 Welcome back to Think, Take, Hawaii, human-humane architecture here today with every other week's learning from the past for the future with your host the Soto Brown. Thank you very much actually you're the host and I'm the co-host of both. Okay, okay, all right, all right. We've got a nice hot lava photograph behind us because we're talking about volcanic volume. Yeah, today we're actually broadcasting from our lava rock capital of Honolulu. Yes, we are. Yes, we are. And if we can get picture number one. All right. And so we really want to talk about what we see and the things that buildings are made out of on this island. And this is my neighborhood. I live right next to that. So I'm walking by it's one over ever over of the Foster Tower. And I'm seeing this build with heavy steel and light gauge steel. Then it's wrapped and it's dry walled. And all these materials we could say if they would complement the island and be better than what we have it's good. But steel unless it's exposed and you can repaint it, it rusts. Right. And drywall is an ironic term because in the tropics it tends to get wet and molds. Yes. But what I find the most hideous here is that as they had started here at the end after doing this wrapping and layering, they basically clad it with wood to come across as local. Correct. And that's faking it. Exactly. Right. And so it makes me really think about how do we build here because this is actually the way we build where I'm from in Germany. We just had gotten snow and so we have to bundle up. It's cold. We have to wrap in layers. Yes. And here we don't have to do that. Correct. And so why are we building in in this way? Right. So where I'm from just the next picture reflecting the two top pictures are from where I'm actually from northern Germany. We have you know some forest but not many. So we put a wooden stud every three feet and then we infill it with some sod brick in that case. And the bottom one is our branch office in music at the other end of Germany down south where we got the Alps and the Black Forest which is what Americans can associate Germany with. Right. And they used at the top floor is heavy timber, is logs. And in both cases we try to sort of investigate and evolve that sort of tradition. Right. Of substance versus surface. Correct. So the next picture shows us you can talk about this in any kind of region in the world any indigenous culture had no other chance than make something out of nothing. Nothing being basically what they had around them. Correct. And there was striking example is certainly the Inus or the Eskimos which had nothing but snow. Right. And they made one of the most genius structures that have the perfect ratio between volume and surface and staying warm. You can actually stay warm in an eagle. There was this guy who shipwrecked. Did you hear about him? And they made him take off his clothes which he was embarrassed because he was western and they saved his life because only naked under that one animal fur. Yeah. He was able to survive naked because of that incredible thermal performance. Yeah. Of an eagle. He was giving off heat and the heat was being kept in. Exactly. Right. Right. So you've been from here and you know working on this subject explain to us how your ancestors have been dwelling. Well exactly is what you just said. In this situation you use what is located in your environment. You cannot bring things in. You're not importing things. And so Hawaiians lived in Hale Hale Pili meaning a framework out of logs and sticks and branches and then thatched with peely grass. And that is a very light structure but we've discussed in the past how that's good in terms of you know air movements and so forth. But they didn't just build a Hale Pili on the bare ground. They built a foundation first. And you can see in the foreground of the photograph in the bottom that there's also a rock wall there. And I think if we go to our next picture we're going to see what we're talking about. And so in the next picture we've got the volcanic source that we're talking about here for basalt. The top picture is Diamond Head as seen from Martin's little home in Waikiki. And the bottom picture is Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii. That is erupting basalt. And we're basically talking about basalt being taken out of the ground and turned into buildings. But not every volcano that erupts gives off the same stuff. And let's go to the two. Because I'm not from here. I'm safer I hope. I talked to Pili. And we cut a deal that I bring these two here. So come and show our two rocks. And you get this one here and I get the other one. And these two rocks that we are showing are here because we're talking about basalt. And so basalt is not always the same thing exactly. So if we put these two together it may not show too clearly. But when you look at them in reality they are quite different. They're a little different color. The texture is different. The density is different. This one has small other objects sort of included in it. And that is important when you are using basalt. If you're making a building you want it to be uniform and you got to take it from the same location. And that's because nature down there that shoots up the variety is not an industrial process. It's highly sort of informed by the pressure that differs and by the flow that differs and by the duration that differs. And the chemical makeup. Exactly. And so what comes out of the ground is not always the same exact thing. So as we continue we're going to be seeing different types of buildings that have different different facades or whatever. But we start out with the next picture is to say that unfortunately these as seeing them in architecture it's almost gone. Right. And as you provided you found this article and contributed to that. It's the if so they're mostly seen as sort of decorative pieces in your garden or as little fountains. But we're even reading that we weren't quite sure if they're actually even rock. They actually made basically fiber glass or concrete and there's some form is some mold that you pour it from. So this gives us a clue that there's sort of some disturbed relationship that we might have developed to this very original authentic material to us. Correct. And next picture is introducing this sort of as the author as a scholar who has written this article here about the subject matter. And we want to in the following show at least two projects out of it. And we want to start out with the one on the bottom right. And we want to if you can get the next picture we want to start sort of chronologically in saying you know before we get into buildings you know rocks have been used volcanic rocks have been used for more landscaping. You tell what you're in purposes to right. So the book that we just saw was called Po Haku was published in 2003 and it's about stone structures in Hawaii. And I wrote two articles one about Shangri-La which is what we're looking at here and another the other subject which we'll get to and later in the program. And Shangri-La is the home of Doris Duke and it was built in the 1930s and you can see it's on black point. And a lot of the topography of this location was very minimal it was a sloping sort of a not too impressive site very pleasant. And at the time that she had this built she had this huge retaining wall built as well as a little harbor all built out of basaltic rock. And this caused a big problem at the time because she had to get special permission from the federal government to alter the coastline as much as she did. And it kind of elevated her above all the rest of the poor people below so that she had more privacy. And again that's just a lava rock wall. And in the next picture that's what we're going to see again here's that same process going on and you can see it even better in 1937. Really tall rock wall being built at Shangri-La and there's the scaffolding on the right that is the construction the way that they built the darn thing. And in our next picture we also see that rock is not always used for fine purposes like building facades etc because it has this utility of being used for bridges and drainage canals and in the upper picture it's a little bridge over the Moanalua stream and Moanalua gardens. So you're basically like reconstructing rearranging the material that's already there and you just re-organizing the rock. Exactly because you're digging up the rock as you do this and you know the picture on the bottom is the Kapalama canal. They just lined the canal they put concrete down and they built a little bridge out of the rock that was there. And up to these days we actually use it and that what we see at the next picture right we might not always pay attention to it if we're on a bicycle walking or walking. Exactly and I'm happy they put in these kind of concrete spacer between actually the asphalt of the street because I can bicycle on that. It's almost like an entire bicycle. That's where the worst potholes used to be so I'm really happy about that but we don't want to talk about that we'd want to talk about the edge. So this is again something that you probably would not do today this is I think an older basalt curb stones which were replaced in a modern more modern street probably be constructed in the 1950s. But there are a lot of street curbs like this in Honolulu which again as you said you don't necessarily notice but this is the level of hand work that we won't do anymore. Yeah and that's a very universal theme because I actually grew up with that too light believe it or not to the next picture. Right. And we call this we call this cobstein fluster and that means head stone pavers and and you immediately said hey Martin and there's a very special way you lay them and that's why I pulled this picture right to the left in this sort of fan like shape. Right. And I should have put a picture in off the house. I spent my youth the second part of my youth which the street was still paved that way and it was very noisy when the cars were driving over and it was very slippery. Yes. And back in the days where the wagon trains always there wouldn't wheels broke right right. And as you pointed out these are maybe not the main reasons why they're not around anymore. The main reason is the cost of labor because you got to lay them piece by piece and no one can afford that anymore. No no no of course not. And again it's a very distinctive thing but that is basaltic rock in Germany just like we have basalt rock here in the Hawaiian Islands. But now we get out of the grounds and finally introduce lava rock to more conventional pieces of architecture. Next picture please. Right. And there is the Cocoa Poms Hotel those are the cottages at the Cocoa Poms Hotel and we did a show about the Cocoa Poms Hotel at one point that's what you can see in the upper corner. But here not only are the rocks lining the bank of that little canal that we see but they are in fact the foundation structures of each one of these little bungalows that we see as well. And they go a little higher like to the windows too. Correct. Like an elevated fondant. Correct. And so we're now about to see more of those kinds of buildings as well as accessories to some of those buildings I think. And in the next picture this is a photograph taken about 1960 this is on Kalani Ikki Street and it is as you can tell in the background by the style of the houses a modern housing development housing subdivision. But in the foreground are rock walls made from again the same onsite rock which form not only a barrier between the street and the property but also that gives you a level lawn right in front of your front of your front door to make life a little bit more comfortable on a sloping site. And another example of that you photographed in Kaimo Ki and I remember that one too when I had a friend to look at and that's the next picture and actually the next pictures. Right. So this is just the same thing in a little bit more excessive way right. Correct. And the interesting thing about this house is it has a lot of Japanese elements and although it's not easy to see the base of these very substantial walls has a little flair at the corners which mimics the style that's used for Japanese castle bases which usually have a motor around them. You see actually on the next picture we can see yeah on the yeah a little bit. A little bit in the upper left corner you can see that little bit of flair that is specifically meant to make this look more Japanese as of course the woodwork does have the same elements as well. And another project in the neighborhood in Kaimo Ki this next picture stands for the aspect of durability because you said well this puzzles you this side because this building has been burned down quite a while ago and has been a ruin ever since and this is a prime piece of land so it's a mystery why there hasn't been redeveloped but it's good for us because it tells us it teaches us these are not going to be eroded away as one can see they're just standing like the rock in the surf right exactly whether they weather but rather little and you know as you said this building burned down in it was a private home in 1976 and if those ruins weren't there it would look like this was just a lot that had never even been developed exactly so that means for people today who might not want the the termite guy to come every ten years and throw that big tarp over the house and poison it yes you know this sounds rather attractive or something that's of longevity right and doesn't go away right so we're going to go to the next picture which is the first real building entirely out of rock and that is also part of that that article you wrote correct these are the guard houses or this is the guard house that is at Fort Ruger and Fort Ruger is on the slopes of Diamond Head and the main road around Diamond Head Diamond Head Road passes through Fort Ruger and there were two guard houses at either end of the property of the military property and it was always open to the public so people could always drive through my mother tells the story of driving past this guard house during World War II and being stopped by the century because she was speeding so she managed to not get in trouble for that but these buildings as you were just saying the more stone you have the stronger they are and the longer they last there's very little that can burn here so if that you know if nothing catches on fire you've got a building for the ages yeah and that's obviously very appropriate for the military who wants durability and solid exactly and the next picture is showing a couple of I took this one and you sort of misinterpreted it for another one so that's a good thing because there's actually two there's one on Nimitz and this one is on Mauna Kea I think close to King Street and these are these very sort of rugged there's almost more mortar in here not quite but there's a lot of mortar in there and which obviously makes it easier because they don't need to cut you know the pieces of stone so fine to fit them together which is the next picture which they then started to do and this is the Armstrong building on King Street at the canal there and something interesting I took this picture from Diamond Headside you can see there's this sort of rougher wall on the left side of the bottom picture and this is where my favorite alley is it's only three feet wide it's like a canyon it's awesome you got to go there and that is sort of the cheaper side right whereas the front facade is to show off it's the edgars and the stones are very meticulously cut and and dressed as I called it correctly yes and the next picture is is another a little more out there as always in our show we just give you appetizer you guys got to go out and find more and there's tons out there and you pointed out we can call this almost an international style because that's how building have been dressed and decorated almost anywhere on the east coast of the United States and in Europe they came from the United Kingdom this way right but this here has a local flare because they did not ship it in correct which they could have done and put in some other cases but they made it out of the local stuff correct and this as you pointed out and I think that's interesting too it's very rough each individual stone is different shape but there is a very strong structure to this entire ornate facade this is the nipu giji building which was a Japanese language newspaper and we're going to see there are surprisingly more buildings like this in Hawaii than you might think yeah we're not sure we're estimating that might might also be already a hybrid construction because there might be some woods construction behind so this might not be any more like previously the Fort River correct which is entirely out of because in some cases which we'll get to the refires then you can tell right buildings don't burn down they're entirely out of style right there's some combustible which is a good way to segue us into the next picture in 21 from buildings they're very close to you yeah professionally and personally that's Hawaiian Hall this is the interior of Hawaiian Hall at Bishop Museum this is under construction in 1899 and as you look at the wall you can clearly see it's just like the walls we just saw in which the rough textured rocks are just because this is the interior nobody was going to see this because it's been covered up they didn't really do a lot of good finish here the other interesting thing though is if you look on the right there actually is a steel skeleton inside this building that holds it up yeah and those are steel girders on the right that are supporting what looks like just a stone building so it's pretty much next picture so we call it a wrapping that's probably fair to say correct doing and there is the stone in the foreground that they quarried on the site of Bishop Museum and used to construct this rather massive and impressive looking Hawaiian Hall and again this is 1899-1900 still stands today yeah and we see it also finished on the next picture right in its original condition right and this is Bishop Hall which is also on the Bishop Museum grounds today this was again stone that was quarried on the site this was the first classroom building for the Kamehameha Boys School which opened to write about that same time and used to be located on the grounds of Bishop Museum today and there is that same Richard Sony and Romanesque exterior that we've just been talking about mm-hmm and the next picture is one where we're talking about that hybrid construction and burning you know this one having burned down correct okay this is one of two similar large buildings on the campus of the Mid-Pacific Institute which is in Manawa and this is I don't remember the name of this building but it was completed in 1910 unfortunately it burned down in 1950 and there was a great deal of wood inside it the entire roof is wood all of the interior structures were wood so when it burned all the combustible stuff as you said burned up leaving this facade but they chose not to rebuild it and in fact just demolished it so all of the stonework is now gone so sometimes stone exteriors can be deceptive and they can look more robust than they really are and sometimes the opposite way and that gets us to the next pair of pictures and this is a little quiz yeah you made me take yeah and did you by the way did you know what this was no of course not okay okay no no no i thought maybe you did okay here this picture the two pictures were taken of a famous building in Honolulu under construction in 1926 and the interesting thing is as you can see again there are the stone walls made up of individual pieces of basalt rock and yet this the building which stands today doesn't look anything like this and so when people look at these construction pictures they have no idea what it was because it looks so different because the exterior has been altered or was it originally constructed to cover up those original rocks okay now lift the blanket which building is it and which building is it well let's go to the next picture and everybody's going to see there is no way it was the Honolulu Academy of Arts today's uh Honolulu Museum of Art and they added a sort of a rough textured but white stucco that covers up all of those rocks and this reminded me and this is what the picture on the left refers to my days in Lincoln Nebraska I can still say that well Nebraska my home away from home I went to school and started my teaching career and here's my Lincoln in Lincoln and but more importantly the building in the back is by the same architect um Goodhue and he was building the capital in Nebraska at the same time and same as in that case it's what you see is not what you get because there's a steel structure right it's the main structure of the tower and then it's basically clad with stones so you have the sort of same attitude sort of Beaux-Arts attitude right that was about decoration and ornamentation and cladding versus the old archaic sort of Egyptian monolithic right which again modernism was kicking in we're talking 1930s labor I mean there was sort of the new deal and these things but besides that it was it was still about or it was already about being more efficient and effective in in construction and the other interesting thing that that I was saying about this Nebraska state capital building is was very unusual at the time for a state to build a high-rise or skyscraper building particularly as you pointed out in the middle of the prairie yeah there was no necessity to build a tall skinny building yeah but they did it to be an iconic structure to represent their state and in the same way I think the Honolulu Academy of Arts building is very iconic in a lot of the ways that it looks and also how they very cleverly added elements from different cultures to put the whole building together to symbolize that the Hawaiian Islands are in the middle of the Pacific with a mix of different cultures there's more to architecture than just what it immediately looks like yeah it's the process and the making and the thinking and the relationship yeah getting to the end of the show let's show a couple more pictures the next one is one that's is my quiz that I'm saying is this monolithic or is this is it a veneer because we can say here that there is we find this topic so exciting that we're going to dedicate a volume two to it so next time in two weeks we're going to talk about volcanic veneers and ventilation because we want to talk about another thermal performance potentially right and this one here is just one over diamond head of the hideous one that I started out the show with right that new renovation and we feature this in the previous show which also the little picture refers to where it was about crazy cantilevering canopies but this one here is the diamond head end of it is from cave wall that has basically the iz music always playing you know under the rainbow and a little poster in there and it's to me it looks it looks pretty much solid instead atomic or maybe there's some structure behind doesn't really matter and the last picture that's two two pictures is once again getting you home to where you work yeah and talking about this project yeah this is bishop museum's planetarium which was under construction in 1960 and this is the first big building that was built on the campus in many many decades so it was very exciting and if you look at the base of the dome you can see the dome of the planetarium is under construction but the base is one of our rock walls made out of basalt and uh if we go to our next picture there is the planetarium and a modern structure that looks like the jessons could be there but it uses this very interesting and traditional rock wall sculpture a rock wall sculpture with the other stuff that's there and i only thought i could use this to segue into the next picture because i thought this used to be a water pump but you told me it wasn't no but there's one so now we're saying if people get excited about working with lava stone here anymore then people might say well then you dig up the island and we say maybe you learn from the sibling island which is the canary and one of the canarian islands right way on the other side of the of the on the earth in the Atlantic but it has a similarity it had many similarities it's a volcanic nature it's remote and it's relying on external sources it's mainly tourism driven right and engineers some 20 years ago let's say put this off the grid and they use wind turbine to pump up water into these uh water basins they build and let it fall down generate hydroelectric power and this island is off the grid so this is an island we're an island maybe want to look into that one and as you said you dig up the volcanic storm to build something and then turn that into a reservoir exactly and it's your stuff and at the at the top left they also have these Renault twitzies which are 100% electric cars and it seemed very easy breezy yes and so maybe look into that one and so with that one next picture is me thinking about uh this summer when my parents showed me this amazing castle which is called the schulten castle and they taught us there that actually the term basalt that we use originates from here which is amazing so this is amazing so we in Germany had volcanic activities uh you'll figure yeah and so the last picture is me at this very special day um to say we're going to talk about volcanic veneers which this is one that we did but also you forced me to put in the picture at the bottom right yes i did and there is the very youthful martin dismaying with his father and the two of you designed this we did that and today is a very special day because my father turned 77 years young so for him hat seeking look once papa happy birthday dad all the best health and happiness and uh with that we're at the end of the show right and we're going to see uh you guys next week hopefully for david rockwood screens and then in two weeks we're going to see guys are talking about volcanic about volcanic veneers and we're going to be talking about stone used in a slightly different way than what we talked about today but same idea basalt stone and until then rock solid guys yes