 Welcome back to us here still on the search for human-humane architecture here in downtown Honolulu, which one could call a construct of Howley's Hawaii and that's the title of today's show and our expert is Dr. William Chapman who allows us to call him Bill from now on and Bill is highly educated at the most prestigious places in the world both nationally and internationally meaning at Columbia and at Oxford and he's currently a professor up at UH in Hawaiian Studies and at least as much also in the Department of Architecture where I'm teaching so thank you Bill for being here with us. Martin thanks for having me it's been really a while getting on the show and I'm glad you found they persevered and got me on so no thanks for pleasure and I just want to as a disclaimer right away I want to say that Howley Hawaii was definitely your title right? I'm very used to take the blame that's very innocent innocent yeah yeah no that's good but for let's say since this is an edu taining program and format let's inform the audience who might not be from here because this could be viewed and heard all over the world what in the world are Howley's? Well as you know and many people know Howley is a term that was used by the Hawaiian population to describe outsiders people who are coming from somewhere else and I understand it means without language really but also sort of without breath and soul to some degree as well so it's kind of remember this place for nobody I never met anyone who didn't speak Hawaiian language so that Howley stuck and that is still a term that's why they use today to describe people from the mainland of the US. I always use the even more catchy description which is that it means the one without breath and when Cook came he did not do what the Hawaiians did actually smell each other's breath when they welcome each other so they said he's the one without breath and how he ended is a is a story that most people know as well so but let's go the other way around what maybe Howley's did to Hawaii and but before we do that let's look at how people here were doing it before they got contacted which is actually another term right you get you get the pre-contact and the post-contact so this is an image here of because this is an architecture show here how people dwelled on the island pre-contact this is a probably early 20th century maybe late 19th century photograph of a of a Howley Peely there could be different kinds of vegetation used for the covering but Peely Grass which was a kind of grass that grew near the seashore kind of a stock thick stock grass not a grass that was used as we're more familiar with the grasses that are used for feeding animals which is all pretty much an import from other places when they brought it in for cattle grazing and things so this was a grass that Hawaiians would harvest and use for building houses particularly those near the shores if up in the mountains you might have other materials that were used in ferns and other things as well sometimes ferns were used to decorate them and they suited very much suited the needs of Hawaiians in a way buildings that could be replaced after storms or replaced periodically as they has maybe on the structure began to fail or the grass needed replacing these are all aspects to it and Hawaiians made permanent architecture they made mainly temples which were made out of fieldstone or rubble and but and those often included other components like wood components and things like that they had wind towers for telling the future and telling fortunes and speaking to the gods and they would usually have holly peely within them but basically most people lived in a form of holly peely so as most indigenous cultures they made it from scratch right here in particular because there was no other place to get it from right they have to basically do that and there was probably status represented in it as well the simplest ones were a little less than pup tents really just to two uprights forming a triangle more elaborate ones had a kind of bow shape to them and usually had a very low door I mean you could argue even that this door main already show the influence of Western civilization or Western influence just by the fact that's kind of a bigger door most of the doors and they really old representations of holly peely are quite close to the ground some people argue that them when you started getting vertical walls that that was a Western influence but some of the early images suggest that some of the buildings actually did have kind of vertical walls one of the interesting things is the whole way of men making them and tying them is very similar to the same craft involved in building canoes or adding outriggers to canoes or putting up mass and things like that kind of continuity lashing technique in the materials they're usually made out of Senate which is a kind of taken from coconut husk making a kind of cordage and then the cordage was used for tying and they didn't use really pins and they certainly didn't use metal because they didn't have any metal to work with little bits of iron in Hawaii at that time and then they got contacted right and everything changed and their entire life including architecture which is mostly an impression and embodiment of sociotel developments so how did that go well I think you know it varied like that picture shows there were Hawaiians living in grass houses well into the early part of the 20th century but I think by the 1920s they were really a rarity and remember coming across articles in the Hilo paper when they were building a rail link for the sugar plantation they'd come across an old holly peeling so really there weren't very many left there's still a kind of nostalgic element a little grass shack in Hawaii famous song as well but gradually Hawaiians had moved into buildings mainly made out of wood if you look at early images of Honolulu there were grass houses in Honolulu into a really late period into well into the 19th century quite typically they would take them with mud by that point because not so much to create a stronger roof but really to keep the animals they want a grazing moving animals at that point they wanted to keep them from chewing on the roof so they put mud on them protect them they also faced the importation of different kinds of insects and other pests they had rats already but they didn't have a lot of like that some of the termites and things like that we have now we're probably not here then and so once you started getting insect pests they became much less comfortable Hawaiians adapted them they put in windows some of the earliest representation show sort of vertical double-hung windows being put in at the ground level where they would open sideways like a slider provide ventilation and you could see that in response to European traditions they started big building really bigger hollies particularly for churches but eventually you started getting the use more of wood construction was really typical and stone construction stone construction they understood but they didn't understand it from a European point of view with a lot of set in mortar with walls with plates and then building roofs over these elements so some of the earliest Western settlers you know people like John Young over on the Big Island who had actually been more or less abducted by King Kamehameha to serve in his military and later serve as an advisor he built the kind of complicated compound over and on quite high on the Big Island and it was a kind of combination of a kind of a welch homestead and a and a Hawaiian house compound a little bit of both cultures it did get this kind of hybridity yeah yeah and maybe one keynote is as well plantation home and then maybe Dickey because you mentioned the roofs maybe you want to talk about these yeah well some of the earliest buildings somewhere actually there was actually a short period of building with adobe or mud brick construction there were an sizable number of people from Mexico and that area who brought this technology with them and one of the things that mud brick construction required was a kind of roof that would dramatically overhang it would protect it from the rain so it became kind of common and there was a examples you can still see at Waoli on the island of Kauai it's not mud brick it's actually stone construction with plaster over it but it has this very steep pitched roof with it's kind of a side that go like this kind of it's got a it's really a second double pitch really so architectural historians would call it a bell cast roof and kind of like a square bell and what this was was to provide a sort of space around the building to shed water Calma Capulia Church in Honolulu was very much the same kind of the construction and originally both of these buildings were probably covered with pili grass and then eventually they got covered with cedar shingle which was a were imported from the Pacific Northwest and they were used commonly but the pitch was necessary for the original covering with for the covering with the pili grass and the double pitch was because if you were to follow the angle of the steep roof down you wouldn't have room to walk underneath it you actually had the double pitch to give you a headspace so and then when they were covered with shingles they continued that tradition shingles don't require quite a steep a pitch but they also require a steep pitch and in fact at the time it's interesting that some of the famous architects you probably talked about other series CW Dickey and Hartwood some of these guys actually were involved in the restoration of these buildings in fact Hartwood worked on the violi mission in the 1920s and so he was familiar with this kind of construction and CW Dickey worked on the mission house in Honolulu in the 1920s when it was converted from having once been a kind of girl school for Hawaiian kids and then was turned into a museum so this is really part of this back to your term howly the kind of period in the 1920s when the kind of well-established Euro-American families were beginning to see their history in a kind of in terms we now think of as historic preservation kind of tell the story of pioneering life and they were really trying to tell that story not the story of Hawaiian life but the story of the little house in the prairie surrounded by the savages idea and so it's not surprising that CW Dickey and Hartwood and other proponents of this Ray Morris was another of this kind of Hawaii regionalist style that really gets started in the teens that really takes off in the 20s and 30s that that would have been a kind of signature element double-pitched roof became very important to them and so now everybody even my kids who grew up in Hawaii they all say hey dad there's a Dickey roof and so that's what you see yeah yeah before we go into our little mandatory break hardwoods by the way our friend Donna Hibbard has written books and write them is about hardwood and this mason did a really nice book on hardwood and there's one there's one project his latest work which is the board of water supply which basically breaks free from the traditional i love the border water supply building i think i don't know if you have a picture of it the show but it's probably my favorite building and i was a disconcerted the other day to hear that someone from the planning department at UH is being brought in to discuss how they might treat the area we call the capital district around the capital and they said it was out of alignment and so it needed to be taken out which is really disturbing oh my god but it may be queen's hospital well now we need a break to catch a breath and vent about that after the break okay back in a minute i've got the beagle sisters here with a healthy tip we encourage you to enjoy the food you eat this holiday season and keep it local and healthy yeah eat the rainbow in your rainbow and if you need any produce come to the red barn on the north shore aloha my name is richard emory host of condo insider more than a third of hawaii's population live in some form of association and our show is all about educating board members and owners about the responsibilities and obligations and providing solutions for a great association you can watch me live on thursdays 3 p.m to 4 p.m each week aloha aloha this is kaley akina with the weekly a hana kakou let's work together program on the think tech hawaii broadcast network monday's at 2 o'clock p.m movers and shakers and great ideas join us we'll see you then aloha hi i'm stacey hayashi and you can catch me on monday's at 11 on think tech hawai stacey to the rescue see you then okay we're back to bill with howley hawaii today and if we can get picture two and and three really quick after each other that's more the mainstream um one is picture two is is uh basically couple lay this is what we find today this is a very i like to call it allow myself to call it an invasive american this is not the best of the best of american because there was good stuff even suburban stuff the case study houses and things like that so this is the most watered down of the american dream and picture three which is also a permanent background is basically the high rise right so both these however we have to say in all these you know you find better buildings than than than worse buildings but still it's it's pretty much a an imported to say the least it allows us to say an invasive um fabric that's imported however if we get to the picture number four um uh this is we came from the border water supply and hardwood with your favorite building of his which you see in danger then we gotta really work on that and uh so that was segwaying into a modern era and that was basically sort of promoted by a rather tragic event in history right well my thought martin is really world war two i know you had to sort of brown on before but no this world war two is really the pivotal moment i mean i guess we could see heartwood's building as pivotal but it was already in the post war period and it was his effort to kind of come to grips with modernism where he came from really what you'd have to call a bozar architectural tradition which was based very much on a formal plan a sense of hierarchy you know it at the front door is all these things that architects were trained in whether they were in germany or whether they were in danmark or most famously in france the vehicle the bozar and so that building is neat because it has they sort of bristle a kind of a kibuzi influence modernism with a kind of chinese pavilion entrance area which is gives hierarchy to the building yeah he managed to kind of evoke something of asia as well and these gentlemen on some of that right in hawaiian architecture or architecture in hawai in the post war period and these two gentlemen and there are more but this is the three people persons man in the center of the picture are actually the next generation and they actually learned on the hardwood and they're learned on the diki right will you tell us who they are well we're going to talk about just three of them who i can identify um vladimir aspaf is grinning down below he's got the mustache peter wimbley's up behind him peter wimbley formed a firm that would become international and then to the right is um um um alfred pratt alfred pratt thank you and he was actually weirdly for a short period in prison during world war two just because he was german austrian to be to be sorry you're right but because they still were suspect right but by that point austria had become german and that's fair enough and my mother being austrian high mom that's i can totally relate to that i have posted german invasion right so anyway he um he would go on to design the arizona memorial in 1962 which is his most famous building but i think you had pictures of other buildings he did as well we can actually that's the second to last picture um is um i picked intentionally buildings because you were uh and this is good because it's actually even uh located very close to your favorite hardwood building and it and it applies a similar pattern which we can call bioclimatic because the fins of the of the board water supply are decorative but they're performatively decorative exactly because they actually cool the building and they block the sun during particular times of the day that's what the whole brisselet means you know it's unblind basically well i think you know both osipoff and osipoff had started doing fairly traditionalist buildings in the 30s he was doing kind of some of this regional stuff but kind of some of those houses would look like diki houses really some were kind of looked like suburban houses in california sort of um monterey style and things like that there's one in minowa that's very typical of that time period but i think in the post war period they really were trying to think of an architecture that would speak to hawaii so there you do have this group of people that were still interested in hawaiian regionalism and i think that's really important and all three of them addressed that in different ways um this picture by the way if we can go back for a second to the second to last picture is uh when we see our friend don hibbert here and uh one woman from the church and the guy to the right is my dear mentor robert mccarter who has written so many books about lucan franklark rides i think i met him when alba auto and many more and uh he was here so uh we gave him a tour and we heard the the woman from the church shared she said well it's recently getting getting hot in the church and we said has it always been like that she says no and we said what was different well there was some green that um the planters were rotting and um we took them down and this is almost similar to what you share with us the shocking news of some people thinking about doing something to the border water supply she shared with us well an architect is consulting in what they could do for a shading we just said we'll bring back what it was the original because there was some intent i mean vegetative facades for shading we wish would have that these days and there is actually you know tendencies in the in the world and contemporary modern architecture our students uh suggest that a lot so just just bring this back right i think probably the most famous i mean there's a kind of direct link between this maybe in the out rigger club by alba both of them are trying to come to grips with this new era of concrete construction kind of comes out of europe it comes out of the tradition of look who's the a and people like that but it definitely um was going to be the building material in the 1950s and certainly wood construction was other than for much smaller scale buildings like houses was not going to be popular and people were getting used i think during world war two one thing desoto may have mentioned was even that's when really some of the most voracious termites arrived in hawaii as a result of the shipping of materials during that time and um so that's that was a had an impact on it so they i think they thought like the the concrete would have a feeling of kind of permanence that was a kind of notion of modernism as well a kind of a time stopping quality there was an architecture that wasn't just in the sequence of new buildings it was a new architecture that was ending all the rules right and then this is a perfect or producer brings in the perfect picture of another project by aussie prophet embodies that perfect and again this commitment to trying to figure out how you make them kind of energy not energy efficient but comfortable basically taking advantage of the breezes taking advantage of vegetation trying to make them open kind of embracing the climate of hawaii which i know is a cause of yours right it is and these are the grandfathers of that movement but as you see even at the airport these days the the type if the late 20th century was the age of concrete i'm afraid maybe the early 21st century is the age of air conditioning and that there are some scary tendencies at the airport too to so to hawaii is that more and give it a give it some sheet rocky ornaments which by the way you tell me the hawaii you talked about symbolism but compared to other asian pacific cultures that you're an expert in the hawaii's were very relatively little symbolic right they were actually pretty rational in their in their gestures right well they certainly had representation and symbolism of stuff but i can see what you mean they were forced by necessity to some degree to be kind of practical with bitruvian and architectural right that's a great compliment and the last the last picture is now the third person who is pete wimily who is mostly and desoda and i got to talk about the hilton wine village and some of the next show so you know some of pete's work is which i feel is dismissed and maybe for some you know a good reason as being tiki architecture there's a lot of that i think he really was trying to go beyond tiki if you look at his earlier buildings i think he was trying to draw upon kind of the culture of the pacific he wasn't trying i mean the tiki movement is really something that comes out of california you know and it had to do with world war two as well it comes out of the broadway show south pacific it comes out of the bars that these guys had become familiar with when they were traveling around the beach culmer and all that and on the beach culmer it was in california who literally changed his name legally to beach culmer started this movement and it became very popular and then it kind of sort of was a sort of like a wave it's in some way starts in hawaii washes up in california with a serviceman after the war and then comes back to hawaii but i think wimbley was always trying to do something beyond that he was and uh locate something in place and that picture we saw just took this the other day at sunset and i was talking to rob here that um us having been in the desert and knowing the saguaro cactus if you cut a section through the horizontal section through the saguaro cactus you you see um or even when you look at it you see itself shading so through this undulation of shape there's always certain parts in the shade so it keeps it hydrated or prevents it from dehydrating and this building here and i have to give a compliment uh to kamehameha school in bob oda who is um uh you know anytime we are in touch i said i know bob you don't like the building because you constantly are going around and doing the spalling repair because these fins are so amazingly thin and they didn't have fiber reinforcement so it's always spalling off but they always go around and repair it and and i have to you know thank them for that because this would be a building that would be a pity to to see go because it's truly a marvel of of blend i think that's your point of of so these people came they're all let's say again asipov was russian but grew up in japan prize was austrian and wimbledon was american so they were from all over the place and they certainly brought the best from their culture right but different to these days where architects come also still richard meyer and other people come for the big developers and are less sensitive about uh the specificity of why and these guys were very very devoted and respectful and said we want to blend the best of what what we have what we bring with the best of what we find is that probably a couple reasons for that i mean one reason would be simply back in the 50s it was more of a commitment to come to y&b here you couldn't just kind of fax it off or send it as an attachment from your offices in new york right so you actually had to experience the place to some degree that probably had an impact too i'm looking at that picture in my mind now of the varsity building and i can't help but think that i'm also disappointed to have lost the cw diki design sort of deco sort of inspired varsity theater which was in the parking lot at that point that's it we run out of tragic loss it was and we take that as uh as motivation for doing another show bill yeah we do about something on preservation next time right thank you we do so much to talk about thank you very much for having been here much thanks