ABSTRACT Shortly after the former U.S. Territory became the fiftieth state in 1959, the firm of Minoru Yamasaki and Associates (MYA) won a competition to design a new housing project in downtown Honolulu. Queen Emma Gardens, as it came to be known, was an attempt by the Detroit-based firm to assimilate U.S.-based late modernism to a tropical climate. Yamasaki, an avid golfer, enjoyed Hawaiian vacations and pursued commissions on O`ahu, chief among them apartment buildings and an office tower, along with unbuilt proposals for hotels and shopping centres. These opportunities came as a direct result of a westward movement among mainland U.S. citizens, the architect’s Japanese heritage, and a newfound obsession with the island chain, but such developments added to significant pressures facing local housing market, raising issues of race, identity, and the displacement of the urban poor in favor of sleek modernist housing deemed “appropriate” by city officials and funded by federal initiatives. The MYA-designed Hawaiian projects illustrate how one design firm’s formal and technical ambitions change over time, largely in response to shifting desires of clients, an evolving construction industry, and a growing tourist market, all of which come together in the development of a post-war itinerant architecture.