inter-neighbor mixing (and do). But something was missing. And that something was a beach.
Planned communities have a reputation for being aesthetically restrictive prefabricated design, with people telling you what color you can paint your house. Beach towns, meanwhile, have never been particularly known for their forward-thinking architecture. But 60-acre Ward Village, in a former Honolulu warehouse district, was made for design nerds—and beach bums. Five mixed-use towers, within walking distance of the Ala Moana Bowls and Kewalo Basin, are designed by some of the country’s best architects. It also presents the first Hawaii project for most of them, including Richard Meier, Peter Bohlin, and Jeanne Gang, with interiors by Tony Ingrao. The Vladimir Ossipoff-designed 1960s modernist IBM building, meanwhile, serves as a sort of town center, renovated by Woods Bagot to be heavy in local materials, like lava stone, and feature traditional Hawaiian motifs on the floors and walls both inside and out.