The Feudal Facsimile: Revitalizing Makiki Christian Church via Ecclesiastical Annex

Abstract

As urban populations skew younger and increasingly secular, religious institutions face declining congregations and rising maintenance costs that destabilize the future of their historic structures. To preserve their venerable structures, many churches resort to high-density housing as a default financial expedient. Yet, such ad hoc apartment annexes paralyze the church’s civic and communal agency, as their detached expressions and programmatic uniformity undermines the very inclusionary ethos the congregation seeks to sustain. Makiki Christian Church (MCC), America’s largest Japanese Christian church, sited in Honolulu, Hawai’i, embodies this tension. As an architectural facsimile of a Japanese feudal castle, the church is a cultural artifact of the 19th-century Japanese American diaspora rendered through nostalgia, symbolism, and what Robert Venturi coins the “decorated shed.” As MCC struggles to discern its fate amidst declining tithes and an ailing infrastructure, this thesis interrogates the prevailing model of church annexes not as an act of static conservation of nostalgia via private housing stock, but as a reminder of heritage through urban revitalization. The proposal repositions the church through the integration of religious and secular program. Multi-use spaces, micro-climates, and public-programming enables the annex to mediate its interior–exterior relationship with its local community. Anchored by a community gymnasium, the annex introduces a mixed framework of housing and rehabilitative social services that extends the institution’s social agency. The Feudal Facsimile re-frames the preservation of religious architecture as an active, site-specific negotiation, one that constructs new symbiotic relationships between memory, use, and collective life within the Pacific urban context.