Vladimir Ossipoff
Vladimir ‘Val’ Nicholas Ossipoff () was an American architect best known for his works in the state of Hawai'i. Biography Early life and schooling Ossipoff was born November 25, 1907, in Vladivostok, a part of the Russian Empire. Because his father, Nicholas Ossipoff, who was an officer with the Imperial Russian Army under Czar Nicholas II, became a military attaché in the Russian embassy in Japan, his family moved in 1909 to Tokyo where Val Ossipoff grew up. Before he was 10, he traveled between Russia and Japan four or five times with his family and was in Petrograd during the Revolution of 1917. Prior to moving to the United States in 1923, he attended Yokohama's St. Joseph's College and the Tokyo Foreign School, which are international schools for children, and was fluent in Russian, Japanese, and English. His family was at their summer home near Mt. Fuji when the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 occurred. Immediately after the Great Tokyo Earthquake, he, his siblings, and his mother emigrated from Kobe to the United States by ship which passed through Yokohama and Honolulu along the way. Prior to leaving for the United States, he visited the construction of Tokyo's Second