 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Human Humane Architecture here on ThinkTechAway. I am the co-host of this program, DeSoto Brown, and we are joined today by our actual host, who is Martin Desbang, who's speaking to us from Germany. And just a second, we're going to see Martin on the screen with me, and it's afternoon here in Honolulu, but poor Martin has to speak to us in the early morning from Germany live. Well, that's okay. He sees up and he's ready to go. And Martin, why don't you tell us what we're going to be talking about today? Welcome back to Solan, everyone. It's a pleasure to be reunited. Why don't we, being away, take advantage of that situation and take a little bit more distant view of our islands? And so if we could get picture one, because we were both traveling, you're currently in Honolulu, but you will be gone in a little bit, and you were away. And tell us where that was and how that relates to the first picture as well. Well, I was in New York City briefly last month and in May, excuse me, and you can see a picture of me in the upper left corner. And while I was there, I came and went through JFK International Airport. And this airport has a very iconic building in it, which is the TWA departure or the TWA terminal, we might say, which built in, I think we said it was 1962, thereabouts. I had hoped to see it, but I just saw a really brief glimpse of it driving by to get to my terminal. And it is now being turned into an airport. And so if you look at this picture, you can see there are two buildings being built behind it. It's now going to be the lobby of a new airport structure. So I wasn't able to actually go in it. Yeah, it's actually a hotel. So it would be the lobby for an airport hotel. And that reminded us, I mean, the architectural approach to build the what hopefully will be a pretty sort of simple blank structure in the back that becomes the background that reminded us of the project that we did almost a year ago that we recall at the top right of the image here, which is the Blaisdale Center, where we would have hoped they would take a different sort of a similar approach and not a different approach where they built a new program in the back and then keep not only the arena at the concert hall, but also the exhibit hall in the middle. Unfortunately, that would not be the case. I guess they didn't listen to us. So they will take a different approach where they make a new exhibit hall that we hope they can achieve the same architectural level of excellence as the original one at. This gets us to the next picture, which, you know, is tough these days, especially in the sort of typology of event architecture. And on the next picture here, we see something that's not around anymore. If you were, and this is a building by an architect that we have one in Honolulu to these West Center of Ohio and pay. And this was a terminal from the seventies, I guess, and it was torn down, unfortunately, in 2011. So let's go back to Honolulu and see what we have as far as aviation architecture. So the next picture, number three. And you were pointing out to that in one of your recent shows, we were talking about the evolution of tourism on the island of Oahu, and the picture at the top left was referring to that, that he said airplanes really broad mass tourism attention to the island. Right. That's right. Yes. So what we're looking at here are two pictures of our two different airports. The one in the upper right corner is the original Honolulu International Airport built during World War II and kept in use until 1962. Very small wooden structure open entirely towards the runway side. Very easy breezy as Martin likes to say. And then we moved to a new airport structure, which was built to accommodate jets. And you see in the lower picture, there's a continental airlines jet at the new Honolulu Airport. And that's what we're going to talk about, which has been through some different evolution. And I think Martin, do you want to say anything else here? Should we go to our next picture? Just looks very, you know, not just easy breezy, but tropical exotic to me. I see more palm trees at the original structure than anything. I see whole Gula girls dancing right up next to the airplane. These things are obviously gone due to, you know, increased security and, you know, other things. So next picture, we can see these are all postcards from your archives. Thanks for providing them. And you can see how the how the airport evolved pretty fastly and trying to catch up with the increased, you know, people flying, right? Correct. And it originally consisted of the central control tower and then two departure lounges on either side of that and a big open expansive parking lot right in the front. And all of that has changed a great deal because our tourism has increased so much. And we're going to be looking at pictures of the way the airport has been modernized, the way it was changed in the 1970s. Go to our next picture. And here's a picture of the airport as it is today or close to as it is today. And one of the things that's changed is the construction of the H1 viaduct in front of the airport viaduct from which now you exit onto these huge off ramps and on ramps. And that's your experience of getting to the airport. And we also have the two wings at either side of the airport, which were built to accommodate 747s and bigger planes in the early 1970s. And that's... And it's compiled postcard pretty much. Something has changed too recently, which is even the name of the airport, right? Yes, that's right. Not called like that anymore. That's right. It's not the whole little intervention. Was it called now? It's called the Daniel K. Inouye Airport. And some people have raised a question about that because it's really not a very nice airport. And is that something we really want to name after him? However, we don't have to go there. I guess next, our picture. Talking architecture. And this is of the expansion, the later expansion and except the bottom right picture, we can see easy breezy and an open, you know, hallway concourse. But everything else doesn't look very much specific to Hawaii anymore. It looks pretty generic to me, right? Yes. I think you're absolutely right. It is very generic. And of course, airports have a very specific function. So maybe that's why a lot of airports look very similar all over the world. Yeah. Anyway. So next page is another compilation of postcards that you provided. And you told me the funny... And you can see how it grows and grows. Infrastructure grows. It's less sticky. And it's more sort of corporate American airport architecture. And then at the top right there is a sort of desperate attempt of still making it look Polynesian, which you said was the sort of fountain that wanted to pretend to be a volcano, but you never bought into it, not even as a kid, right? No. No. It was colored lights showing on water. Didn't really look like lava, but that's what it was supposed to look like. And if you look in the lower left corner, you'll see a picture from the early 70s of the airport beginning to expand with this large parking building that's right in front of it. So no longer as you approach it, do you see it? And then it also has the two wings or the two other departure lounges being built on either side of the original ones. And let's go to our next picture. All right. Let's zoom into that and go to the next picture, because that picture shows that. And that's from the 60s originally. And it's a very clean functional utilitarian structure that has a lot of poetry within that austerity. And it's sort of a double beam that stands very far and wide to the columns at the very end. And everything is pretty much wide open. And you point out that the ceiling here was sort of flush and flat, and the light fixtures were sort of inserted into it. And then there was an addition that was in the 1970s. And I guess that's the next picture where the famous wallpaper magazine had to feature that. And that was around Dean Chakamoto's exhibit of tropical modernism that he wrote a book. And so they feature that as one of the examples of fine Honolulu architecture of its time. And so if we go to the next picture, let's catch some attention. If you guys Google and go online, you'll find this guy, Christopher Dukes here, who did this little blog about the architecture. And he quickly identified the style of the architecture that we have pointed out in a couple of shows. And this is a fine piece of tropical brutalism. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. I agree with you completely. The image is going with that. So the next picture is from your archive. This is that to the brutalist shedding. And you can see the flower power in it. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. These are those 70s terminals in use when they were brand new. And really, they don't look that different except for the clothes that the people are wearing, as you pointed out. And as you said, he's slightly distinguished. So Oscar was sort of working contextually because he found the original condition that we saw a couple of images before. What he did here differently is the ceiling, which he sort of undulated. So you got these ups and downs, and the light pictures were sort of integrated in the low point. So you get a more indirect light source, which is a better one. So it's an improvement, but he was working within the genetic code of sort of the already given sort of brutalist sort of functionalist approach. And next picture, these two pictures is two we took. And lucky us, it's pretty much in the same original condition. Very little has been changed or altered. So kudos to people at the airport who resisted that sort of temptation to remodel it, to give it make-up and makeovers, right? Right, exactly. And that's one of the things that I don't like. Exactly. And early in the show, next picture, we want to come with some recommendations here. And this is now a picture from me traveling on my way back to Germany two months ago now almost, which I went through Tom Bradley International Airport in LA. And this is sort of a mix you think because you see at the top left, which you said, what does it remind you of? Well, it looks like the Sydney Opera House got pulled and stretched in a long line. And so it does have similarity of those roofs, but it's a completely different building. Exactly. We had a colleague of mine that we want to greet, that's Maki Tsagimaki, who's from Finland, who found that actually the architect of the Sydney Opera House, Yon Utzon, had some relationship to why, because that client burned him so much that he needed to recover on our island of Oahu. It was getting inspiration for another project that the church needed. So this is an interesting relationship. But this airport is really sort of like, they tried so hard to reconnect to these glorious days. We put in that little picture of the TWA again. So there is this attempt and this sort of, you can see they want, they tried so hard. But when you look at the details and even the way it's composed architecturally and tectonically, it's not anywhere close. So it's almost, I'm almost close to saying I hate that being a recent American, that we Americans lost it, you know, because we can't do it anyway. You see it with cars, you see it with other things. So where are these good old days, right? And not to get further depressed, let's move on to the next picture. You're sounding like me. You sound like me, the good old days, right, right, right, yeah. Yeah, there we go. So good old days, next picture, there is something left still from the good old days. This is a piece of, five pieces of Gooby architecture on LAX, which does really have a name, sort of a signature building. It was by a guy whose name was Pereira. And Pereira was mostly known for his trans-American Pereira, the Thai rise in San Francisco. He was also the campus architect fleshed Dean at UC Irvine. So he built this thing here, which is currently a restaurant. And on my way to moving to Hawaii some six years ago, I was in this restaurant, which is called Encore, I think, and I have the best spicy chicken burger ever in my life. So I can recommend that. So let's see what we have sort of left and, you know, what people started to do on our airport. So next picture, this is a picture I took, which is basically the departure area when you approach it with a car and you want to sort of drop off your baggage and people. This is what you saw until not that long ago, which was a pretty clean, modern, you know, horizontal roof line. That next picture, unfortunately, someone thought they must update that. So they started to, and I put in this little color picture, I call it like the Polynesian culture center. And like they wanted to pretend it looks like a horn or something out. It looks pretty silly to me. And especially if you look at the way it's constructed, it's a sort of assemblage of different layers of invasive material. So we're thinking, better don't do that. This is what the mindset of the indigenous people, they were anywhere in the world and not in Hawaii, either would have ever done that. They did things that made tens and this is more nonsense. Yeah. And what we've gotten out today was a flat horizontal surface as a roof, which now has this little kicked up thing, which as you point out has these kind of things sticking up that are supposed to look like Polynesian things, but don't really. Yeah. Exactly. Just don't. And this reminds us of something, next picture, a couple of shows ago here next door to me back in Waikiki. This is the New Denys, which we have critically observed this sort of, you know, notion of pretending. So it's notion of surface rather than substance. And to sort of lick and stick, you know, lava stone, you know, this is an update on that. I mean, now it's totally completed. You drive by there every day, but it's pretty much what that is. And so we just say, don't do that because the next picture is because the airport has some really cool substance. And let's, you know, look at some of these sort of details and features. So Christopher Dukes, the guy, once again, the picture at the bottom variety channel leaders, he points out in his block and they reminded us of the top right pictures, which is Pete Wimbley's Coco Palm Resort, or at least we should say was under construction, but that's a different story. And I'm curious, and probably they probably won't redo these chandeliers. And obviously to my understanding, you tell me, because you're Hawaiian, but the, you know, your ancestors didn't have chandeliers way back. They did not. No. At some point they were, at some point they were proud to have ticking torches, but they didn't have before they found out the computer nut oil can burn, you know, chandeliers they didn't have. So this is again an interpretation. This is American technology, you know, Thomas Edison's light bulb, you know, and, but they, they interpret that in a, in a Polynesian in a fun way. So the chandeliers are really, really special and really, really cool. And they also are left to it. Yeah. I also want to point out that the color is also very typical of the 1970s. Earth tones, burgundies, browns, yellows, that fits in exactly with when this building was constructed, when these wings were constructed in the early 1970s. And as you started to say, it interrupted you on the left, some of the tile work is still there. A lot of the tile work is still there, which again, it's not a literal interpretation of anything Hawaiian, but it does have a suggestion of some types of tropical form. So it's still there. Reminds me of our show about the Lua Street Apartments and the little fit, ceramic, you know, tiles and stuff like that. Right. Those abstract symbols, yeah. The next couple of pictures, you went to the airport, took some great detail shots here. Next, next picture is once again, just like the Christopher Dukes guy, his actually sort of title of his blog was furniture in the airport specifically. So here it's about benches and they're pretty much cast in plates, concrete blocks are topped with a local probably coa wood topping. So you sit on warm wood. But again, the whole structure is sort of stereotypically, monolithically concrete. So also the big picture here is these benches with these wooden planks in front of the very sculptural concrete wall that we want to get to in the next picture. Yes. And here we see. And so concrete, we have at the top left a reference to another fine piece of local brutalist, tropical brutalist architecture, which is the Royal Hawaiian shopping center where they took way more effort than Bush hammer. So they scored, you know, these lines into the concrete under a lot of, you know, manual force, whereas here it was done differently where they're using wooden boards and they just left the space, the boards apart from each other. So the concrete while being compacted and condensed could pour out of the gaps. And this was obviously, you know, then happening irregularly that gave us very, very interesting sort of texture to the wall. And the bottom right pictures are sort of a reference to us pointing out that concrete was and still is one of the prime materials on the island that has a lot of potential. And you identified and discovered an interesting phenomenon of sort of participatory interaction of the people on the airport with that concrete and that's on the next picture. What is that about? Okay. Well, in this picture you can see this is in the baggage claim area and so many people have rubbed against that wall and pushed baggage carts against it that they've actually worn off those skinny little vertical ribs that were originally on the wall. And I, when I saw this actually had to go up and touch one of them to see how robust it was and to see could it actually be chipped off? Well, not with my fingers it couldn't, but with a lot of wear and tear it does go away and you end up with a still textured wall but without those vertical ribs so prominently in place as they were originally. Very interesting. So very tactile architecture, very haptic, right? Yeah, yeah. So next picture is two pictures in one that the top one is these walkways from the parking structure to the terminal, which you pointed out is various in a light way. You can see the exposure of the structure as being trusted. Yes. Whereas the big picture is basically how you go down to the baggage claim. So it's very sort of earthy. It's very, very stereotypic. It's very sort of ethereal, whereas the top one is very sort of ephemeral. So it's a great sort of articulation of different tectonical system, very educational architecture. Yeah. And two different experiences in the same complex. And I also said that that upper walkway that you go over from the parking building over to the terminal building, those cross beams remind me of the way Ward Warehouse looked. And that was one of the subjects, of course, of our previous shows, too. Which is unfortunately gone. And we got to do a follow-up. That's a whole other subject, which I'll talk about. It is, and we will do a show about that. Yes. It drives me crazy, but let's wait for that show. Next picture. Next picture is a compilation of, again, once again, the nature of this architecture is sort of solid math and how you carve out that math and basically avoid the solids. And once again, the original condition of the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center was using exactly that strategy. And you can see the details of the airport follow that same sort of philosophy of tropical brutalism, which, by the way, Timothy Shuler, who's a co-host of the shows of the recent weeks with our local MOMO board members, is about to write an article about. So you guys stay tuned and be excited about that. Yeah. I'm excited about that. Yeah. No, we totally are. And so next picture is, there's hope because even though they have to update the airport due to different needs of security and expansion and things, they pretty much stick to the original notion when they do things. Never mind that little stainless stained glass detail in the back with a more literal floor pattern. As we pointed out, in the back, you were not literal. You were abstract. You were interpretive. You were suggestive. So we suggest that they were suggestive. But that aside, people pretty much respect the condition which we support. And the next picture is some details that you pointed out are from actually the back in the days, the wooden slats, right? Correct. I think those wooden slats were installed in the early 1970s at the time of the renovation. They serve as a sunshade to cover up the windows on the Makai side of those structures, which otherwise normally led in a great deal of afternoon sun. They've got this wave pattern made into them in a 3D manner, which is intriguing. And then at the below those, you see there's this blue mural that is behind the ticket counters. Martin thought that that looked like it was of the correct time period, original, to the 1970s. But actually, this blue one and the orange one, which are two different of the departure terminals, are very recent. And so you pointed out that this is actually rather thoughtful to correlate to the original appearance of those 70s buildings. They fooled me in a good way, exactly. That's the way to go. That's right. So next picture is some artwork in the airport here of this guy here who was using these sort of rocks on ironwood planks, contrasting the concrete. And that's a very classical way of, you know, using the softness of wood to sort of warm up the harshness of the concrete. We've been using that in our professional work in the kindergarten at the top right, and also in the Permitiva project. So we use, you know, invasive wood species, cut it down to lumber, and sort of contrast our rugged concrete structures with that. So next picture, traveling also on Founding Father J. Feidel, who is in the top left corner, speaking to our emerging architect audience in another prime piece of proposed architecture, the Plaza of the Pacific, right next door where you sit right now. And in a publication wallpaper, again, magazine on the top right, the three pictures where we were featured with our translation project, it was called Travel Top 25. I think we were 007. And another number was what you see in the little picture of the second to the right, which you think is about clubware or something like that. But in fact, it was a very clever, which the wallpaper magazine, if you go down to the substance of it, it had some very, very interesting critical take on things. And that little black text I put in the bottom picture, this was a play to you for, for something that they said the Pope, they were feeling pity with the Pope, because the Pope always has to kiss nasty store material, concrete and rubber and things. And they said in, in Helsinki, the traditional then Tay International Airport, the Pope is pleased because he can kiss wooden floors. So Jay went to Reykjavík, and this is a picture I took when I went to Reykjavík. And on the top floor, they have wooden, they have wooden floors. So we're just encouraging to stick with that sort of, the turtle of wood, which they already do. So this is a good thing. So we have like few minutes left. So let's go to the next picture, which shows us, which I, you fooled me because I thought that was the most recent condition. But this is a rather historic postcard as well. This picture is already older than you would think. First of all, there's no inner island terminal, the Hawaiian airline terminal, which is there today. There's not the other secondary parking building isn't there. And there also are no connections to the freeway. So this picture is actually probably from the 1990s. It's already over 20 years old, and the airport has changed even more since this picture was taken, even though it doesn't look as old as it actually is. Let's go to our next picture. And the next picture, we try to find one picture from all your great pictures you took out there that is most symbolic for what the nature of the airport is. And we think this is like, it's this, it's like this sort of cast in place, tropical, exotic, brutalistic and sit in the architecture, architecture as furniture, furniture as architecture. So a very good example for that. So we would say stick with that. And next picture is a project we did some years ago, which is a school cafeteria, which is using the same sort of tectonic strategy of pretty much making it a hangar, you know, wide open, wide open spacing and see the exposed beams, the contrast, wooden concrete. And on the outside, I was happy to see in my post occupancy evaluation, traveling, I saw some weeds growing, you know, around it. So maybe, you know, landscape, nature and architecture make for a good team. And so next picture is, that's what we propose for what project is that. Well, this is one of the Primitino projects. And it makes use of not only architecture, but it makes use of the open air and it makes use of vegetation. And we're almost at the end of the program. So we've got to do our one last picture here. And that was Martin was saying that when he first arrived here, he was very pleased to see that there was nature incorporated into this huge concrete monolith of the airport viaduct. And you said that was one of the reasons you chose to come here to live, rather than another airport, another place where you were potentially going to be offered a job as well. Which we see at the bottom left, this is somewhere in the boom docs on the mainland, which is with an average, you know, postmodern little regional airport that they made us wait for half an hour to get the plane, the plane. And, you know, it was this, and versus here, where, you know, this very proud, heroic, almost patriotic, brutalist piece of architecture, plus the easy breeziness. So we have that picture of the flowering. We don't mean this literally. We mean this figuratively. So the smell, the scent of tropical vegetation is something that we recommend the airport authority to dwell upon. And, you know, we were talking about the viaduct in Nimitz. This is probably not the most scenic, but as you can see, when nature starts to take over and basically contrast that or compliment, that's sort of our concluding suggestion that's the way to go. So stick with sort of the tropical exotic feature, try to keep it as easy breezy as possible and just stay with that. Okay. Well, thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody, for being here. This is Human Humane Architecture, I think, Tecawaii, and we will see you again on our next episode next week. And until then, aloha.