 We're coming back to our show because you were so excited about last time, our Volume One of the nature of surface and substance of the architecture of the University of Hawaii Manoa. So welcome back to Human Human Architecture here, broadcasting live from our sometimes educated, exotic, tropical paradise of Honolulu, Hawaii. And once again with your favorite guest slash co-host, co-host slash guest, DeSoto Brown. Good afternoon to you. Bishop Museum Historian. Thank you. And myself, Martinus Bang. Thank you. So we're going to jump right in where we stopped last time. Last time was, we called it the, and we're referring to this book and you bad student have, you know, forgot your book again. I forgot my textbook. I give you a third time and then you get, I give you a D today and next time we should forget it. You get an F. He's a teacher. Okay. He's a professor. He can say this. So anyway, so this is our source here. Whenever you see pictures, they're black and white. They're either from this book or even better. If they're better quality, they're from this guy here and from his precious archive at the Museum. Yay. Right? Yay. That's right. And so we called the last show, we called it the rise and that was basically from the end of second to last century till the late fifties. And this one we call the thrive and Kobayashi calls it the boom. And first picture, please. How do you call that? Well, I refer to this as the jet age and that's the time period after jets began to come here in 1959. That's also the time that Hawaii became a state and it was really the beginning of our huge economic boom. You just pointed out in our conversation how unique some of our architecture was at that time. We had the Kaiser aluminum dome at the Hawaiian Village Hotel. We had the La Ronde first rotating restaurant in the whole world on top of the Alamoana building. And one of our favorite sites is the shot of Miley, the character in her travel agency office in the film Blue Hawaii. And in the background is a back projection of Kalakawa Avenue across the street from the international marketplace. So this just to put everything in context for what happened on the island. So let's go back up the hill to the Manoa Valley. And the next picture, please. This is sort of a late entry to last show because this as you can see was late 50s here. And this is indeed the building when we charged us to go up and do field work and do, you know, real checking out. This is the first thing that was long two months ago. You came back with this and said, look what I found. Yeah. You see this picture. I sure did. Right. Yeah. And this, so this is Kella Hall. But also, you know, we are little PIs so we hear things and we hear that this building here is up for a facelift. And we were saying, you know, buildings in the tropics here, they're beautiful, just like the people here. They don't need makeup. They don't even need moisturizing cream. They just need a little suntan, maybe the coral friendly of these days. That's right. That's right. So we're saying just clean them up and don't, don't do anything else of them. Right. Because these buildings are pretty much substantially beautiful. And let's go to the substance next picture. And the interior of this building has this remarkable stained glass work. And that is far out see, out does any makeup that you could put on the building. And you can see that there's this large atrium lobby that has got this multi-story access to the stained glass. You pointed out it seems almost like a church. There are seating areas on each floor. You pointed out that the corridors are, this is a double loaded corridor, so it's really pretty generic. But we've also got the stairways that have the inserted small windows, which are all different on each landing. And one of the things I think is the most remarkable in the upper right corner is the building is built intentionally not parallel. So the stairways aren't parallel, they're at a slight angle. And that if you look down into that atrium with the stained glass window, you can see that the railing is a little canted as well. And it's a very fine piece of very humble, subtle modernism architect is clear for Clifford Young. We're going to do a show with me, Ray Turin, who happened to stumble into a residential project by Clifford Young and ended up having a great impact. So she will report on that. So same kind of notion. Very simple materials. I mean, the bars of the guardrail is basically simple filigree teas. And everything is sort of simple, but it's orchestrated in a beautiful way. And one of the things the characteristics is, you know, these grooved concrete walls, put some battens into the form, gave it structure. So that's what it is. And we're saying just clean it up. If we go back to the previous picture one more time, because the even the fenestration is still original, you know, to the north side, to the mall, it's got even these vertical fins that we pointed out, Sinclair Library had to, you know, that very early morning and afternoon sun we get here is being blocked out. But otherwise, it still has the jealousies, a combination of the glass ones and the wooden ones. And it has some nasty sort of carbuncle AC boxes sticking out. So maybe take these away and sweat a little more, as we said. And just bring it back to the original how it was. Right. And you could not replicate that. Exactly. Absolutely. So, you know, respect it and almost don't touch it. I mean, touch it up, you know, but lightly and authentically. Right. So let's jump ahead to the two pictures ahead here, which is something we had reported about in a couple of shows that we reference above. We had done a show with one of the users of the Halla Manoa and basically will brooder, you know, being stunned by the whole composition. And this is basically East West Center by the architect, International Star Architect to be and upcoming at that time. I am pay from the early sixties and mostly, you know, it's this building here, Jefferson Hall and Halla Manoa. But to the next picture, it actually it's comprised of other buildings here. As you can see, these are the dormitories and then Kennedy Theater. And you can see how sort of dominant it basically is at the corner left of that aerial view here is sort of this this very strong composition of these very sort of, I'd say, sort of, you know, probably even, you know, Louis Kahnish sort of and pay refers to Louis Kahn quite a bit as one of his, you know, influences. And I would say, too, that the juxtaposition of Jefferson Hall and the Kennedy Theater across a plaza from each other really accentuates that they're monumental, that they're really big and they're impressive. And you pointed out earlier that the East West Center, strictly speaking, is not part of the UH system, but the grounds are contiguous and do circulate between the two. And we talked about we like to call it synergy because down the road of East West Center going to Doll Street is these two slabs that V shaped and get to the next picture. We did a show about that. These are the gateway dorms that follow just parallel. So there was probably and these were local architects, great local guys and pay was a great national architect. So great symbiosis here and synergy. Next picture is a late entry to. No, this is actually showing the composition again from the other and also shows like these sort of growing architectural mountains in the valley, you know, between the actual real mountain. That's right. So what a composition. A late entry to from the previous era is the next slide here. This is one of the local stars. Again, this is Alfred Price and we had a little hard time that's our excuse to that we didn't feature it at the first time because we couldn't really figure out. Someone had told us that the picture on the middle right is the price, but then in the book we didn't see. So Don Hibbert lifted the secret and said it used to be the bookstore at the very bottom left. And they have altered it. And you know, there's this really on the left is a super nice concave wall feature, but they put this, you know, itself pretty nice portable right right next to it and see the nasty AC machines. I think this again needs some serious cleanup. And we got some serious scholars here. There's, you know, Jack Gilmer and my colleague Laura McGuire together with Don Hibbert writing a book about price. And so, you know, there's an increased appreciation about this this architect. So you age, please be aware of that. Absolutely. So to bring it back to what it was. Yeah. And he's most famous for being the architect of the Arizona Memorial. Yeah. And the only other client who treats buildings of it badly is the zoo, which I'm looking at in my front yard. And it seems like this is doomed to be like, you know, demolition by denial. And it's on the register. So hopefully not. But we need to teach that client to as well. So jump ahead, go back to this building here and that color row of pictures at the second from the top is what intrigued us the most. And we're about to say this is one of our favorite buildings because this feels really tropical. There is our concrete walk wall. There is the palm trees. And then there is a single letter sign. And you feel like, well, this is it. This couldn't be anywhere else in the world, right? And it's sort of almost distracting you from that. That's just a little sort of, you know. That's just the first floor area. Behind that is a pretty chunky, pretty big building that's pretty international style, but it's designed exotically correct with large walkway lanais. So it's doing it right. But again, look at that, how it looked back in the past where there was this hyperenthusiasm about the cars and there was almost no vegetation. So it's actually better now than it was way back, right? Right. And we're going to touch on that later in the program. And let's move ahead. And there's some buildings I know this well because they take really good care of me. This is the Health Service buildings here from 63. It's a very sort of a nondescript building, but very modern, like post and beam and breeze block, as you can see, and courtyards as a theme that we, that was the other thing you reported back. You said, I think there is a theme. Courtyards is the theme. We're going to revisit that, too. That's what I think, too. And the next picture is just like in the last show, we can't be all inclusive here. There's no way we can cover it. So there's so many buildings that you guys got to get out and discover. And this might be one of them. This is the auxiliary service building that has the same sort of beam structure, post, breeze block infill, and the lava plinth that you point out. And the exposed rafters of the canopy that is out over the parking lot. And these buildings feel very mid-century, very modern, very site-specific, very much about the place, not in a nostalgic sort of pre-contact way, but in a post-contact, but in a progressive way. And again, that's also space age, too. This is also from that time period. And talking space, Edge moves to the next project here. This is spacey in many ways. And we're referring. This is Kaikendal Hall. And we refer in the little pictures on the top right. We have featured that building sort of once in our feature about tropical staircases. We figured it out. And it was easy breezy. Had this z-shaped form of the train. And then there is this sort of funky, very artistic structure of the post. The mushroom pillars reminded us of the show we did about the apartments that Obama grew up in by Park Associates. And then the most commercial architect of America at that time, John Graham, did our, we already talked about La Ronde. And below La Ronde was the Alamona building that had these vertical sun-retractable louvers. So Kaikendal Hall pretty much had that. And there is another similar. And these louvers, and I have to say a colleague of mine who retired Steve Meader, you know, that was his project. He wanted to bring it back to and he failed. And that's a shame. It wasn't his fault. And you see these nasty AC things sticking out. So to both clients, General Growth Properties and the Alamona building and here at the university, please, please bring it back to the original. You know, update that and improve it because there was some fastening and some falling off issues originally. But you can do this better today, right? Yeah, yeah. But we hope because the original deteriorated, the original building deteriorated to where the louvers fell off and that was the reason to remove all of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's no reason to bring it back because we're smarter now, right? Yes, we are. The technology has progressed. That's right. And another similarity to our pletitouille of keeping Snyder Hall and not demolishing that is because this is the same architect. So please don't erase the trace of that architect. Great, great, great. And, you know, just today, hot off the press and the internet is that we try to get Sinclair Library, but it seems like there is also very good, you know, used for student learning center or something like that. But for us architects, we then couldn't have it anymore. So we might refocus on Snyder Hall again. Or any of these mid-century modern building are better than our Pomo piece of cake and we'll talk about that in the next show. So let's move on because now we have reached the late 50s, excuse me, late 60s. And this is how it looked pretty much like that. And this is the era when the Y5O started and was dwelling on modern architecture as an actor, as we pointed out, right? Yes, it was, it was. So next picture here is then late 60s. This is Hamilton Library. You as a librarian know very well. Books, Nietzsche, The Needed Cool. So this is maybe by nature of that typology. A more introverted project. But nevertheless, very nice. You got the waffle ceilings as the opera concert hall has from Blaisdale. And also kind of a similar thing as Kennedy Theater, by the way. They all have these sort of celebrated, uplit, basically waffle slabs. So that's like the Washington Metro. That one very much. Talking brutalism, thank you for a sick wing because we're getting into brutalism, Sue. And there is the next project here. Is this one here? This is familiar to us. This is Moore Hall. And Kobayashi had these sort of other faculty and grad students help writing the books. So there was a guy who was on the review board of the building. And he was bitching about the architects having made the North facade, which is the one on the bottom right, having closed. And he had urged them to open this up because he said, well, it's North. But also we get the very early morning, sun, and the late afternoon. So these vertical fins basically do the job. Not so much on the south side. This is why that little picture in the middle on the left is me when I was there for a little volunteered for a German language test thing. And so I saw the curtains being pulled. Whoa, so in the stairways that you like a lot because it's very exuberant, it's very easy breezy. But again, it's facing east and west. So this is the most critical. So maybe replacing the glass with the fixed glass jealousies because that's the perfect thing to keep the rain out but let the air through. Now, particularly for a hallway where you're not trying to protect collections and you don't have papers and things like that. And I also like it has a wonderful zigzag canopy, too, from that time period. Exactly. And it also has, well, it's a courtyard. It's also very nice. And it has these huge lava rock bolsters. And it's very sort of googie and zigzaggy and curved. It has these planters. So it's overall a very nice composition. And all these buildings, I mean, this criticism is very relative to an absolutely great. I mean, criticizing this is very sort of almost illegitimate. But we're still saying, but good things you can improve and you can clean up and maybe exoticize them even more than they originally were. That's our point. Next picture here, next project. And this is one that we found. We did a show about when you came back from your Tiki conference at your keynote speech. This is one of the few sort of Tiki buildings on campus. This is Kraus Hall, which is very, I took the picture on the top right just the other day poking over that lava rock wall again from the whole street. And you see this sort of idyllic oasis pond. And it's very tranquil. And it's very low-key. And it just has this sort of feel of almost we're talking here to our producer, almost high school feel, like high school or elementary schools or kindergartens. It reminds me of my elementary school years, have hallways like that. But this is also a botany building. And it is nice for that to be focused on an exterior scene where you're seeing plants. And it seems customized to this nice Mr. Kraus up there, who was this botanist. So it's very low-key, very humble, very tropical building, you know, very, very tropical. Very nice, nice scale too. Exactly. So next picture is now we're going big, because these were our local architects recently. And now we're going star architecture nationally. This is basically, as you can see, the biomedical science building from the early 70s. And this is a very prominent at that time American architect Edward DeRal Stone, who, you know, looking back, he's sort of a little dismissed as a little sort of a funky, sort of a flamboyant kind of gentleman architect. He did a lot of US embassies, by the way. So he's very impactful. I've seen, you know, Nebraska in my days, he did the Stewart Museum, which is very similar actually to this one here. And one of my really favorite ones is in Chicago at Millennium Park, the original standard oil building. Then Emma Cohen, I think now Eon, which is this sort of very sort of slender, square plan, extruded tower that was clad in white marble and was juxtaposing the dark, sort of devilish, Meezy and Mies van der Rohe ones as there's the dark German and I'm the white Central American, you know, I love that. So he, you know, and they were like in the book, they were saying this sort of, they found this sort of pagoda, Chinese pagoda had a little funny and the ornament, is not literal like we do it these days with these chevrons. It's just simple geometrics and you might see something alluding to some Asian culture, but maybe not and it has courtyards and these courtyards are spectacular. And it was so much fun to take these pictures for us, right? Yeah, and also it is in a very prominent location at the end of East West Center Road. So I think it's appropriate to have a building that is as that prominent and significant as something to look at but you're down the road. And talking prominent next picture here, we're talking about previously about I.M. Pei's sort of mass popularizing the Leucan philosophy. For me, it's always the firm that did the same to basically me's van der Rohe, just talking about him, a skit mowing smell at this time. This is one of the, still is, it was one of the big players in architecture, national firm, so they came here, did Moor Hall and Moor Hall is also, you know, many say it's not one of the best SOMs, but if you look at it, I appreciate and acknowledge the generosity of hallways of circulation that not only there are these niches built into sit, but you can say these hallways are so large that they allowed outdoor learning. And the fire marshal is still okay because you still got your three, four feet where you can eat grass. And it has these two courtyards and they're actually suggestions to basically build more space and to enclose these two courtyards, which I'm very much warning again. John Hara, about whom we will talk, soon has a nice proposal with his daughter, Mayumi, right now to only enclose the courtyards within or densify within the square elevators, so you would actually sort of get four little courtyards and I find this very sensitive instead of blocking the whole thing. This is something, again, it's a very nice utilitarian but in the recognition of outdoor space, also very tropical, exotic. And unfortunately outdoor space often is seen as a waste. Absolutely, that's why I'm saying very generous times. Right, exactly. And we will see in the next show, that wasn't the case when that era here ended. It was the opposite. Move on to the next picture here. This is, we did a previous show, Tonya Moi did here about the architect, Steven Oyakawa, who did these dorms. And also, well, Bruder was very impressed. The architect worked for Frank Lark writing and see that. When I talked to students who live in there, they acknowledged sort of these very funky shade features in front of the windows. Something we learned from that as far as critical assessment is that with Primitiva, who's also a circular building, we gave it an interior courtyard. That one doesn't have, so it gets a little stuffy in there. But again, that's relative criticism to an awesome project here. And unique looking. Exactly, move on to the next one here. And this is Campus Center here. And Campus Center was designed by Ishihara, who was working with Warnaki, who was the architect of our capital here. And so this is a project here that we will have Richard Lowe and talking actually about the word, the word wonder world, we will call it. So it's a different subject, where we'll quiz him on that one here as well, because he's involved in so many things. So looking forward to that. I took that picture at the bottom left as sort of a post occupancy evaluation, because that was one of the days when power was out on campus. And people were basically escaping their interiorized, hermetic, AC classrooms because they were suffocating. And they went to naturally, they gravitated towards these easy breezy spaces. And that was one. And then even when the power stayed out longer, some of the devices went out, and guess what, people started to talk to each other and breathe, and breathe, and wasn't that awesome. So moving on, and you know this, we're like now truly in the 70s, and this is familiar to you because you live in a house by that architect. Yeah, so this is Asapov. And I think, is this the building that they just painted recently? As you unfortunately see that picture is under, they do the spotting repair. So I can understand that, you know, you're still in trouble and trying to keep the corrosion because there is enough concrete over the rebars. But at the bottom, at the bottom right, they're painting the ceilings their way inside and there's never humidity getting to them. So I'm afraid this is, they just want to put makeup on. They are doing that. We have to ask, they're saying, you know, Sid Snyder, who's the late partner of Asipov, who we had on the show over the summer, our Doko Momo members, we got to ask him because they claim he had okayed it. And it's just a shame because brutalism wants to be pure. Plain concrete. There's an awesome article by one of our previous showmasters, you know, Timothy Shuler about the brutes from the beach. That's right. And you guys all read that awesome article and when you did, you will never put makeup on a brutalist building. So I would almost say stop this here and now. I agree with you completely. It's supposed to be raw concrete. That's the whole purpose. Yeah. And the next project is shows you to what extent that sort of brutalist, you know, tropical brutalism was infused into even the most sort of profane typologies as that big parking garage on the street. They were even doing it to that one. And even that one has an awesome courtyard. The next project here is the arts building on campus here. And it's a building that was by, you know, the beginning of Group 70, which is one of the biggest firms here, Group 70 Lab. It was Gordon Teal. I remember he gave a talk story at Doko Momo and he was talking about how much fun they had. They basically outsourced the guy into teaching then because he was becoming too problematic and was sort of interfering with the business of the firm. We have our tropical tourism guest, Suzanne here, and she just gave me this shirt here. And thank you, Suzanne. And it says Elvis in Blue Hawaii. Yeah, yeah. And she points out that, you know, good architecture, tropical exotic architecture on campus might be a USP as they call it in her realm, a unique selling proposition, right? Yeah, and I was just saying too that there isn't enough selling of architecture for tourism or promotion. There needs to be more of it in selective locations. We have a lot of outstanding buildings and we're talking about them. And good news is that Doko Momo just won the bid for the National Symposium next year in September and it's gonna be 500 guests and more. And most likely, UH will play a role. Of course, is it good? And we were saying, you know, in the next show we point out we better continue that good legacy because otherwise what do we have to show in the next 50 years, right? Well, that's so true. That's so true. So let's go to the next page here because we gotta speak up. This is Sakamaki Hall that, you know, is a simple, you know, building here by the architect Robert Matsushita. And I was walking by yesterday and I saw the low sun in a lower picture coming pretty, you know, flat and heating it up. I was reading in the book again, it took a poetic take on that and said it had some sort of mysterious sort of notion that created as the light but it's certainly also overheating but that courtyard makes up for it. Once again, it's very cool, very jungly, very exotic, very nice piece. Next one is by the same architect is and we're exiting the 70s now and we're gonna close the show with one of the early 80s but we choose this one because it's still keeping up the integrity of the 70s and not doing what the 80s unfortunately became known for which we see in the next show and this is still a very nice building here. Once again, feature courtyard, right? And featuring shading devices and overhangs that basically, you know, make it nicely tropical. And work with the climate. And what does as well work with the climate next picture because here is our landscape enthusiast. Our tree enthusiast, what does he have to say? Well, he has to point out that the campus of the UH Manoa campus has a lot of unique trees, a lot of interesting trees. They were planted specifically because it was a place that studied botany of the tropics but the trees themselves not only add to the campus, in some cases they are even more noticeable than some of the buildings are. So they're an enhancement that is not just in the background but sometimes you wanna just look at the trees themselves because they are beautiful and significant too. Absolutely and let's phase out with one last view here of architecture. It's almost non-architectural. It's almost like build trees and most likely they're put under trees and these are the little portables. And you still find them all over campus and they're like just single corridor, jealousies, easy breezy, hot air can rise up. In some cases they've been sissy and put AC and we can take out again. But these are great, these are great too. So these are part of the sort of genetic, exotic tropical code of the campus as well. So that was pretty much it. We hope to see you then in two weeks with we have to do the third of the trilogy and it's gonna be called the fall. We're sorry because you have the rise and the thrive and then you have the fall which is in some cultures unfortunately the destiny but we will always close on positive notes and we will then say and potentially re-rise. Yeah, so stay tuned for that. Next week we're gonna have a great combination of a former colleague of ours, a Maki Saki Maki coming back from Australia to us and sharing the newly founded, they have a gold coast there too and they opened a Doko Momo there and we have Laura McGuire who's organizing our coming up Doko Momo walking tour which is taking place in Kapilani Park. So be excited about that one and until then please stay exotically educated, educatedly exotic, bye bye.