 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Welcome back to another episode of Human-Human Architecture here on Think Tech Hawaii in our Tropical Paradise of Honolulu, Hawaii. And we're back here for our every other week episode of learning from the best practices of the past for the future with your hosts. Well, there's our host, Martin Desbang, and I am co-host and assistant, let's say, DeSoto Brown for Bishop Museum. I'm a Bishop Museum historian. Never say that that you're assistant. No, no, no, no. It's your show. You're the boss. You're the boss. That's okay. It's not still more time. Let's jump right in because we got ourselves into something. What is that? What is that? We're talking about tropical brutalism, and brutalism is a style which was international in scope, and it was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 70s. And there's a surprising number of brutalist buildings here in Honolulu, which we're going to be looking at on the show and talking about the entire thing. And let's bring picture one, and it's something new foreign to the islands because how have we been building here initially with this stuff? Yeah, we were building with wood. And if you look at the photograph in the upper corner of this slide, you can see the Hawaiian Hale, which is built of wood, and then it has this statching of grass, which is a nice insulating light material to use. But there were also these massive Hale religious structures, which are monolithic and rather like brutalist buildings, which were made of stone. So in the photograph, people can see this is a huge stone wall photographed on Moloka in 1909, and they're even bigger Hale than that one. So while it wasn't totally traditional for Hawaiian most structures, certainly we see that there are other structures like that. So get to the next picture. Brutalism is an international style, and there's many definitions. Last time we just pulled this from the web, but we don't want to go there. We just want to mention one person who was sort of specifying what we're interested in, the tropical version of it. So the term tropical brutalism you find online tracing back to a gentleman whose name is Jean-Francois Lejeune, and he's sort of a hybrid of us because he's an architectural historian, and he talks about that. But we want to actually go to the next picture and not do it so scholarly perfect, but basically very emotionally excited as we are about it and the few other ones around us. And one of them is our dear friend Kurt Sandburn, our most activist reporter on the island. And at the same time, we were getting excited about it. He was sending us an email saying, guys, I'm getting sort of sentimental about brutalism and romantic and revisiting brutalism again. And he was pointing out sort of the mastermind behind brutalism that he would never officially associate with brutalism in his buildings. But he's certainly sort of the one who paved the way. And these are the next two pictures. The picture number three is his Escherich House up in Philadelphia, in the outskirts of Philadelphia. I had the chance to visit that. And at that time, it was for sale. And the realtor basically advertised it as the bunker for $300,000. It's now three million or whatever foundation, luckily, that tells you that something went wrong with his style. I have to say this building has totally blown me away. And I was just closing my eyes and trying to feel it with all my senses. And it just felt good. It looked good. It was just good all the way around. And the same with the next picture, which is Excella Library, which is a little further up the coast in Boston. This is an iconic building. It's the Stereotomic Monolithic Block that once you approach it, you can see more what's going on. And once you're inside, it draws you into this vertical vortex that is very much like a Pantheon-like, just amazing. Right. And that's something we're going to see, too, that the monolithic building frequently draws you into two spaces on the inside that doesn't show you what's happening on the outside. It wants you to come in and see what's happening on the inside. But let's do it the sort of provocatively polemic way, because we know, and this is, I think, almost no style had struggled so hard after being really hip and really in en vogue and has been so sort of hated. Correct. And this is, even the term was an unfortunate pick, because people now who don't understand where it comes from, it comes from baton bruit, which is the French word for raw concrete. But brutal in American and in English language was something different. Exactly. Exactly. Which is an unfortunate connotation for something which it didn't start out as, and people use that against it. Exactly. So let's start provocatively with the building and the building hopefully excuses us for having picked it as maybe one of the ones who are maybe more invasive of nature, so not so conducive of local considerations. And we will bring this number five, please. And where's that? Yeah, okay. This is Guaya Camilo Plaza. It's located at the corner of Guaya Camilo Street and King Street in Caligí. It has the very typical brutalist raw concrete finish. You can see on the right that there's a little strip of horizontal window there that is where the open space for the parking, which is hidden underneath the building. But this building also has been altered a great deal by the cell phone repeater stations at the top that have made it look very different than what it originally did. But you'll see that there are some common things to brutalism here in the raw concrete and also the horizontal strips of recessed windows. That's something we'll see in a lot of the other things that we'll see today. Yeah, you so perfectly said, brutalism minimized the glass to maximize the concrete. Absolutely, yes. But in defense of the building, whereas the parking is sort of half submerged, but on top of that is actually an open entrance lanay. So whereas the maybe, you know, the like three fourth of the building are basically invasive, there is this indication of some exotic more. And ironically, and that's we're going to see this again to the parking building has better air circulation than the building itself does. That's become the theme of this show. And next picture here is right around the corner. Next is the Hawaii National Bank on King Street in downtown Honolulu. And this again, you see the recessed windows, which are not played up as much and the concrete actually shades the windows. This is not just a stylistic thing. It does, in fact, have a function of reducing heat because there's not as much direct sun coming into the window. It is very common that like brutalist buildings very commonly were commercial structures, institutional structures, they were banks, they were offices, they were schools, they were government buildings. And this is typical of this as well. And you also don't see a lot of large brutalist buildings. I mean, usually see large brutalist buildings, not so many small ones, but not that's not 100% the case because we will see a few small ones as we continue to do. And this again, we allow ourselves to say is maybe not one of the finest examples. In fact, I was just working with a friend Don Hiver the other day, we were walking by and he was telling me stories about even in the authorship phase, I'm struggling there. So, but I think that's also typical for any kind of style, whereas the master is know how to do it and then come the sort of fall the optimistic followers, they don't understand it fully, but they copycat it. Right. And then you end up with buildings, they're more or less sort of, yeah. They look like it, but they're not really fulfilling it. Exactly. And that's we allow ourselves to be one like that. But go to the next one, which it gets better and better. Yes, it does. Project by project. Yeah, this is the first circuit court building, which is on Alakaya Street. Again, very minimized windows reduced to these horizontal strips deeply set into the concrete. And this is a little bit different. This building actually in the photographs looks lighter colored than it actually is. I've brightened it up. You've brightened it up. No, no, no. It is actually this this is deceptive, because this building actually does look more gray. But we are going to see that there are sort of two realms of this plain concrete that that are used here in Hawaii for brutal instructors. And we won't get into that yet, because we've got some better examples. But again, very typical, also something that you see do in a lot of brutalist buildings, a larger portion at the very top of the building. So at the top of the tower on the left, you can see there's this element that sticks out horizontally. That is also something that you see in brutalist buildings sometimes sort of a top that's clumped down on top of something. Big pimple, maybe. No, a big pimple, let's not say that. It's a structure. And it illustrates a little bit what you were saying, because this is really important, because that differentiates the invasive from the exotic. Yeah, so let's get back to us on screen so we can show you folks what we're talking about. So if we have glass, we know when this simulates the sun here, it passes the glass and it transference the heat. So you've got to burn your finger. You burn your hand. So woods doesn't heat up that much. We all know this. If we sit on a wooden bench in the sun, it's okay. But if we do this with concrete, we burn our butt, right? Exactly. And that explains us very simply that this here is a conductor, right? And this here is pretty much not. So whereas the sort of the heat transfer through glass happens immediate through concrete, it also happens but in a delayed way. Yes. But this is originally the way why the indigenous people not also was it easier, as you correctly said, to build with this one, more efficient and effective, but also these buildings stay more comfortable, thermally comfortable. Correct, correct. So that also is an insulating fact. Exactly. Exactly. But we also have to say that this material here is sort of locally available too, because three of the four ingredients, meaning water, the sand, and the aggregates are local. And then you already started to introduce their two different aggregates you can use. You can use the basalt, the lava rock, and you can use the coral. And once you use the coral, it looks lighter and more cream colored. Yes. And once you use the basalt, it looks darker. Correct. And the darker it looks, the more it heats up. That's true too. So the architects basically brought something from the mainland and then some of them were able to basically adjust that to the local conditions of being always hot and other ones didn't. So the ones who didn't ended up being evasive and the ones who did it are the exotic ones. Correct. And so we want to point out these here now increasingly. Yes. So let's go to the next picture. So slide number eight is the Kalani Moku building, which is in the Civic Center in Honolulu, and it is a state office building and in the upper corner of this picture you see the light, the freestanding lights, which light up the exterior of the building at night, which also are part of this rough textured concrete. And just as I said earlier that the top part of this building is more massive. It's got these protruding elements that stick out in the facade. But something that's very important, and we see that here too, here in a tropical setting, the greenery is always around the building. The building usually has blue skies and full sun. It looks a lot less forbidding and a lot less difficult than it does in temperate climates, whereas there's a lot more criticism of brutalism as being unfriendly and fortress-like. We don't have that as much here just because of our setting. And you can see this building is okay. It has an overhang and it has certain fins here, which we see soon as one of the ways to effectively shade. But it's not so rigorously consequent with that, right? No, it's not. It's starting out there, it's getting there, but probably again not one of the masterpieces. Correct. And our next picture is, I was saying that most, a lot of the brutalist buildings tend to be much bigger. And this is an exception. This is a small two-story building, the Lum Yip P building, which is on King Street in downtown Honolulu built in 1968, as you can see on the facade. And it has the typical vertical striping or fluting of the exterior, as you can see on the right-hand side next to the brass plaque that identifies the building. We're going to see a lot more of that, this texture, this vertical or sometimes horizontal exterior strips are very typical of the concrete used in brutalist structures. We call this bush hammered and it's basically a pneumatic tool, machine-powered tool that's still hand operated, but it's machine aided. And it basically carves out the top parts and it brings out the aggregates and then sort of the way you use the tool, it leaves these lines. Correct. So it's almost like a corduroy. Exactly. But this one is a regular and textured one. We will see that very frequently those textured elements, those vertical bars are chipped and that's intentional, but we will see that as we continue. Next we've got, okay, now this is a very interesting building. On the left-hand side, this is located on King Street in Kalihi. It is a Shinto shrine. It's the Tencho Kotai Jingukyo Dojo. This is an example of Japan's indigenous religion, which is Shintoism. Japan also is very, Buddhism is very prominent in Japan as well. And that sculptural sort of scoop thing that's on the roof, that concave element, I think is a reference to the traditional roof elements used on Shinto shrines, which usually have a diagonal sort of crisscross at the gables of the roof. But you show on the right-hand side. I came from another angle sort of of the architectural historian here that I'm pretending to be. Not. That to say maybe they were aware of Le Corbusier, because Le Corbusier in his late work was one of the proponents of brutalism. In his early work he was a high modernist and in his late work, especially working in other climates, he really started, as you can see on the left side of that building here. This is in Kandigarh by the way, where they were building this whole entire government building in India. And so that's missing on the picture on the left, where you have a lot of this sort of unstructured surface that gets hit by the sun. Only the arcades are shaded. You took a great picture in the sun and basically demonstrated that. So they were just taking sort of the iconic roof shape from the master, but not understanding how he was sort of continuing to be exotic. But I think that's a remarkable building nonetheless. And it does look very fortress-like. If you are looking at it from King Street, it looks like it could be holding off the zombie plague if you had to. Exactly. So next one, and we got to move a little fast. Yeah, this one is the first federal savings and loan of branch structure, which was on Veritania Street, which possibly is threatened with demolition. We'll see it's for sale. And in the upper left corner you put in the Unity Temple, which is a very early Frank Lloyd Wright structure, very iconic for its time period about 1910 built in Chicago or built in Illinois. And those that overhang and the windows being reduced to just simple little slits looks like this first federal building, which is on Veritania Street. Exactly. And it's a later brutalist building because you can see the texture on the right side in zooming in the picture you took is basically it results from that at that time somewhere in the late 70s in the early 80s that sort of bush hammering became to labor intensive and not affordable anymore. So the architects were teaming up with the industries and they basically created what you call the fluted block. And the fluted block is that make a form a mold and basically cast these sort of ribbons into the concrete and then you just stack them up. And it looks like it's fluted, but basically it's sort of pre-manufactured. Exactly. Makes it deeper to build. And next, we go to something that we've already discussed once, which is the Ward Plaza. And you pointed out, and I think this is really astute in the top picture, we've got the Roby House, which is built in 1910, very iconic important Frank Lloyd Wright structure of the Prairie School. This is built in Chicago. And if you look below the Ward Plaza, built many decades afterwards, they have a very strong similarity of looking like a lot of horizontal strips just stacked up on top of each other. And on the right, we see our close-up of that aggregate, that rough textured basalt incorporating aggregate that we've been talking about as being part of the brutalist look here in Hawaii. Very right. And this project was actually the first one that got us in touch with the brutalism. And the second one is the next picture, a show that we just fairly This is the Royal Hawaiian Center. In Waikiki. And you provided another great picture you did, where once again you can see this very raw rugged bush hammered surface. And you can also see the strategy overall of sort of carving out the monolith, avoiding the solid. Exactly. These are big rectangular blocks. And the picture on the left was taken in 1984. The structure has been altered a great deal today with changes to the facade. But in the old days, it was very much blank on the outside. They wanted you to come into the inside. Next project is another one next door here downtown. Yeah, this is the Pacific Tower of the Pawahi Square. And you again see the textured concrete. The building itself is in the picture on the left. And on the right is, rather than vertical stripes, we've got the horizontal chip stripes of the parking structure of this entire complex. And again, that's a very typical brutalist thing. But this is not the dark basalt gray. This is the lighter sand colored or coral colored aggregate. We also say those are the two sort of different colors that you can use of the concrete. And us being the easy breezy provocateurs, we would say let's move into the parking structure. Which has got a lot more air circulation. And it feels good in there. Right. Right. Why putting this glass in that segway is perfectly into the next picture, which I call nicknamed the Kamea headquarters, which they have the administration in the building. Correct. This is this is Kauaihau Plaza. It is adorned with these very concave, concrete vertical horizontal panels, which are added to the exterior of the building. They look like they're structural and they are not. They were just actually bolted on there. And at one point, one of them wanted to fall off. And that was a moment of panic when they had to fix all of them. But again, the parking building, which is what you're seeing there has much nicer circulation because it's completely open, unlike the office building, which is insulated with glass and air conditioning. And this project also provides the permanent background picture you see every once in a while. Correct. That was something that my son, Joey, found most intriguing about the tropical downtown. We have here this contrast between the lush green and the sort of rugged, sort of man-made stone concrete. Frank, by the way, calls it liquid stone. There we go. And he writes it right. Go to the next picture, the Frank Fawzi building. This is the Frank Fawzi office building, formerly the City and County Municipal Building. It's also in the Civic Center. Again, very recessed windows reduced to horizontal strips. And remarkably, the entire base of this building is entirely open. So it's floating above its base. And so when you walk into the main area down at the bottom, you look up to this open space underneath you. And that's the whole building. Yeah. And we have to give credits to Dr. Alfred Yee, who just recently passed away, who is the mastermind from the engineering side behind many of these magnificent buildings here to create a totally free spanning ground floor lanai for such a tall building as a super effort and masterly achieved here. Right. Perfect. And around this building, we should mention the landscaping, which is the next picture and project. Right. And the parking structure that serves the Civic Center is very disguised because it has earth mounted around it and it's entirely landscapes. You don't see most of the cars, but you do see the brutalist elements in the elements that are visible above ground, the entranceways, the walkways, et cetera. Again, there are those vertical stripes textured into the concrete. And that gets us to the next picture, which shows a project which is probably the most iconic of our local tropical brutalism. But we don't want to talk about that so much about the landscaping around the building, which some sources say that's Lawrence Hallprin was involved. And Lawrence Hallprin in the landscape realm is probably the most dominant activist in brutalism. To the right is the Kella Fountain in Portland, which is a magnificent building, which is an urban waterfall right in the center. And we see traces, or there are traces, but we're going to talk about that. Many of these projects we're going to do shows entirely on the building. And the financial plaza is iconic enough that we can talk about that as a whole. Absolutely. So we want to show a couple of few before we phase out. More nondescript buildings here. The next one I think is on King or Bear Tender. Yeah, this was built as the Bell Collins building. It's on King Street in Kalihi. Bell Collins was and still is a contracting and designing firm. So they made this a little bit more sexy looking than a lot of the commercial buildings would have been at that time. And again, there are those vertical elements, the fluting that we see very common of that raw concrete. That's a different technology. These are the simple double T-twinties that you use for parking structure ceilings. And they just use it as a wall. So all of a sudden, this very generic industrial fabricated thing does the purpose. As you can see on the picture on the left, that you took at a perfect time of the day where it's high noon. And you see these fins shade the glass. So once again, exotic. Exotic and they work. Perfect. So do the next ones, next picture even more. Yeah, this is 1060 Young Street, small two-story commercial building. Again, the windows very recessed. Those vertical louvers are very much to give shade. And they do. You can see in the picture on the left that they are keeping the direct sun out of that building. And sun not only heats things up, but it also fades things because the ultraviolet rays in sun can be damaging. And the less direct sun you get, the more easy it is to live inside. And the next one, the Kaiser hospital. The Kaiser clinic. Yeah. Doesn't even more by on the right side, you can see these sort of horizontal overhangs. It's probably facing south. And the class we're looking at frontally is the west facade. Where he basically moved the windows facing northwest. So the goal of these buildings were to never have any sun hit the building. And this is a great tropical interpretation of what probably he knew, which was Lukan again, his Salk Institute in La Jolla in California, Southern California. Not only architecture, but also the landscaping in these pools. Last but not at all least, our final building here from downtown is the next one. Right, the Pan Am building on Kapilani Boulevard. And again, people tend to think of monolithic, huge, heavy, forbidding structures as part of brutalism. But in fact, in this case, we see the entire two stories that are facing towards us on the ground level are entirely open. And you approach the building through this big, large, open, breezy area, which is not, which is the antithesis of what people tend to say about, about, about brutalism. And also the chef, the main part of the building, you know, is pretty much thinned out, carved out and basically reduced to these fins with a, with a glass push deeply inside. Yes, true. So the last couple of minutes, this building reminded me of one that has very much informed me. And this is the next picture when I went to school for that one year in Lincoln, Nebraska. This is I am Pays Bank, NBC Bank at that time, now Wells Fargo. And it's pretty much very much alike a building we have here, luckily, by the same architect, I am pay, which is the East West Center complex and most explicitly there, the Manoa dorm building, which you can see at the very top left. Another sort of classification for differentiation between invasive or exotic could be the year of date of the building. Because buildings before 73, which is when the big oil crisis was, are not unlikely more invasive because they could just do anything with oil. But after that, the awareness was different. So this building with its sort of differentiation for orientation is already doing the right thing. And I want to add that for a couple of years, a new technology has been around. And that's called the ultra thin concrete. And this is thermally micro engineered concrete that you can basically cast concrete so it insulates. So you can build this building again, we're probably in that zero lead platinum building, which is pretty amazing. Yeah. Getting us to the end of the show, the next couple of pictures, this has so much influenced us that we as architects, we're doing an homage to that inspiration from my childhood here, from my education. This is the school cafeteria that we did a couple years ago, which is an exoskeleton that self shading itself. Yes. This is in temperate climate. If you would replace the fixed glazing with jealousies, you would have the same effect. And the top left is from Pays NBC bank in Nebraska. And at the bottom right is our interpretation of that. Next picture is a website you found the Soto. Yeah. And brutalism is now undergoing a re examination and a repopularization. People are defending it rather than criticizing it. People are saying we need to save the brutalist buildings we've got. I'm totally on board with that. And as you just pointed out, brutalism is relevant today with the new concrete technology that exists that makes it more environmentally friendly. So let's not tear them all down or repaint them or trash them. Let's appreciate it. And also go to the next picture. We keep being polemic. Let's not continue this. This is how we're building as of now, which is a glass box. And it's also metal. Metal doesn't grow here at all and glass just overheats. So why are building this way? And why not next picture following the trend that you just talked. They label this here. There's another website which is basically reintroducing brutalism. It says, Brute is back. Yes. So if we want to stay on top of things and not fall behind, we want to be as innovative as we were at Century here. Right. We want to look at these trends. Exactly. And there's a publication. This is a new book out, The Beauty of Brutalism, Raw Concrete. This is a new scholarly book that's available in bookstores. Right. And the last picture is another play. First of all, as you said, keep these goodies from the past. They're jewels. Treasure them. Yes. Nicely renovate them, clean them up. Yes. Innovate them. And if you built new, this is a project we proposed a couple of years ago for Manila. Once again, an exoskeleton, self-shading, easy breezy. We call this tropical textile. So this is our encouragement for the young emerging generation. Keep the old tropical brutalism jewels and build new ones. Exactly. And learn from them and keep them going. Exactly. There we go. So without one, see you in about two weeks for a new next episode of learning from the best practices from the past for the future with the soda brown and Martin Disping. Until then, have a good time.