by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Andrew Charles Yanoviak, AIA, is an environmental and codes specialist in Honolulu and a long-time advocate of the AIA. Yanoviak served on the national AIA Steering Committee for Building Performance and Regulations and has testified at ICC, UBC, BOCA, SBCCI, and CABO hearings. He is the president of Environmental Systems Planning & Design Consultants.

Education: I have a BArch from the Pennsylvania State University. That’s my basic fundamental background. Then I have a certificate of real estate development from the Wharton School. The reason for that is because when I got into architectural practice I found that the realtors were the ones who were shaping the form of high-rise towers—not only shaping them, but also designating where each tower was going on the site. It bothered me very much that that wasn’t a part of architectural work.

I’m also working on my doctorate in architecture at UH [the University of Hawaii], and I’m finishing up my dissertation. I’m going to turn that into a book for young people aspiring to go into architecture, and also it will be a book for their parents.

From Philadelphia to Hawaii: What happened was our children reached school age. I wanted to work in the center of the city, but I didn’t want to be involved in commuting to the suburbs. We happened to live right in the center of Philadelphia, and I just walked back and forth to work. So the suburbs weren’t very appealing because you can spend an hour-and-a-half to two [hours] commuting everyday, and the children needed to go outdoors. We had an apartment in Philadelphia, and it was all very lovely, but my wife had to take the children to Fairmount Park every day because children like to play in the sand.

We researched the world over a period of two years in terms of where to go. One Sunday, I had absolutely nothing to do. We had finished a major project, and my wife said: ”Why don’t you go to the Free Library and get some books on Hawaii?” I came back to Fairmount Park with seven books on Hawaii and asked her why she didn’t tell me about the place before. She said she was trying to, but my mind was crowded with other things. I came out here first and explored the place. I decided that I wasn’t going to come here if there wasn’t at least one high rise, and there was. I was able to translate many of the things that I learned in Philadelphia out here and I’ve worked on several high rises.

Service to AIA Honolulu: I started the environment committee for what was the Hawaii Society AIA. I founded that particular committee as an offshoot of our Codes and Professional Practice Committee, which I was chairing. I’ve been on the Codes and Professional Practice Committee now for almost 25 years, and I’ve chaired it for almost 20 years. The environment committee I chaired for three years and then handed it over to two reputable people. One of them is still involved as co-chair and the other person that is serving as co-chair came on the committee about six or seven years after it was founded. Back in those days, it took two solid years to get an environment committee approved by the chapter board of directors. That’s how reticent they were to move forward in that area.

Mentors: Oh, several people. We’ve had some great people here in Hawaii who have passed on. When I came here, I did several interviews and then made a decision to go with Val [Vladimir] Ossipoff. He passed on a couple of years ago, but we remained friends until the end. Another mentor of mine was Alfred Preis. Alfred started the very first state foundation on culture and arts in the nation, which is unusual for an architect. He wrote the legislation and everything. It was modeled after what Philadelphia had done in creating the first city foundation on culture and the arts. Alfred also designed the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. Alfred was the one who understood me the most when I first came here. The other one was Pete [George J.] Wimberley. They were the three. As it turned out, when I worked as a consultant on the H-3, which is an interstate highway, all three of those mentors actually were planning and design consultants to the state Department of Transportation, so it really worked out.

Tom Creighton, the former editor of Progressive Architecture, was another mentor of mine. He kept on telling everyone when I first came here that I was very articulate and should be teaching at the university. He was doing a course in architectural history and theory up there and he turned it over to me. I was working in Val’s office and Val said, “I’m going to make an exception in your case, but no one in my office has ever worked anywhere else while they’re working in my office. It’s one of my rules, and just because I’m allowing you to do this, no one else is going to do it after you.” It was a special privilege, but I had to agree to come into work on Saturdays. I said, “No problem. I’m used to that.”

Bucky [R. Buckminster Fuller] is another mentor of mine, but he’s way up there. Another mentor was Ed Bacon from Philadelphia. I’ve had a lot of mentors.

Yet another mentor of mine was Le Corbusier. My wife and I got married at Ronchamps. Architectural professors throughout the nation have said that that is the best work of architecture during the 20th century, and it is a musical instrument. A gift from the [abbot] was that he had 100 German students sing during our wedding ceremony, so it was fantastic. It was like being inside a violin or a cello.

Why did you become an architect? I became an architect because my father told everyone I would. When I was in ninth grade, he was in construction, and I was doing isometric drawings, which were supposed to be perspectives. I didn’t really know how to make an isometric, and I didn’t really know how to make a perspective according to all the rules. I learned that later, but they were three-dimensional drawings that he could follow in construction instead of trying to combine floor plans and elevations and sections. He had it all in 3-D, so he could count the concrete blocks and so forth. Everything was right there: all the framing members and everything, so that’s how I got started. Then I got into mechanical drawing and it just went on and on.

Everybody told me: “Yes, you’re definitely going to be an architect.” I made up my mind, but I didn’t want to let everyone know. It worked out okay.

On the Buckminster Fuller Challenge: I’m all for it. I just hope I have time to work on it. I have had several ideas already that I’ve passed over and it’s amazing the research materials I have in my files on the World Game and also trim tab, and I’ve had quite a bit of correspondence with Bucky. I do plan [on submitting for the challenge]. I have until the end of October. I hope I can do it because time is marching on rapidly and I’m involved in so many other things. It needs to be done. It’s a great concept.

Friendship with Bucky: Every time Bucky was coming out here, his secretary Miss [Shirley] Sharkey would get in touch with me and let me know, and I would have a few minutes with Bucky at the Honolulu Airport or wherever was possible, so that’s the way it worked. Bucky was a great architect, although many architects don’t recognize him as such. He was a beautiful thinker, always working.

He wore three watches back in those days: one for where he was, one for where he was going, and one for where he came from. At the Honolulu Airport one time he told me, “Andrew, I’m going to take a little nap.” The first time it happened I was really shook up. He said, “It’s going to last around five minutes. You’ll think I’m dead. Do not disturb me. I need to rest.” And then he tells me: “When I wake up, I don’t want to hear anything about anything we’ve been talking about. I only want to know three things: where I am, what time my next flight is, and what gate I go to. I don’t want to hear anything else from you. I’ll judge if I have enough time to talk to you.” But he was a great person.

Favorite way to relax: Should I tell you about my mistress? I play an accordion and my wife says that that’s my mistress. I’m currently working on Rossini’s Barber of Seville, the overture. It’s a lot of fun. Prior to that I was working on his Italian Girl in Algiers, the overture, and that was a lot of fun. I get involved in arranging those pieces as well for the instrument because the accordion is not a symphony, but it comes a little close. I have to do certain modifications. I’ve composed 24 pieces now of my own.

I didn’t play for 17 years while I was putting my children through private school and then college. I guess about three months before my oldest daughter got married she called me and said, “Dad, I want you to play the accordion at my wedding.” I went to the closet to get it out and the termites had a good chance at it first [and] they virtually ruined it. There was only one here on the islands that I could purchase new, and that was a Hohner. I still have it, but now I have four others as well. I do manage to spend time playing it every evening. I try to squeeze it in somehow because I need to do it. It starts coming to my head around that time. It’s like Frank Lloyd Wright said, music and architecture intertwine.

Most important work: It’s something that I call “UNIVERSE: CITY 2000,” which is a take-off on the word “University”: 2000. I actually came up with this concept in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but it’s a whole new direction for designing and planning cities where you don’t take up so much of the landscape. You don’t devour streams in the process or destroy watersheds. The university system with research, education, and community service is a three-pronged multi-functional entity, and the same is true of the city. A city has three major functions: government, university, and industry. Government we all think of first because we all have to pay the taxes and we all get the benefit of this. There’s always university involved. It’s another major function or component of a city, and so is industry. It all forms tetrahedral triangular relationships, so I designed a city on that basis and inverted it because there are three classical ideals.

In mankind, ever since the beginning of civilizations, innate and inborn within all of us are truth, goodness, and beauty. If you line up those three classical ideals with the reason for a city to exist in terms of its components, universities are supposed to be involved in the function of truth, not deception. Industry is supposed to be involved in beauty, not in environmental blight or ugliness. Government is supposed to be involved in goodness, not corruption. So that was another rationale for me from the standpoint of design for inverting the city. But we have to take care of Mother Earth, and so my “UNIVERSE: CITY 2000” concept is intentionally oriented in that particular direction.

Advice for young architects: Everybody says study hard, work hard. It’s true of most professions, but I think one of the most important things that I learned early on at Penn State was to develop a philosophy about life because architects are designing for people. Don’t only study buildings. Study people. Get to know how people react to certain statements psychologically. Study how people react psychologically in small conferences and also sociologically in larger groups. And, learn from experiences like the World Trade Center because we need to learn. Architects make mistakes just like others in professional life.