 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to another exciting episode of Human Human Architecture, broadcasting live here from our exotic tropical paradise of Honolulu, Hawaii. And today's show is, as promised, a follow-up on the trilogy of the three shows about the architecture of UH Minoa with the solar brown. In the last show that we called the fall and potential re-rise, we're promising to do a follow-up on what we call the exceptions of the rule of, unfortunately, not so good things having been built ever since the 70s. And that great exception to the rule is our today's guest, John Hara. Welcome, John. Thank you. And his daughter and partner, business partner, Mayumi Dao. So hi, Mayumi. How are you? Thank you for being here with us. And let's jump right in and show the slide number one, which is me snapping a picture of you guys in your office here, which we can see that you guys are old school, which I call also new school, which is I encourage my emerging generation to be heavy on physical model making. And here are the models. And we want to jump in. We want to show the three projects that we identified a little bit more in depth. And they're actually from the late 70s and the 80s and of the very early 90s. So let's start in the 70s. Slide number two, please, which is exactly 77. And John, explain a little bit to us what we see. Yeah, what we're looking at now is a diagram of the proposed east-west center at the bottom of Holmes Hall, designed by Skid Rowans and Merrill, and at the upper side of the east-west center building is designed by Ion Pei. The building we designed is right opposite of Holmes Hall and it's on axis of Dole Avenue, which is indicated by that line going into the building. This also shows the relationship of what we're doing Burns Hall to the other buildings on campus. At the top of the drawing is what was then called the biomedical building. By Edward Jarrell Stone. Yeah, by Edward Stone, sure. And we're saying this is something that hardly anyone does these days anymore, this sort of figure of ground, calibrating of axes and of relationships and configurations. So that's very classy. And based upon that, you went a step further. And if you go to the next slide, please, also did physical modeling and studies about spaces and places, right? So here you can see that relationship again between the SOM engineering school to the left and the gateway dorm at the very bottom, which we also did a show about. And then as you indicated, the Hall and Manoa up there as part of the east-west center, which you told me this interesting anecdote about, actually, let's go back one decade early about the mid-60s and you at Penn, please share that part. Oh, yeah. So in some of my classmates from Philadelphia went to work for IMP in New York City. And we had these incredible discussions. They were working on a project in Honolulu, and what they were talking about in the office was, well, let's hurry up and get this project out of the office. It said, Honolulu, nobody is ever going to go there. Well, these were the fresh post-statehood days, right, where it was still exotic and far away. Yeah. And it was the beginning of IMP's development of the precast concrete facades. Amazing. And let's go to the next slide, which shows the model a little bit more from the side, where I find it intriguing that you were actually paying as much attention to the detail of the massing of the neighboring building as much as to your building. So it's way different than sort of the very narcissist sort of me, me, me sort of attitude that we have so often these days. It's more about the others, the others, and how do I basically fit in? Well, it's also very important that what you build is a relationship to other structures. That has to work as well. And let's have one more view of that beautiful model here, next image here. Also want to recognize how you built that topo model, that topography. So you went through the effort in showing the mountains, right, which is... And the mountain was a very important part of the composition, and as we'll see probably a little later, the work of art was generated, I think, by the fact that the mountain comes down, and we'll discuss that a little bit. And if you want to, we can discuss it now, because we bring up the next image in there, it shows. Sure. Work of art was originally conceived of by the state, Hawaii State Foundation on the Culture and the Arts, which is one percent of the construction value. And I spoke to the director of that time, Alfred Price, and then I suggested that instead of a piece, a sculptural piece, it'd be nice to have something which would relate more to the environment, such as the garden. A couple months later, I get a call from Mr. Price, and I said, someone of Gucci is coming to town, and we set up meetings for you to discuss with him what the work should be. And that's precisely what Mr. Noguchi did. Well, we built this model for him, actually, but he wanted to recall Hila Ridge in the back coming down to these mountains of rock, and becoming a rock garden, very much in the Japanese kind of tradition. It was really an incredible experience. Unfortunately, because of the discussions between the State Department and the University of Hawaii regarding money, it was never executed. What a shame. Let's go to the next slide. Nevertheless, again, one could always add it, right? Yes, yes. Because you set the stage for it, as we can see, the setback of the building is basically giving space, too, for that. It was also upon access with the road, as one of the earlier drawing shows. Exactly, yes. And talking sort of value engineering, let's go to the next page here. Something that Detective DeSoto and Martin were already identifying when we saw the working model in your office, and then comparing it to this is actually a picture, I believe, from the Kobayashi book Building a Rainbow that we took from there. So the comparison you can see is something more rich on the right side of the model and something sort of missing on the left side, which is some of the breeze soles, right? We're very much concerned about the environment, except those days it was not called sustainability, it was called ecology. We should call it like that again, please. And the breeze sole was certainly part of it. Protecting all of the fenestration from direct sunlight, which is now, you know, people do it naturally, I think. And the kind person you are, you were defending the client when I was starting to accuse the client of having been a bad client. You said, no, actually the client was good, the university, but the construction manager who was in charge... Yeah, the construction manager was in charge of bringing the building in for his budgeted costs. And there was an irony to that right at the end. Sure, you could certainly take off the breeze sole and save a lot of money. They saved a lot of money. They saved too much money. The cost of the building came in under the budget. Like a million? Did you save a million? Something like that. So I think we should make a claim to bring the movers back. Yeah, I think we should try to do that. All right, well, let's move on to the next page and also to the next project, because this is getting us into the 80s, which, you know, many of us, if we think about the other arts of music and even like car, and this is probably the low point in American car manufacturing in many ways where cars were not made to last anymore. Everything was about the look and put together cheaply. The Reagan era, never mind as well. So, I mean, and you probably very remarkably, when DeSoto went out there for his field work and in gathering information about the show, this project of yours, without us shame on us knowing who did it and what it is, he immediately said, wow, I like this building and I agree and that we did our research and found out it's your project. So tell us about what project it is and, again, your thoughts behind. Well, again, our concern was how our project relates to other existing buildings around the site. And then the upper corner is a biomedical building and the lower corner are two high-rises that were designed and the decision was not to compete with those two taller buildings. So this is a laboratory building, you know, a wonderful client and the thinking here was to separate the office space, which is quite different from activities in the laboratory spaces. The courtyard serves as a function of being the facade for the offices and all the offices are in the inner ring of the courtyard. The laboratories are on the outer ring which does not require light or air beneath that kind of requirement. Very clever and go to the next page, we can see this and I want to just say this is the emerging generation, this is the old school, this is the ink on vellum and then you did these I remember because we worked like that as well so I'm part of that generation our kids don't know this anymore everything comes out of the machine instantly but these are and then also the shadow lines are beautifully inked on so it really sort of gives us a sense of the plasticity of the building. The V-Logs printing which they don't do anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so go to the plan, the next page here which again Yeah, the plan shows the offices in front of the courtyard so we were with the laboratories being in the back and you know, it worked out very well. It still does, I think it worked out very well. Absolutely. The next page is just the top floor and we see on the very top right we see this sort of interesting in the very rectangularity of the whole configuration we see this one sort of breaking out of that rule sort of more organic kind of curvy line and if we go to the next page we can see what that is then in reality right. And the reason for that was to somehow try to acknowledge the fact that this is next to biomedical building or opening up that vista as well. Mm-hmm. And I would say you know while it is truly a very sort of a zeitgeist gesture I'm thinking of New York 5 and Richard Meyer and Guathemey and Siegel in their you know, good heydays I'm seeing that by at the same time some of their buildings are still dated that you know you clearly think about the 80s like okay but here both sort of zeitgeisty and being timeless move to the next image here and again vegetation plays a big role and as you were saying Mayumi that your father is often using and allowing in fact inviting vegetation right. Yes, he loves trees. But on the other hand the idea of maintenance and that's equally as important with landscaping, you know, landscaping must be maintained and the university is always to go on that. It's notorious and not wanting to do maintenance. Next slide to that regard here this is a picture you provided from when the vegetation was small and you can see that the building is doing a job because the glass facade of the fenestration is pushed back so you can see the structure doing a job in shading, right. Then on the next page is a picture I took which I love at Jungli because I come from Germany where you studied and worked and we were just talking in Switzerland and France and you said we're going to talk English or maybe Swiss German or all the languages that you picked up on your way and sort of obviously here now the typologies on campus here identified courtyards as a very good theme that in fact at that time in the 80s the university has given up on because most of these horrible hermetic buildings don't do this anymore so you were keeping up that sort of genetic code of the courtyard. Well what has also happened during the time is that the landscape grew which is very natural and it still works as a courtyard but it absolutely does. Still sitting. Exactly. What universities then do over time maybe not so good anymore the next picture here this is a picture I did of what they did to your building after the fact and maybe trying with best intentions but again not of the originality that that you handwriting sort of brought and to expand on that we have the third project which is the closest to me because it's my workplace or at least it's supposed to be in fact I basically boycott to be in that building that I'm already saying you didn't design but we get to that because we bring in the next picture here and this is what I would have loved could have worked in a very tropical easy breezy single loaded corridor aerated through multiplicity of courtyard building that you designed for me and my colleagues This was the original scheme for the school of architecture and it was designed to be part of the quadrangle rather than to dominate the quadrangle to allow the quadrangle to be important as it should be as you say there are spaces in between the buildings which relate to whatever the functions are so again that was the intent it was and how that was played out on a larger scale we see at the next page here which is the side plan and you rebelled you, you were resisting the classicist order of the of the quarter and the quadrant here and basically moving the building out of it and making it in line with George Hall here and that way opening up the quad to the public, to university that's right and to try to repeat what was done prior to well for example the neoclassic kind of language it was somewhat archaic but well that's why we did what we did well initially in the first and as we talked it's interesting because he said and this is almost ironic because he said you know I went to Berlin I studied shingle right and so but I think I allowed myself to say you were working in the notion of shingle because if shingle would have come to Hawaii in the early 90s to the tropics he would have done what you did but what in fact then you were forced to do was the shingle who didn't move on right that's right the shingle who got stuck in a time that is outdated right because the campus architect at that time was shooting three bullets at your design and the three bullets were if you don't remember the my no no no the three bullets were the language to be neoclassic the building should be two stories in height with parking below and then class assist in style and then central into the quad right so these were the three bullets and when you were initially sort of talking to us about this on a side note when you gave a talk story at dokomomo and after that I insisted and thanks to your daughter who was then basically not giving up on making you dig out the proof of evidence not only of what the building originally was intended to be but then also how hard you fought to keep as many of these original ideas and from these many drawings we just going to share one of the iterations as we call that so if you can get the next image here which was where you basically had to give in and move it down but you were keeping sort of its democratic gesture of being open versus prison watch it what it happened to be we tried to keep a courtyard for all kinds of reasons it was another face of the university to the public and you know it allowed the school of architecture to have its own exterior kind of orientation absolutely which I thought was very important at the time it would have been I can tell you on a daily basis because so trapped and so hermetic and so introverted we don't have a face people say where is your building and we say well it's where the parking is that's the face of the building and that was by programming of a client who at that time had turned into sort of being stuck in some formalism and wasn't as progressive innovating and trusting an architect who had proven himself you know twice to be capable of doing these things so the next picture here is again showing in this sort of beautiful hand drawing style how again you know you would have I mean often it's a compromise right between different interests so the client here wanting the quadrant to be completed in the original way and you did that but at the same time you insisted to be open to give the school a face that is an open face for the offices and the classrooms speaking to the public and the sort of empty theater sort of stepping down so I commend you for that and again just for the records there are many more iterations where you were not giving up you were staying a rebel and saying okay I'm not gonna you know and at the end you had to but again I'm saying this is this is not I mean obviously there is some stamp on the drawings that unfortunately has your name but I'm saying and with a show we tell everyone it's not your building we have now shown what your building would have been and it would have been just another beautiful building that's exotic and tropic and totally appropriate so whoever designed this here the campus architect who is also now the one of the largest firms here on the island and designed by committee as well because it was just one person and whenever you design something by committee I have that experience too it just goes wrong so that we have a tradition here if you go to the next page to conclude on a positive note and while we were sort of critical about the existing building we have and then sort of being very sentimental about what it would have been go to the final page here please is that our tropical tutor Bill Chapman who has been a friend for a while and now is our interim dean pretty much has thrown out something that's also within the tradition of campus because this is the old engineering building and the old engineering building was overgrown with vines so he basically suggested to do the same with a current school of architecture basically dematerialize it with foliage and that way sort of bringing back your idea to just you know you have to go over a bump but the sort of the lawn or the meadow you know the quad is sort of continuing and you just dissolve that sort of tragic sort of neoclassical mock-off so there's always some hope and another hope is that we cannot not talk about your recent engagement in academic architecture which is the university of Hawaii again but at West Oahu so we would love to have you come back talk about that and that has to be when I will be half around the world because this is going to be my last show for eight months that I'm able to be here but I will not be gone physically I will be but every other week I will continue to see if this is going to be my last show and I don't know if this is already here I see him Rob can you signalize him that he's supposed to walk into the show please and so we are going to continue human human architecture every other week and human human architecture is if you haven't recognized yet it's about mainly the post contact so here come and join us there he is hello everyone hello to have you so I'm just announcing what we're going into we keep running strong every other week human human architecture about the post contact culture construction evolution but at the same time about that history that's about documenting and conserving that and we need to do that too and you're also going to be here with us in another capacity because every other week you will coordinate and synchronize our doko momo board who is going to do the one unique in the united states of all chapters we're going to have an own doko momo chapter Hawaii show and you're orchestrating them so I will be a co-host probably for many of those shows and then you and I will be doing shows you'll be remote from Germany I will be here in Honolulu and we'll have various guests on the show we just agreed that we will have them back you with them and we're going to talk about Harris Hawaii and this time at West Oahu so we look forward to that and until then stay all happy and healthy and as joyful as John and Mayumi and along that side also happy holidays because next week it's already going to be the Soto and that's going to be a reckless show because I will be in trans and cannot and I think it's going to be your brutalist topics there we go there you go alright see you all then bye bye happy holidays