Every design element of the Hawaii State Capitol in front of you is intentional, from its cone-shaped chambers to the reflecting pool at its base. Completed in 1969, the building was designed by architect John Carl Warnecke with a philosophy of embedding the islands' identity into every structural choice. The two cone-shaped legislative chambers represent the volcanoes that created Hawaii.
The forty-ring reflecting pool that surrounds the building represents the Pacific Ocean. The forty-six columns that ring the building represent the royal palms of the islands. And the open-air design, without a traditional dome, reflects Hawaii's relationship with sky and trade winds.
On August 21, 1959, Hawaii became the fiftieth state of the United States, the last to join the union — and it did so by a wide margin: the statehood vote passed with about ninety-four percent approval among Hawaii's residents. But statehood was contested. Native Hawaiians who remembered the illegal overthrow of 1893 and the forced annexation of 1898 had complicated feelings about joining a nation that had taken so much from them.
Those tensions have never fully resolved, and the Hawaiian sovereignty movement remains active today.