Cooper Apartments

The Cooper Apartments, also known as Seaside Apartments, is a historic apartment building located at 421–425 Seaside Avenue in Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.. Constructed in 1939 during the Great Depression, the building is a pre-war garden court apartment in Waikiki that combines Streamline Moderne and the emerging tropical modern style with Asian and South American vernacular architecture. Designed by the Honolulu architectural firm of Dahl & Conrad, the Cooper Apartments exhibit characteristic features of tropical modern style blended with modest art deco-Asian decorative elements. The building's design includes white masonry walls, a low pitched hipped roof with overhanging eaves, large sliding windows with horizontal panes, and a stepped scalloped front wall. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2017. History and architecture The Cooper Apartments, also known as Seaside Apartments, is an example of the small garden court apartments prevalent in the Waikiki neighborhood of Honolulu before World War II. This two-story, concrete masonry edifice housed ten units arranged in an L-shape, centering around a paved, brick-walled courtyard which is accessible through a moon gate from the street. The architectural detailing extends to a cantilevered second-story lanai, corridor embellished with a wrought-iron railing exhibiting a foliate pattern, reaching upwards to the roof. The design also incorporates fret-work doors and large sliding windows to facilitate the flow of cooling trade winds into the individual units. The building is an example of the modern design ethos of the architectural firm Dahl & Conrad. Bjarne Dahl, the senior partner, graduated from the Chicago Technical School in 1918 and worked with California architect Julia Morgan for five years. He moved to Hawaii in 1926 as the supervising architect for Morgan's YWCA project, and decided to make Hawaii his home. After a series of professional engagements, Dahl established his own office in 1935. The following year, he formed a partnership with Conrad "Connie" Conrad, a graduate in architecture from the University of Southern California who arrived in Hawaii in 1934. Their partnership, which lasted until the end of 1941 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, resulted in apartments, residences, and commercial buildings. Their work reflected a regional offshoot of modernism. Many of their Waikiki buildings have been demolished. The building was owned and constructed by Francis Cooper. Cooper was the owner of Hawaiian Transportation & Rock Products Company, the firm which manufactured the 4” x 16” hollow concrete blocks used in the construction of the building. The blocks were made with crushed lava rock aggregate. In addition, the company produced the water-proof concrete tile roof used in the building's original construction. The Cooper Apartments is considered to be the best surviving example of a pre-war garden court apartment in Waikiki. Modern usage and preservation Following the war, the need for housing led to construction of three and four story buildings in other parts of the city, as lots were consolidated to accommodate the larger structures that increased urban density. Originally constructed with five studio apartments on each floor of the building, all the original interior walls and ceilings have been removed through multiple building-wide renovations, shifting the building's primary function from residential use to commercial. The building was placed on the US National Register of Historic Places on August 7, 2017 owing to its embodiment of the distinctive characteristics of the local architectural period. In 2023, the building was sold along with the neighboring historic property, Seaside Hawaiian Hostel, for a collective sum of $9.5 million. This transaction, reported on October 19, 2023, along with the neighboring Seaside Hawaiian Hostel for $9.5 million. See also National Register of Historic Places listings in Oahu References