Greg Warner’s contemporary designs are rooted in his island upbringing and his fascination with one of Hawai‘i’s most renowned midcentury architects
As a student at an all-boys private high school on the Big Island, Greg Warner found himself drawn to the chapel on campus, where he would often retreat to sketch and draw for art class. The building was simple: raw concrete walls, ohia tree trunks as supporting columns, a rugged board-on-board ceiling made of natural timber—“very modern but rustic,” Warner recalls. “That was the genesis of my understanding about what architecture was, whether I knew I was going to be in architecture or not.” He didn’t know it at the time, but that chapel and the rest of the buildings that made up the campus were designed by Vladimir Ossipoff, whose modernist work literally shaped the Hawaiian landscape—and who would ultimately become a guiding light on Warner’s own journey as an architect.
