 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Good day everyone and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and the program that you're watching is Human Humane Architecture. I am DeSoto Brown, the co-host of this program and I am the Archivist at Bishop Museum. And joining us via audio from Germany where he currently is is the host of this program who is Martin de Spain. Good day to you, Martin. It's morning for you, it's afternoon for us here. Hello DeSoto and hello listeners. Hello everyone. And viewers. Happy viewers, happy listeners. And today we're talking about a place in Waikiki which is called the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center and should we go to our first picture, do you think? We should do because that's our little tradition where we see our very stylishly zeitgeist, the eyewitnessing DeSoto looking at the construction site, right? That's right, this is 1978. The Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center is under construction. I am showing my displeasure on my face because of the noise and the dust. And I do want to say too that just about a year after this picture was taken when the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center was partly constructed there was a sniper one afternoon who shot people on Kalakaua Avenue right in front of where I'm standing in this picture and he wounded five people but fortunately did not kill anyone. But that's not we're going to get into. We're going to talk about the architecture of the Royal Hawaiian Center and let's go to our next picture. Yeah and that gets put like 23 years prior to that construction, right? That's how it looked before. Correct. This is about 1955 and this is Kalakaua Avenue, the sidewalk and to the left in this picture is the site of what became the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center and originally this was all the gardens and the grounds of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and you can see the Royal Hawaiian in the lower left corner of this slide that we're showing right now. And when that was constructed in 1927 it was built as the most luxurious hotel in the Hawaiian Islands surrounded by beautiful gardens and that's what you can see right here because those gardens continued up until 1960 from 1950 to 1960 part of those gardens were replaced and if we go to our next picture we will see And to me from half around the world that looks very exonically, jungly, you know, paradisiacal. Yes, that's right, that's right. And we can see in the next picture which is from 1963 that those gardens at least along the street have been replaced by a series of four commercial buildings. Now the jungle isn't there anymore but there's still a lot of palm trees and it is however a different feeling because it's now a retail district it's now a strip of retail stores and if we go to our next picture this is the same sort of strip in 1965 and this is the first building that was built along that stretch of Kalakaua that was the oldest building was the Royal Block and it was a series of retail spaces then it was followed by the McInerney department store the Royal Hawaiian arcade and the Snackshop restaurant and they were all there until 1978 in our next picture and that's when... And you see the construction site in the background and you told me that the building would look in front of us as an Osipoff building or was an Osipoff building, right? It's the only remnant of the McInerney store which they used as their construction office during the construction of the initial part of the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center and then they eventually destroyed that as well for the entire shopping complex that we're talking about today and next, here's another picture from 1978 and again that construction is starting but on the left is one of the remaining buildings that I was just talking about that's the Royal Hawaiian Arcade which was a wooden building and it was demolished last as they gradually worked their way from Lewar Street in the Diamond Ed direction to construct the entire Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center and the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center in our next slide is in a style that's called Brutalism and Martin, tell us about Brutalism. Well, we choose to pull from Wikipedia here which is like the explanation for the people here and it talks about Brutalism, not what it sounds like being brutal that's how it was perceived later on we're going to get to that when people dismiss the style originally it comes from the French term for raw concrete the Tongue Bru and Le Corbusier is one of the most important architects of the 20th century was heavily getting into that one as well and this is a building here in the United States the New York Buffalo City Court Building which shows in its very extreme that these buildings were intentionally very, very hermetic they were very, very windowless and they mostly sort of turned their open face to the inside and so it was a style that was very, very much of its time before that as you just pointed out with the pictures from the 50s and the 60s on Carcow Avenue everything was very lean and streamlined and open and modern, high modern and in the 70s it turned to this sort of more ethereal very gravity-based, very grounded, very massive kind of architecture and if we go to the next picture this is surprise, surprise this is how the architect in that era sort of themed as one would call it today the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center as I subtitled this as the rocks in the jungle this looks like a natural formation out of minerals basically aligned with this lush tropical vegetation and one of the things that I hope people could see in one of the previous pictures is that the Royal Block initially was extremely open as a modern building every one of those retail spaces was entirely fronted by glass and once the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center was built it went in an entirely other direction to be a windowless pretty much facade of rock concrete and there's the most famous however if we go to the next picture if you look up closer there were certain glimpses sort of certain views, framed views that gave you an indication of inhabitation and you pointed out for example these kind of very 70-ish external elevators they have these light bulbs at the top and at the bottom and you can see that cabin moving up and down but to the right and to the left you see this very intentionally very hermetic very closed concrete surface and the next picture gets us an up-close view that you kindly provided again from taking us back into the times that actually the ground floor indeed was open it was almost like a sculptor took a shizzling tool and carved out that monolithic block and cut these openings in and these openings were pushed back so they were in the shade and they were shaded and they kept cool because we always look at architecture not just in its surface but it's its substance so you might say maybe that you get a first idea that this approach of architecture was certainly new and maybe far into the island might have not been that inappropriate climatically thinking maybe this was an approach worth taking and I can also say too that you didn't really see those frontages of those businesses unless you were right up close to them and one of the problems was because there was no signage the windows were so hidden that if you look on the left side of this picture there's a banner that's hanging up that says Suzanne at the Royal that's because some of the businesses eventually started putting out banners to show that they were actually located there so the people would see them from across the street and speaking of hidden treasure is what you just said if you go to the next picture we can see another feature of the building that you got a glimpse from the outside and these are these four beams that you can see implied on the roof there and these beams if we go to the next picture this is when you kindly did your photo documentation a couple of weeks ago this is the picture you took and that is a tree that was already growing on the property and before the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center was built the outdoor circle said that they wanted the developer to save this exceptional tree because it's one of the very few of this tree that are growing in the Hawaiian Islands and so they kept it, it has thrived it has grown up through those open rafters that we were just discussing so it's part of the building in a way that goes up through as you were saying last night what could be sort of the ceiling the rafters or the beams there suggest a ceiling but in fact it's the sky and the tree has grown up through them and the next picture gives us a zoom a close up of the texture of the concrete and this is how these beams look like and this is how the entire structure looked like and this is also very typical for brutalism that from a distance it looked very sort of opaque and flush but when you got closer at least some or significant number of these buildings were treated very delicately by something that you call a bush hammering method and whereas it looks like this has been manually carved with a tube and almost like the Egyptians or the Essex in fact we're talking 1970s and 80s highly industrialized building technology this was done with a hydraulic tool that was sort of shizzling that out of concrete but nevertheless it was quite an effort and what it did as you can see it brought out the aggregates and the aggregates are dark so this is basalt so this is local petrified stone you can say that was man-made, right? Yeah and this is also as you just said this is very typical of brutalism the textured concrete and also the chipped concrete that you were just describing is something that you very frequently see in brutalism so it looks like it's a smooth surface from a distance but it's actually textured and there's a lot of hand work that goes into that to make it look like that If we go to the next picture and we step back again and look more at the spatial quality of the mall and it's actually not even called the mall the original name and still to these days is Royal Hawaiian Center so the center sort of implies maybe also some social quality and in fact if you look at the clever organization so the main circulation is partly covered every storefront has an overhang that we already know from the Ward Center that we did a show which is also as we classified it as an exotic brutalist structure so same performance and same features but in addition to that the other half at least or sometimes more is open to the elements basically ends with the courtyard but the threshold between the hallway and the courtyard is naturally the guardrail so you don't fall off the edge but different than in the Alamoana Mall which we have done the last show about that had some very tragic press recently because some of these guardrails failed and casualties, fatal casualties here the guardrails are way more cleverly designed and in fact it's a trough, it's a planter out of which this very sort of filigree steel guardrail seems to grow out of and then it's tilted inwards which is really about the safest way you can design a guardrail in the public space because people try to climb over it and they fall on their back so this is a very very sophisticated solution for myself being a practicing architect if you want to try this with any kind of climb especially profit driven developers good luck because this is really high standard and this is really nicely designed, neatly done Yeah and you know what else we've talked about too we say that the Royal Hawaiian Center has a very blank featureless facade that it pretends to the outside world and yet it turns inward and the vitality is where you're expected to go that's where they want you to go rather than just walk along and look from the street they want you to come inside and experience what we're seeing in these pictures right here Exactly and that today is not the case anymore and now we're going to look a little closer, why not and the next picture just shows us how it looks today Correct and maybe we jump over that picture because people probably know it and if not they can go there and more importantly is the next picture that we sort of collaged as sort of a way to try to understand so if you go back to the time and you see which you know which president ran the United States at that time when the shopping center was built it was Jimmy Carter and you know Carter with all respect and he gets a lot more rehabilitation now these days than during his presidency it was really about substance and ethics and reality and then you know ever since Ronald Reagan took over it shifted from substance to surface and that's what the center is representing at the very picture at the bottom right is that each storefront was sort of like throwing its makeup on and trying to make a big show so it was more about extroverted than introverted right and all of those things as you said just now makeup those are facades that have been put onto that original concrete exterior so they're not really intrinsically part of the building they are extraneous you also had pointed out that they are like cheesecake meaning a reference to the Cheesecake Factory restaurant so it's been adorned it's been decorated it's had extraneous things put on it that weren't originally there and that was to modernize it to make it more appealing and also things go out of fashion and brutalism is not particularly in fashion and so we've got these extraneous exteriors now yeah and if we go to the next slide the owner reveals what you just said almost like sitting on the red couch and telling the psychotherapist what the problem is and here the client shares the owner shares his paranoia his phobia about brutalism I mean they respectfully call it a minimalist style but then they very quickly get into their criticism and basically explain that it was anti-commercial what you explained is that there was a sort of hidden secret and you were supposed to go inside they were saying well that doesn't work people don't find us, people don't see us so that's why they started to I mean I call it cheesecake in it because one of the tenants is Cheesecake Factory and that is the most appalling piece I think so this disrespectfully just throws his stucco and plaster at that very refined and delicately crafted bush hammered surface and so that being said if we go to the next picture that illustrates that we've got a contrast here of the original raw concrete with some other elements that have been added since then to dress it up like it looked more sleek make it look more modernistic so there's the wood slatted roof the interior ceiling I should say and then these beams have been smoothed over with kind of a stucco plaster exterior put over them so that it's not so lumped it's not so much the raw concrete that it used to be but it's got these extra elements to make it smoother more appealing, more attractive more modern looking if you will mm-hmm and there was a very recent phase of remodeling that took like I think almost like over a year and if we go to the next slide we can see that so this is what they probably correctly call the Royal Grove because if you keep walking through you end up at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel so they sort of reactivated and reanimated that space which is probably to be complemented and applauded however again I want myself to quote again another phrase from their website where in the White Text they talk about the Grove and the connection and the connectivity but then the sentence concludes with this room that they're sort of introducing and then they basically say it's an air-conditioned space where visitors can see three films on Hawaiian culture and history and I think it's fair to say that we were both a little bit puzzled to say the least about that sort of combination that you want to show history you want to show legacy you want to show tradition but then again what does air conditioning have to do with Hawaiian tradition little to nothing and we both have been there and we've been critical about other developments actually pretty much across the street a little further a diamond head side which is the international marketplace which we were seeing astroturf and I'm not mistaken we see the astroturf here and we also see the astroturf in the extension of the Alamoana model that we talked about last week so astroturf seems to be the thing which both of us are a little bit irritated about because that's petroleum based plastic that just like air conditioning has very little to do with Hawaiian tradition and culture and the term I used last night was to illusionize this area to make it look I mean it is very appealing it is very attractive but at the same time it is creating some illusions because it's not 100% natural even though you are under a gigantic banyantry surrounded by palms there are still there are elements of petroleum based products in there and we can't get away from that the term illusionized ever since you said that last night that's one of my new favorite terms I will adopt that alright good and if we go to the next slide it reminded me of a project we've been doing some now 20 years ago we directed a show about it a while ago in the old Urban Transcendent Show days at the very bottom right so people can look at that and it's a kindergarten and we took the same approach of basically making the facade a non-facade like more a retaining wall and cut very few strategically placed openings which you can see behind that woman who was walking out of the kindergarten but then there is one major larger opening which is basically the entrance to the kindergarten that leads to a courtyard and then the picture on the left is pretty much the circulation so very similar to the Royal Hawaiian where basically the aha effect is on the inside whereas the outside is strategically and intentionally more austere and one thing that the director in the show says is that the parents come and they're excited to bring their kid to that new kindergarten and then they're very surprised that this is almost two decades old so but the main thing I want to point out is when we talk about natural environment and typology we both projects strategically introduce the courtyard as a theme for wave finding and procession through space but as well as a climatic control device as a natural climatic control device because the Mediterranean culture of the ancient times as the Greek and the Romans that was their air conditioning their natural air conditioning was the courtyard so the Royal Hawaiian center using that typology of courtyards is in fact a principally very appropriate way of climate control because that whole thing doesn't have big glass fronts and it has large overhangs and it has these courtyards with lush vegetation and we got evaporative cooling so the whole thing is pretty green and literally and figuratively speaking right yes and you're keeping out a lot of heat through the various exteriors I mean we had a discussion last night does concrete retain heat or is it an insulation from heat and that engineer to be able to tell you but I would say that a thick concrete wall is going to take a long time to heat up to the point where it's going to be heating the interior and I would say that a thick concrete exterior is going to be something that's going to keep the inside cooler and that's the way the Royal Hawaiian shopping center looks absolutely and you know going to towards the end of the show if we go to the next picture we want to point out that there is some renaissance for brutalism there is an awareness this is a website called city lap and it's the case for you know making a case for brutalism again this is one of the most you know known brutalist buildings in Boston and at the very bottom right is a picture I took when I was there and I think you also quoted the term heroic right the term heroic is often used in association with the brutalist style yes so if we go the next picture this is actually a picture you took just couple weeks ago which shows actually a corner the situation where little has been altered this is pretty much still the original you can you can see this sort of strategy of creating the solid that you basically carve out avoiding the solid is you can call this architectural strategy and the next picture is us also many years ago with one of our first projects here which are these train stations and they have a similar approach as well they are rather close from the outside to give you protection and shelter from the traffic but on the platform they open up and they're carved out for different functions so also the materiality is by the way basalt so lava but not Hawaiian that would have been too far to ship it from but we have some volcanic areas in Germany so this is from the Eiffel so this is Eiffel basalt and little did I know that I would ever end up in Hawaii and you did some pretty interesting research because first of all and we can also say already that we get so excited about exotic brutalism that we can't get it out of our mind so that would lead to our next show entirely dedicated to that subject but you already went ahead to think about that maybe there are some traces of indigenous nature on the Hawaiian islands about using building materials more stereotypically more massively more monolithically rather than skeletally and tectonically and that is the next picture what is that project? well this is a Heiao which is located on the island of Molokai this is a photograph from 1909 and if you see the man at the bottom of this huge wall you can see the size of it now this is a religious structure this is not something where people lived but it does have a monolithic quality even though it's made up of a lot of individual rocks which are clearly visible and yet the size and the scope and the mass of this thing is really not that dissimilar from the ideals of brutalism so while it is kind of a stretch to say this is brutalism hundreds of years ago it's not that far off because we are in fact using the same types of materials basalt and we are massing it in the same way to give a similar type of feeling of solidity heroicness not unlike brutalism does perfect and to go to the next picture we can even, you might even go that far to call it timeless because this could be in Hawaii right we can see some volcanic mountains in the back we see some palm trees and we see sort of brutalist architecture Bush hammered if you look at the detail this looks like Ward Plaza this looks like the interior courtyard of our today's project the Royal Hawaiian Center but it is actually on another volcanic island, the island of Tenerife which belongs to the Canary Islands and it's by local architects but it's a contemporary project that has just been built and that shows the re-appreciation of the younger generation of architects for that style that had been very very dismissed over the years however also we want to sort of cheerlead a little further there's also projects from the past that haven't been that dismissed and the next picture shows the picture on the right is a detail very famous detail of the Alcadara center in San Francisco where he's these ferns in the middle of this sort of liquid stone how Frank Lloyd Wright called concrete this is a brutalist structure very heavy very massive spending over several blocks but yet softened to vegetation and that is what we see on the left right the cover of the brochure from which era this is from 1997 it was a sculpture and a fountain which have been removed by now but you can see in the background is the original concrete structure of the Royal Hawaiian center and then as we were pointing out the addition of flora the addition of growing plants into the concrete setting and this is something that brutalism often did to have planter boxes which were kind of confining the flora and they're confining the growth of the plants to one degree and the plants are still growing in the way that they want to in a totally natural style so you've got the juxtaposition of the built concrete environment softened by and contrasted to the addition of living plants absolutely and coming to the end of the show the last picture we've been using cars as vehicles for reflection for a while and the top row of images are some that I took to the left is in Dresden in the 1950's Mercedes SL that I think it's fair to say it got pimped over the years and the second picture from the left at the top is the brochure of my friend Stefan who has relatives who restore vintage cars back to their original status so looking at the Royal Hawaiian center it reminds me of my car that I had when I came to the United States in 1972 Plymouth Fury which you see single at the third from the left on the top row 72 Plymouth Fury I bought it for $600 and just for the fun I was just googling how much would it be worth today and believe it or not the very right picture at the top row there's one for sale in Hawaii so guys go and get it it's only $12,500 this is like a 2,000% increase of value so a very provocative and polemic provocation might be hey guys strip all that bullshit off the facade and bring it back to its original which all things considered we said is actually pretty cool right and there is as we said the re-appreciation for brutalism that ends us to the end of the program everybody and thanks for watching thanks for listening we will be back very soon back with a different schedule when Martin returns from Germany and this has been Human Humane Architecture on Think Tech Hawaii and we will see you in our next episode