 Good to have you all back with us here to another very exciting, exotic episode of Human Humane Architecture, broadcasting live here from our mildly and moderately tropical metropolis of Honolulu, Hawaii. And today it's the dudes about the broods, and the dudes are DeSoto Brown and Martin as the host, and we have our colleague Timothy Schuler as our guest today. So what's that thing about the broods? The broods. Well, I recently wrote an article titled, titled, The Broods on the Beach, and it was very much inspired by an assignment both from an editor, but also some of the recent shows that you guys have been doing on brutalism. There's definitely a trend worldwide to be thinking about this architectural style. And re-appreciating it. Yes, exactly. And so we got basically asked by one of the editors at Flux Magazine, Matt Denif, to kind of try and untangle what brutalism means to Hawaii's built environment. If we could get the picture one up here. There it is right there. Magazine on the picture one. Here is the cover of it, and one of the pictures he used in the whole description. At the top left is what you mentioned, how we stumbled around and into tropical brutalism. Every now and then. And the next page, please, is me having, you know, when Tim was kind of delivering the complimentary copy to me, I was overly excited and took these snapshots here to share with everyone. And so this gives you an overview of how actually the article, which we can only simulate, but if you would have it and flip through, this is how it looks like. And I have to say it's a very appealing composition, very well done as far as writing, of course, but then going along with the images. It's very captivating to read. Yes. So Tim, you know what, before we go any further, tell us about what Flux Magazine is. Oh, sure. It is a tri-annual magazine published here in Hawaii, published out of Chinatown by a group called Nella Media Group, and it's essentially a magazine about Hawaii. It tells Hawaii's stories. As you mentioned, it's beautiful. The art direction is incredible. I've heard people describe it as, you know, one of the best designed objects coming out of Hawaii right now, which I'm absolutely thrilled and proud to be a part of the team that puts it together. And I think the thing I like most about it, as evidenced by this story on brutalism, which is something that other than the two of you, no one really is talking about too much. There's certainly not newspaper articles being written about it. We don't have an architecture critic in Hawaii. And so I love the fact that they are really sort of kind of trying to, you know, turn over the rocks and look for stories that people aren't talking about. So much of the media here is focused on, you know, stories that are, if not clean and shiny, at least, you know, attractive and easy to go to. Oh, yeah, of course. And this magazine has done a good job, I think, of doing design stories, but also just really fascinating stories. Absolutely. So let's go to the next slide here and talk. Take advantage of having you here and hearing sort of the stories behind the story, especially, I mean, writing is, your writing is great and it's explicit. I mean, it's still, I think it's great because it's sort of implicit within being explicit. So, and it actually made us sort of, you know, go off and think about the article in different ways. And we're going to take advantage of that and actually make it a little trilogy. This being the first one where you tell us more about the article and then the Soto is going to go off and tell us what he gets out of the article and he's doing this in a very sneaky way, right? Wendy? Well, yeah, because Martin is going back to Germany and when Martin is in transit, I will be on my own, totally uncontrolled, and I will get to do my take on tropical vertical. That's going to be trouble. It's going to be trouble. Big trouble in the pilotry. Exactly. Exactly. Look out, world. Look out, world. And then there will be my revenge will be won when I hopefully have landed, you know. Yes, that's right. That's right. The final word then, huh? Yeah, yeah. But again, it's like, well, whereas the writing is greatly sort of implicitly explicit, the pictures are obviously always sort of implicit and it's up to the viewer to basically make up. There's a little connotations, of course, but they describe more the actual thing, what you see, but maybe you can tell us a little bit. And I'm particularly excited to hear why the first pictures that one sees are actually these. Sure. Well, I can only speak to some of, you know, the role that I played and I'm not in the in the studio whenever they're, you know, doing the final pagination. But I do know what. So what you're seeing here is actually that is the side of a parking garage in downtown, actually just adjacent to the studio where we are right now. Right now. We sort of walk by there every time he does, I was just looking at it minutes ago. Exactly. But I think this, I think one of the reasons they led with this is, A, it's an incredibly beautiful photo. We should mention John Hook is the photographer for everything in the magazine on these Brutalist buildings. But I think this in particular, at least what it says to me is it gets at a bunch of different things. One is the ways in which brutalism was very quickly kind of transmogrified into the Hawaiian context to try and speak to this specific place. So I think here, just the things that I pick up from it are just kind of the falling pomfrons. Also there's a kind of very geologic quality to it. It's highly textural. I think you can't quite see it in this photo, but also the tone, the size of the aggregates that is used in the company, but also the tone and color of it also is very related to Hawaii. And I think they wanted to try and kind of capture all of that as the lead-in to the story. And we can see that more in the next picture here. And the prettiest one, I should have done a better job and basically go to my front door beach, which is our front door beach because we're both Waikikians and put it in the sand and basically show this sort of analogy to... No, no, that's okay. That basically concrete is sand, right? It's just aggregates basically glued together. I mean very sort of dilettantly said, right? But here you were saying you can't, but here you can see the fine grain of the... And I believe the picture on the right is one of yours that you took. It is, it is. That is that dojo in Kalihi. Oh, yeah. The dojo originally turned me on to... It's an incredible building. Satya Otani did it, who did some incredible works actually in Japan as well I found out in researching this piece. But I think this juxtaposition is perfect because it shows the ways in which even when they were not intentionally trying to evoke these kind of floral forms or these kind of vegetated forms, by leaving the concrete showing the wood grain pattern of the board form, there were still, I think architects in Hawaii and outside were trying to comment on the ways in which natural materials like wood were actually still really crucial to making a brutalist building. And you know I think the interesting thing with these two is that on one hand on the left side we've got something intentionally made and sculpted. On the right hand side we're using a natural form just as you said because the concrete pressed against it when it was wet. And so this is by happenstance, but that building does have a lot of plywood texture that they intentionally left. They didn't grind it off and make it smooth. It wasn't done like we frequently sort of get amused about the sort of attempt of these days where they throw a form liner into the concrete and make a very literal analogy to some kind of leave that you can only see that one thing, which is a very postmodern approach. This is way more in the modern approach that you might see something from plant life, but you don't have to, right? So it's very sort of implied and not explicit. So it just leaves interpretation, which I think is sort of appealing and makes it more timeless. You know what I also like about the form on the left is it looks like a water pattern in sand. And this aggregate is sand. So water flowing over it might have made a pattern similar to that, but now this is permanent in the building. And we're moving on to the next picture. And I can use this because we talk about some of the masters of brutalism along the way. And what you just said, this reminds me of one of the American masters, Frank LaRide. He basically said concrete is liquid stone. Right. So that's pretty much exactly that. Correct. So you're talking next door. This is the other next door to us where we're sitting here. This is this building here. So tell us again, what do these images say in regards to your research and investigation? Well, I think there's so much to say about this building in particular, as you guys well know. But this, I think, this was one of the first, but also I think remains one of the best examples of tropical brutalism here in Hawaii. It was intended to remake downtown in this kind of modern image. And I think very much did that. But I also think it's just an incredible collaboration between the landscape architect Lawrence Halpern, who was legendary. Now, this might be one of his only works in Hawaii. I'm not sure about that. So as ironic as that is, and as sad, and even that one, you give me an idea to go deeper into that on my pitch. So I will do that. But working with the two design architects and then the landscape architect, they've crafted something that is sort of quintessentially brutalist, the hypnotic grid of windows, the three separate but very related volumes. Everything is sort of top heavy in that traditionally brutalist way. We could go to the next picture because there's a good illustration of top heavy. Right. There we go. There we go. Yeah. The castle and cook building is, in fact, bigger on the top than at the bottom. But the bottom does have these flaring out sort of support-like extrusions from what would normally be the rest of the building is completely perpendicular. And by the way, this is the financial plaza of the Pacific. We didn't say that at the beginning. That's what this is. And we're talking about texture, but sort of more performative texture, I believe, on a large building scale. And I cannot not make sort of an analysis about the building performance beyond the visual, the sort of thermal comfort. So I'd probably do that or we do that in my spin. But let's move on and look more at other aspects of texture and give the next slide for that. Oh, yes. So this is building the American Savings Bank Tower. I forget. I believe this was maybe built just one or two years, completed one or two years after financial plaza. This was in place by 1973. OK. And but yeah, as you can see, still very brutalistic. The buildings are caddy corner to each other, but a completely different feel in terms of how the concrete is treated with the bush hammering, these very jagged ribs. That's very brutalistic. And it's a different color. The other thing that this really brings up is concrete is not all the same color. Concrete is not made of the same stuff. So that in this case, we've got a light, sandy colored concrete instead of a dark gray concrete. It's probably due to coral. Exactly. Except basalt. Right. So the different raw materials went into it. And so they're both brutalists, but they have a very different feeling because they're different colors. And that wasn't incidental to it. It wasn't just because they were building in Hawaii. It was very strategic on the architects part. I found out they went to painstaking measures to mix the aggregate to get the color that they wanted, which was interesting. And since you named the owner and the name of the building, I think we got to do another show, a follow-up show, because they're actually moving into a new building that they just finished, which is mainly out of concrete. So this is interesting to see whether it's evolved or not. That's right. That is a very N. That's, yes, correct. But let's stay within the old era in the next picture. And I want to say this era and trying to avoid to say style because that's sort of stigmatizing, I think. But that era is pretty much up for being on the rage of a historic registry because it's 50 years and the Plaza of the Pacific had just turned. So it's supposed to be already. But as we know, being on the register, it doesn't mean it's protected from demise and being demolished. So what it needs is what you greatly do is basically raise public awareness and make people re-appreciate it in best case, or at least tolerate it. Yeah, exactly. I hope so. Well, you do a great job in starting to get this public discourse. And this building here, we were looking at, here, you can see the evolution that here, the glass. You just saw that at the very beginning, you were categorizing brutalism in a great, very simple way so people can comprehend it and say, well, modernism was maximizing the openings. And then the mainland was doing that with glass. And here, in best cases at the mid-century, easy breezy, they were doing it with open openings. And then brutalism was sort of diminishing that. Absolutely. So minimizing the openings and maximizing the opacity. And that's pretty much. And then they were playing with the interstitial space between the inside and the outside. So here, you can see that the glass is sort of slowly but surely getting more flush again with the concrete. Yeah, not as recessed. But then it's just correct. And the next picture is what you told us that was one of the first pieces where you got intrigued or aware of tropical tourism. And here, it's where it's almost flush again with the concrete. And you told me that it seemed to you almost like a canvas that really sort of brings out the green very much. I keep sharing my oldest son Joey's fascination with brutalism when he came here. And he said, you know, this contrast of the gray and the green is so cool and so intriguing. Yeah. Yeah, you can't, from far away, looks a little bit more like the kind of glassy office building. But if you go to this, this is originally called the Haseko building. I think it's called the Bellilani building now, named for the street there. If you go up to it, there are portions of it. They have these kind of poured concrete seating wells and little pathways and all these different little concrete areas out exterior to the building. And they really, because there's such heavy plantings in that area, it really starts to almost feel like ruins or something like that. Even though the building's only 30 or 40 years old. This also won a design award from the local AIA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and that is actually very help-printing, although it's his signature, but not in his own, right? But it's like in his tradition. Yeah, and one of the things that I think is different between when brutalism came in, it is, of course, very stark and hard and brutal. But at the same time, inevitably, they always made room to incorporate greenery. Unlike older buildings which occupied the entire lot out to the sidewalk, brutalist buildings intentionally put plants, trees, foliage as a contrast, as a softening. And like you said, this almost is like a background to display the greenery against or like your sunset. So then you said you want to bring in one building that's maybe sort of the most starkest embodiment of the archetype. So let's jump to that one in the next picture here. The Giant Sandcastle. You're in Christmas mood. Waikiki. That's what they do in Waikiki for Christmas, but not everywhere else. But yeah, so what is this? This is the Patsukukiyo Federal Building, right downtown, right on the edge of downtown along Alamoana Boulevard, designed by architects Hawaii, but specifically Joe Farrell, who was young at the time, I found out. And he was the lead design architect on this building. The building itself has a crazy story in terms of they moved the whole thing, it got redesigned like I think six or seven different times. But the final design is incredibly brutalist. I think it's probably the most, if the financial plaza of the Pacific is one of the earliest and best, I think this kind of exemplifies what people who were working in Hawaii did with that era's approach to building. And let's look at a detail, let's jump to the next slide. And we were saying we should have, while we were chatting before the show, we said we should have gone to the beach and brought sand and little forms. And you were saying the round towers we could have literally made. Yes, right, it's like just putting a little bucket, a plastic sand bucket. So it's a very sort of stereotypic approach of carving out a mass, right? And that's what... Absolutely. And that one, it said you wanted to point out sort of probably its idol or its main inspiration that the architect has confirmed to you that it was. And there's more stories about the creators of the building. So let's jump to the next picture here. Yes, so this is the government service center in, I think the name may have changed now, but in Boston, a major civic building in Boston done by Paul Rudolph, who is now considered, I mean, one of the American masters of brutalism. And I was astounded to find out that I always thought that federal billing had some, you know, it seemed to be drawing on specifically his Rudolph's kind of style or approach, his manner of thinking. But I found out when I talked with Ferrell that yes, indeed, Ferrell had actually interned in Rudolph's office in Florida in the very, very early days. But that he was absolutely following his career even after Ferrell made the move to Hawaii. He was following Rudolph's career when he went to Yale. And he specifically mentioned this building he definitely would have seen published, yeah. Awesome. And that gets us to the next slide because there's an interesting, well, these are more details of it, but let's move on to the next slide here, 14 already. Because there's an interesting, this is the beauty of journalism. And once you start, it's like a continuous thread and from one story you stumble to the next one and so on. So when we were investigating up at my employer's place at UH and our final show, and John Hara has shared with us his original design for the School of Architecture. And he also mainly writing my landscape. So this is interesting that there was a very heavy landscape connotation to the original building design, but even more before that, and John basically told me that and he will, I will make him talk more about it when I will have a show with him in about three weeks. I'll ask him more because he said originally, guess who was basically commissioned to design the School of Architecture building? Paul Rudolph. So there we go, isn't that crazy, right? That would have been incredible to see what that would have looked like. And the two pictures up there is an architecture school that he built on the East Coast and the thing on the bottom right I will bring in my pitch here, which is a book by a former colleague of mine in Arizona who wrote the book about that era that you were just relating to, which was that Rudolph basically grew up in Florida and had his first work in Florida. It was very sort of high-modern and very tectonic and then he moved up that coast and got more and more heavy. So he came from basically more urban, yeah. So he came from sort of very ethereal, very airy, very light, very ephemeral, very heavy, it's interesting. So we're wondering, obviously time-wise it must have been in the later area, but our sort of question is, would he have reconnected to his roots about tropical? And so hopefully John knows more. But this sort of like more sort of this sort of differentiation between the steatomic and the tectonic and the light and the heavy in brutalism as well, inspired you to share a couple, actually two more projects here. Let's go to the next slide here, which are on other islands because it's not just here, the brutalism. Right, the epicenter is definitely downtown Honolulu, but it was amazing. I think that one of my favorite things about doing this piece was really finding just these isolated specimens all over the place. I think my favorite might be the Zippy's Headquarter on King Street. It completely takes the brutalist language in this little two-story building. Yes, a tiny little brutalist building, but it's very funny. But yeah, on Big Island and elsewhere, even at Waikiki, we have our own brutalist hotel building, also done by Joe Ferrell. But here this is, I forget the name of this resort, but it's in South of Kona. And yeah, completely, it's such an interesting contrast because it sits on the land so wisely, but then the closer you get, it still has these very broad-faced, monolithic, concrete walls, and they repeat in this geometry that goes across the coast. And again, it's that juxtaposition that I think actually makes it work, even though the European architects probably thought that a resort done in this style was probably like anathema to the entire endeavor, but... Well, there's an even more famous project in regards to that, which is the next slide here. It's the Mauna Kea, one on the Big Island, which many consider one of the marvels of modern architecture and actually sort of not like mid-century modern, but later and sort of a very sort of an interesting tropical spin on brutalism that is way more sort of framing views. So it's less about the form, but it's more about the space, but it's inherently about concrete as that sort of containing material, right, containing and holding human activity and event. And you know, that was all easy breezy when it opened. I got to go there. I always loved to hear that. And it was all built like that intentionally. It feels right on the cusp there. I think this was 1965, and it's just, you know, you can feel people sliding into just these big concrete buildings, but even today, luckily, maybe not in the guest rooms, but this is still one of the most easy breezy hotels in the world. Yes, it is. And if you have been watching the show, this is not a surprise how much sympathetic we are with that. And maybe we go to the last slide here to that regards. And by now, DeSoto can talk better and more about this than I myself, because he's been... He's been taught. Yeah, and he taught himself. Well, this is, again, we go back to, we like to end with a lot of sort of a hopeful or optimistic view to the future. And Martin is a professor at UH, and his students have yearly projects, annual projects. This is one of them, Primitiva 2. This is one. This is Primitiva 1. That's fine. Pardon me. Just to basically make some points about it, it's open, it's easy breezy, it is open to the air. It incorporates a lot of open spaces for the residents. It is also a place where you can buy things, buy food. It is built so that it is more communal rather than individual. And we've got a central core which gives light, which brings light and air into the entire thing. And it's also in the lower left corner, we also see the plans for making smaller, skinnier buildings rather than huge monolithic concrete structures. It's something else that's come out of this, this looking towards the future. And that's, again, we're wanting to go in that direction. Yeah, and it's last but not at all least, it's out of concrete. I was gonna say, that's why it makes a little cameo in the article. For that reason, we talked at length about if nothing else concrete, it may not feel like a lava rock wall, but it is a locally made material. Whether it's poured in place or precast, we can make, it is one of the few things we don't have to import. So there may be a future in concrete construction. No, there will definitely be a future. We think so. So it's the evolution of the tropical brutalism. We have a lot of basalt here. We do. We are getting new basalt all the time, not at the moment. We just got a whole bunch more new basalt. And I like, I just got the notice that we're at the end of the show, so I need to somehow phase out. But I like that you actually centered in your description, you centered the social aspect of that. And that's something that I heard you say a lot where brutalism comes from. It has a very sort of socialist approach, right? It's about the people and it's about civic engagement. And that's what we're doing. And I think coming full circle, that's also well thinking you for having inspired this great discussion discourse spinning off the article. And I like that this sort of the medium you were using has the same approach in being very proletarian and being inclusive because I bought my copy at Saveway and you can buy it at Long Drugs and stuff. So it's not like a boutique, an exclusive thing. It's like when people buy their groceries, they pick this up. So it's very sort of easy to digest, but yet very rich of nutrients, I would say, as tropical brutalism is. We also said the closer you get, the more you see. You see the substance. So again, seems like the total piece of artwork from all directions. So thank you for having written the article and for having been here to talk about it. And as you can see, we got us going to go above and beyond. And hopefully you guys do too. And keep writing the story for your own and help to sort of basically public education about that particular subject matter. So. Well, the more you look, the closer you get, the more you see that's true of buildings but it's also true of stories. So that's true. That's true. Right, right, right. So that we're at the end of the show next week. See you back hopefully for an update on the evolution of Elevate, which is one of the recent plans that are homegrown on the island by Nathan Toothman. And so see how that went. And so until then, please stay very tropically exotic and exotically tropic. Bye-bye. All right, good job. Thank you.