 Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture-slash-Doko-Momo-Hawaii program. I am the host, DeSoto Brown. I am the Bishop Museum Historian and I'm also the Curator for the Archives Department at the Museum here in Honolulu. And I'm about to continue the story that I started with the last program I did, which is about the Capital District in downtown Honolulu. What is Doko-Momo-Hawaii? You may be asking, Doko-Momo is an international organization that studies and preserves the architecture of the middle 20th century. And the program that I'm doing consists of images not only from Bishop Museum where I work, but pictures that are from my personal collection as well as pictures I've taken myself. So last time I talked about the construction of the Hawaii State Capitol and how that was the replacement as the main government building for what had been going on in Iolani Palace. And in this aerial photograph, which is from about 1970, you can see the new then-do state Capitol on the left. And you can see historic Iolani Palace towards the right, sort of down in the lower right corner. But what I'm going to be talking about today is the area beyond the Capitol building and going generally in the direction of Diamond Head. In this photograph, you can see, if you look carefully, that not only are there streets in this area, but there also is a variety of different buildings because this area had commercial buildings as well as residences of all different sizes, shapes, ages, and so forth. All of this area was cleared completely and turned into what is called today either the Civic Center or the Capitol District. Why was that done? Well, because the new state Capitol people felt needed an appropriate setting. So rather than being composed of a lot of different small buildings, it was decided to clear this area, leave it mostly open, and just add a few new government buildings. Next go, let's go to the next slide. Here are two pictures of downtown Honolulu taken 19 years apart. Picture on the top is from 1965. Picture on the bottom is from 1984. And the first thing that you see is extremely different, of course, because how many high-rise buildings were constructed in downtown Honolulu on the right during that 19-year period. But what's important for this discussion is what's right in the center. Because in the lower picture, you can see that the Hawaii State Capitol is really dominating the view. And in the 1965 view, it's not even there at all because the construction was just getting started, and they were just clearing the space to make the Capitol. But if you look to the left of the state Capitol, in the lower photograph, you can see a lot more green space. You can see a lot more lawns. And that is the area that I'm going to be showing you and talking about. Next image. So here's what that area looked like, or part of that area looked like before any of this got started. This picture was taken in 1948. And it is showing you the corner of Punch Bowl Street on the left and Hotel Street in the foreground. And as you can see, there's a cab stand, used cars are offered for sale there. And then the white building, the white two-story concrete building in the center, is the medical group. That was an independent group of physicians who got together to form this organization, which no longer exists. And I knew this building very well because in the 1950s and 60s, I was taken here frequently to visit my pediatrician when I was a child and to get shots, which I did not like. And so this building always scared me because I knew I might undergo a shot. But I do remember also being in the office of my doctor, Dr. Nance, and looking out the window across Punch Bowl Street at the construction going on for the state Capitol. So I can remember this area before it all changed. And by the way, all of this is gone today. There's no hint of this still in existence. Next image. Here's another picture showing what the capital district of today looked like before it became that. In the center of this picture is the Honolulu Lithograph Company, which was a printing company. To the right along the right edge is the Star Bulletin Newspaper, the Honolulu Star Bulletin Newspaper's printing press. And again, at the bottom is Hotel Street, as I showed you earlier. Not only are all these buildings gone, but some of the streets that went through this large area have also been completely removed. And again, you would have no idea that any of this ever looked like this today because none of it's still there. Next slide. So now I'm going to show you some comparisons, then and now comparisons of specific locations to show how much they changed with the construction of the Capitol District. This again is Hotel Street. Now, we're familiar with Hotel Street in downtown Honolulu. Hotel Street used to continue all the way from downtown through to Thomas Square. And in this photograph from 1948, we're looking on Hotel Street towards Thomas Square in the distance. To the right of the picture, not visible, is Honolulu Halle City Hall. And this is the area that was going to be turned into the governmental building section. So here's what it looked like back then in the late 40s. And next slide. Here is what it looks like today. Completely unrecognizable as the same location. That's because Hotel Street has been completely removed. And there's mostly green space. It's mostly what appears to be open park space with trees and just two 1970s government buildings. And on the left is the Kalani Moku Building, which is a state government building. And in the distance in the center of the high rise is the Frank Fosse Municipal Building, which is a city and county building. And those are still there today surrounded by open space. But that open space is deceptive. And I'll explain why as we continue. Next slide. So now we're going to look at the two views together and you make it even clearer as to what's going on. The picture in the top, the black and white picture of late 1940s. The lower picture, what it looks like in the same place today. And this was the intersection of Hotel Street again. And that's in the center of the picture. And on the right, a street that was called the Kapilani Extension. That was Kapilani Boulevard that was gradually extended up to Baritania Street. And that was built in two sections, the first section, the first block up to Hotel Street, open in 1947. The second block was not complete until seven years later up to Baritania Street. And that was dated from 1954. And that second section of Kapilani Extension would have gone directly through the picture that you're looking at. The picture, the view from 1948, right through the K Mishima Fender Shop. Well, in the lower picture, you can see not only are there no roads, but now there just appears to be this green grassy hill. Well, the hill is not exactly what it seems to be. And you can see there's a cement structure in the middle of it. And we'll get to that in a second. Next slide. Here, the upper view 1969 on Baritania Street at the Kapilani Extension. The lower picture is what it looks like today. And again, that appears to be a park because you mostly see green grass and large mature monkey prod trees. Well, that's not exactly what you're looking at because you can see on the top of this sort of elevated grassy area are some buildings. Well, I'll explain what those are as we continue. But let's go to the next slide. And here's another view on Baritania Street again, 1969 versus today. And you can see across the street that there are a bunch of different buildings. The area occupied by the Kapilani District had a lot of different buildings of different time periods, different ages, different types of construction. And there were a lot of old wooden buildings, which we're going to continue to see as we go through this. Now, one of the things that you'll notice is that there is a continuity to the plantings or the grass and the trees that are found in this area. It's one of the reasons that it is particularly nice as a park because there's a similarity. It's not a really disjointed bunch of different plants, but sort of a small selection of plants which are repeated. And we'll see more of that as we continue. Next slide. Here is the intersection of Hotel Street on the left and Punch Bowl Street on the right in 1969. And these are, you can tell, two photographs which have been put together by me to create kind of a panorama. On the left, Hotel Street continues from this site all the way into downtown Honolulu without any breaks. On the right, Punch Bowl Street continues up to Baritania Street. And again, you see old wooden buildings facing us directly is a small grocery store. Up on the corner of Punch Bowl Street, there's a 1950s concrete building, which was the headquarters of the Honolulu Rapid Transit Company, which ran Honolulu's transit buses at the time before the city and county took those over in 1971. And on the left side, you can see just past the wooden building on the corner, a large clump of trees, mango trees and other trees. And what are they? Well, they are actually an area of residential houses, wooden houses, old wooden houses, probably built in the 1920s or maybe even earlier. Those probably were rental properties that were not owned by the individual tenants. But that again shows you how diverse this neighborhood was. Next image. So here's what it looks like today. And the entrance to the parking garage that you're seeing on the left is in the same place as Hotel Street formerly was. Now, as I've been saying, this looks like open parkland. Well, it actually is a very large parking structure. And it was intentionally constructed so that there is earth covering it, mounted up over, obviously, concrete superstructure underneath. And on that are growing not only lawns, but mature trees. So you get the illusion that there's no building there. You get the illusion that again, it's open parkland. This is very important because what happened with a lot of the land that was cleared for the Capital District was actually the construction of parking, not new buildings. But the parking is disguised in a way that you don't know that it's there. And that is really successful. And that is something that I think we can be proud of right in the center of Honolulu. A lot of parking, but you see no cars, which is great. Next slide. So it was not just the area that I just have been speaking about to the Diamond Headside of the Capital Building because this Capital District extended up Maoka to Vineyard Boulevard. And these two pictures show that type of area. What happened there? In the upper picture, again, 1969, 1970, small wooden grocery store called the Tsutsui Store is at the corner of South Vineyard Street at the bottom and Punch Bowl Street on the right. The lower picture doesn't look like it's in the same place, but it actually is because South Vineyard Street was rerouted when all of this area was cleared. And it was connected to Punch Bowl Street in a different location. If you look at the color photograph on the far left, you'll see the remnant of South Vineyard Street leading to this parking structure. Because again, the point was to not only open up space to create parking for all those government employees. So that's what this turned into. Now let's go to the next slide. And this is across the street. This is across Punch Bowl Street at the corner of Punch Bowl and Miller Street. Again, in the upper picture, you see that that's a rather rundown wooden building that was called the Queen's Hotel named because it was next to Queen's Hospital. In the picture showing today, Queen's Hospital is across the street on the right. But where the Queen's Hotel used to be is now a parking structure for Queen's Hospital or the Queen's Medical Center as it's called today. But again, surrounded by trees and open grassy areas as well. Next slide. Well, one of the reasons for constructing the Capitol District was because there were a number of important historic structures, architecturally distinguished structures and government buildings already in the area. So it was a decided to construct this, this build this new Capitol District to take all of those buildings in. And one of the buildings there that was already located there was this one, which is Honolulu Halle, the Honolulu City Hall built in the late 1920s. And behind it, City Hall was, again, parking. And let's go to the next slide to find out about that. Here's a picture from the late 40s of one of those parking lots. And you can see Honolulu Halle in the distance. You can see the tower in the center of left. Well, everybody who worked in Honolulu Halle liked having parking right nearby. And as the Capitol District started being constructed in the early 1970s, a number of those people who worked in Honolulu Halle didn't like the idea of losing their convenient parking, and they wouldn't allow it. Well, Mayor Frank Fosse, who liked to do publicity worthy things, one Sunday just arrived with an excavator and a bunch of heavy machinery and a crew to demolish all of those parking lots. And he did it by, and actually he ran some of the equipment, I think, for publicity pictures, right as the project got, right as that demolition got started because he liked to get publicity. And so without any further discussion, all of those parking lots were removed. We could be grateful for that. Next picture. So all of this stuff, as I've been talking about, was built in the early 1970s. And during that time period, there was an architectural style that was particularly popular, not only here in the Hawaiian Islands, but all over the world. And it was called brutalism. Brutalism made use of a lot of raw concrete cement that wasn't decorated, that wasn't covered up, but looked like cement. So the parking structure that I've just been describing has a number of cement parts to it, they're sticking out of what looks like grassy hill. And as you can see in these two pictures, that is in the brutalist style. And when we go to the next slide, here is more evidence of brutalism. Brutalism very commonly made use of vertical kind of ribs, if you will, in the concrete when it was poured into a form. And then those ribs were intentionally chipped away. So all three of these pictures show parts of the parking structure that use that same motif of the vertical chipped strips of concrete. And in the lower right, that is a planter in which a mature tree is growing on the top of the parking structure. And you'll see what the rest of that looks like in a minute. Let's go to the next slide. And this is it. On top of that parking structure is a preschool slash daycare for kids who are parts of the families of people who work in the area in the various government buildings. And this is a very low, key, very sort of unobtrusive structure with the green metal roofs. And it's again, surrounded by lawns and trees to where you don't even think you're on top of a concrete structure with cars underneath you. And yet you are. And this is one of the few things that takes up some of that space that is otherwise parked. Let's go to the next slide. And a prominent part of this area is this large sculpture. And it's called Skygate. And it was created and designed by a man named Isamu Noguchi, who, despite his completely Japanese name, was actually American. And he was half Japanese and half French. He was an artist and a sculptor, and he designed things like furniture as well. When this was constructed, and by the way, in the smaller picture, you can see his name in a date of 1977, which is impressed on one of these support poles. When this was constructed and first shown, people complained about it. They didn't like it. They thought it was unsightly. They thought it was costurously expensive because it cost $122,000. But today, nobody is upset about it. It's just part of the whole landscape down there. And another reason people don't complain about it now is because the trees have grown up around it substantially since 1977. So it's no longer as visible or prominent as it was when it was first installed. Next slide. So in this area, there are two large government buildings. And this is the first one. This is the Kalani Moko building. As you can see, it's mostly horizontal, very strong horizontal at appearance. And it's from the 1970s, and it is a state government building. And in the next slide, you will see that it too is part of the brutalist architectural school with the unadorned concrete. And all of those sort of cylindrical things in the picture on the left are light fixtures that are supposed to be eliminating the exterior of the structure of night. And on the right, you'll see those vertical stripes again that I was talking about. This is because of individual pieces of wood were put together, the concrete to be poured into, and then it left this pattern. Next slide. Something that you wouldn't understand what it actually is on the Kalani Moko building is this. This looks like it's just a decorative element in the concrete. It actually is a stained glass window. And all of those black spaces are occupied in reality by large chunks of colored glass. You unfortunately cannot tell that that's a stained glass window if you're outside looking from this view. It's only when the inside is illuminated at night that you can see that this is actually colored. And unfortunately, we don't see that as often as we might be able to. Next slide. So the other building in this area is this. This is the Frank F. Fosse municipal building. And it was opened in 1974. And again, it is one of the two, as I said, government buildings built new in this area. Now the reason for doing this was to consolidate various government offices, which at that point were located in a bunch of scattered places. So the two buildings were meant to consolidate all of those, which they did. The Frank Fosse building was originally called the Honolulu municipal building. But Frank Fosse was this very well known, very prominent politician who was the mayor of Honolulu for two stints to well, two sessions, let's say, from the 1960s up to the 1980s. And as such, he was a very well known part of our local history. He had a very adversarial relationship with the media. So he got a lot of publicity for that. And after his death, the building was renamed for him. Next slide. Now there are people who do not like the Frank Fosse building. And again, that's because it looks so concrete, so forbidding, and so unadorned that I have had people tell me that it looks like a prison. And in fact, somebody I know just mentioned that to me a few days ago, it looks like a prison. It is not a prison. And again, I am a fan of brutalist architecture. So I'm not going to be too critical of this. But I do want to point out that there are some elements of this building that are not just straight, concrete, rectangular and no adornment. And if you look at these two pictures, you can see that there are those touches. And the picture on the left, you'll see how those horizontal portions actually are set back at different distances from the upright horizontal part of the building. And that may seem small and not significant, but it shows you it's not purely a utilitarian warehouse type building. On the picture on the right, you can see that there are rectangular sections sticking out of that part of the vertical part of the building. And again, those mimic how those sort of horizontal strips are set back at an angle. So in the front, you see the setback on the horizontal parts. And on the side, you see those rectangular portions that go up the building in a diagonal line. Next picture. And one thing about the Fosse building that's really notable, and most people are not even aware of it, is that it has this unique base. So there are two vertical portions on the side that essentially are sort of holding up the central part of the horizontal parts of the floors of the building. But on the ground level, there is this two-story open space, which these pictures show you. And that means that when you go into the lobby of the Fosse building, as we like to say on human human architecture, it's totally easy breezy. That's because it is completely open to the outside air. It is open to the trade winds. So when you're in it, you look up, and there's a big open space with open space around it. And the ceiling that you're looking at is two stories up above you. Again, this is a subtle thing, and you're not necessarily going to even know that it exists unless you happen to go into the lobby of the building. And these government buildings today, of course, are increasingly secure. So it's not possible to just walk in off the street and look at it. But if you do, you can see that the architect actually gave a lot of thought on how this building was designed and constructed that goes beyond pure utilitarianism. That's why I do not agree that it looks like a prison, even though other people have said that ever since 1974. Okay, that brings us to the end of this particular episode of Dokomomo Hawaii's Human Humane Architecture, sort of a consortium, let's say, of two organizations being represented. And again, I'm DeSoto Brown. I do want to say that we've just been notified that ThinkTech will be no longer creating new material as of the end of April 2024. And I've had the privilege of being on ThinkTech for, I believe, seven years now. So I've done a lot of shows. And it's a sad ending. But fortunately, the shows that we've done will remain online for people to be able to continue to see them. And I hope people will be able to see these shows, this one and many others, for many years to come. And I'll be doing several more shows for ThinkTech before the new content is no longer being done. So I hope you will continue to be watching for those, as well as looking at these programs, hopefully into the far distant future. So, keep watching. There still will be more to see. And so till next time, thanks for watching and Aloha. We want to announce that ThinkTech Hawaii is moving into a new phase and will not be producing regular talk shows after April 30. We will retain our website and YouTube channel and will accept new content on an ad hoc basis. We are also developing a legacy archive program to provide continuing public access to our content. If you can help us cover the costs of the transition and the development of our legacy archive program, please make a donation on thinktechawai.com. Thanks so much. Aloha.