File:Senior Core Building, President William McKinley High School, King Street, Ala Moana, Honolulu, HI - 52263983341.jpg

English: Added to McKinley High School in 1939, this Art Deco-style building, known as the Senior Core Building, was designed by Vladimir Ossipoff, and financed with assistance from the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration (WPA). The building features stucco cladding, a hipped red tile roof, decorative exposed rafter ends, steel pivot and single-hung windows, open-air lanais on the exterior faces of the building oriented to the south and east, decorative terra cotta geometric screens with decorative terra cotta panels below, decorative cast stone friezes over the entrances to the building featuring motifs from traditional Hawaiian lore designed by Margarite Blasingame, balconies at the western ends of the building’s two classroom wings, exterior staircases, and terra cotta spandrel panels with terra cotta decorative elements depicting various fruits that can be grown in Hawaii. The school was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The campus was expanded in the mid-20th Century with the addition of classroom buildings, a vocational building, cafeteria, and gymnasium, all built in the Modern style, with the cafeteria being especially notable for its folded cross-gable roof and large curtain walls on the exterior, the Multi-Purpose Classroom Building G for its butterfly roof, and the two-story Classroom Building F for its angled slender concrete columns at the exterior lanais, angled metal railings, and “floating” exterior concrete staircase. The 1920s buildings on the campus were rehabilitated by the State of Hawaii under the direction of architect Leon Noe, with the rehabilitation of the Marion McCarrell Scott Auditorium being completed in 1998, and being carried out under the direction of Peter Hsi. In 2019, the Senior Core Building, built in 1939, was rehabilitated under the direction of MASON Architects, Inc. in two phases to allow classes to continue uninterrupted in the building during work, which saw the building’s original windows restored, the exterior terra cotta and trim repaired, and landscaping rehabilitated. The project won an award from the Historic Hawaii Foundation. Today, McKinley High School continues to provide high-quality education to the students of Honolulu, housed on a beautiful campus of historic buildings arranged around a beautiful landscaped quadrangle off King Street near the heart of Honolulu.