 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Hello everyone and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. I am the co-host of this program, DeSoto Brown. And we had a little hiatus there for two weeks for Christmas and New Years. We're now in the new year of 2019. And I just want to acknowledge that I had a decorated holiday season and I think Rob can show you what I'm talking about. Look at that. Isn't that spectacular? Oh, that is a decorated beard for Christmas. Well, let's get away from Christmas. Let's get away from the New Year frivolities. And let's now welcome the host of this program, Martin Desbang. And Martin Desbang is joining us from his current position in Germany. But you can't tell. Looks like he's right here in Honolulu. And then good afternoon, Mr. Desbang. Although it's probably not afternoon for you. It's probably early morning, something like that. It's Martin's sabbatical time, 3 a.m. in the morning, cold, cold Germany. That's terrible. But good to be back, makes me feel warm. Good. To think about our island, so jump right in. Yeah. Okay, let's go to slide number one. Yeah, and this is, you know, I have my personal copy here. This is actually our tropical tourism expert, Suzanne's personal copy that she gave me from the magazine that Timothy Shuler was writing the article of Brutes on the Beach. And it started a really vibrant and vital conversation amongst three of us. And you had the chance to respond to the article. And this is my turn now, right? Yes. So we've each had a chance we did a show with Timothy and then we each are doing a separate show in which we talk about brutalism here in the tropics. Exactly. And if we can get to slide number two, please, this is the perfect demonstration how if you are as excited about this subject matter as we are, it's going to be around you everywhere. For example, in this case, when you fly out of Honolulu, this is the international airport. And you see to my surprise, not to say disappointment, that they're modifying the airport with this very clumsy, chunky, unelegant steel construction probably caused by security paranoia. And I wish they would have listened to our previous show about not to touch the airport as you don't touch Eroseranum's TWA building in New York City, but remodel it back to the original condition and then whatever you have to add to outside or if you have to do here, do in the notion of the architect, which is Asipov here, which you live in an Asipov house by the way. I will soon live in an Asipov house. I'm not there yet, but someday I will be and that will be a whole new world to deal with. But you grew up in one, I should correct you. I surely did grow up in an Asipov house, that's correct. So let's go to another encounterment with Tropical Rulism slide number three. This was me and this was my Mahalo Mili Kallikimaka from some local ladies at the district court because Martin supposedly had parked incorrectly and his ladies waved his fees. So I ended up in the district court building that reminded me a lot of the building that you showed last time at the very bottom right here, which is the Frank Fonzi government building. Both buildings are very stereotypic, very monolithic. Both their lobbies are kept very open and easy breezy. And actually in this case, even more than in the Frank Fonzi building, which is surprising as we said yesterday, we were talking about what we're going to say today because this is a building that has even higher security demands, right? Correct. So it's very refreshing that once you go up and you are in these offices, it's a missed opportunity because the building is, you know, potentially, you know, able to be biochlametically operated, but people don't take advantage of that and basically hermetically sealed in AC. So our recommendation would be open the buildings up as they were intended to be designed in some case. Right. And you do have that wonderful shot of looking down the escalator at the open court at the bottom and that is a nice element that hasn't been changed. It surely is. So if we go to slide four quickly, this is just remembering what we talked about, you know, at least in the show with Tim, which was a little bit more about the surface and the sort of aesthetics of tropical brutalism. But today we want to go to slide number five, which is also a permanent background and I think you brought something to illustrate and demonstrate. Yeah. So let's, Rob, let's go back to the studio here and let me show you what we want to make a point about with concrete. Concrete is something that will hold on to heat. So if I am putting a flame up to this piece of concrete, the heat is being absorbed into it and that is the point that Martin wanted to make about his, we can come back to our slide here, about your lanai in the Waikiki Grand because the concrete is bombarded by the sun all day and as the sun goes down, the concrete will start to give off the heat that it accumulated and that can be a problem. As you said, it's not comfortable sometimes to sit on your lanai even if the sun is not out because that concrete is giving off the heat that it already absorbed. Perfectly put to solo and that means a little demonstration basically tells us that thermal mass per se and exceptions to the rule as it always is the case but principally there's a no-go for thermal mass in the tropics so that's a principal problem. However, if we go to the next slide, number six, from the previous show, you can modify the concrete. For example, instead of mixing the salt into it, you can mix coral into that and then you get something that you have a perfect branding name for. I do, you get what we are calling blonde brutalism. If you look in the lower right corner, there is a beautiful blonde lady for a Pan-American poster for the Pan-American building and I many years ago got to meet her when she was later on in her life but she'd been a model in the 1950s here in Honolulu so she's the embodiment of blonde brutalism for this particular moment. Certainly is. So we're going to talk more about substance today than surface. So number seven is the building that until most recently the main tenant was American Savings Bank who have now moved to a new office building that we promised each other and you now that we're going to do a show about it. So this building here maybe then all things considered that we were just talking about maybe isn't so exotically tropical because it has an amount of windows that are pretty flush with the facade and it also has a lot of concrete that could be overheated by the sun. So are there some more sort of exotic and less invasive tropical brutalist pieces? Yes, there are. And if we go to the next picture here in number eight, the image on the left side shows a glass tower here by Joe Paul Rongstead who we also want to get on the show and on a talk story at Doko Momo and I paired him with a car in front. The white car both get blasted by the sun and are hermetically sealed so they need fossil fuel to basically operate, right? So we call that an invasive approach while the exotic approach is the one on the right side. So the building that's also on the foreground on the left picture, you can see that these breeze slays and these slabs are basically shading the amount of glass on the building and I pair this with my car in front of it which is when the top is down uses the trait winds for thermal comfort. So both have an exotic tropical approach, one could say. And I should say backed by palm trees to emphasize the tropics. And I'm glad you mentioned that because that's the smoothest transition to the next slide, number nine. Because this is our most, we agree, this is our most iconic piece of tropical brutalism on the island, the central plaza of the Pacific going more into detail, however, your analogy and your reference to the palm trees, the building, if you see on the right picture at the very top, different than a palm tree that basically gets more intense and more dense and more fluffy until you go up. Because that's where the most sun is and the plants need the sun. Buildings basically shouldn't open up and shouldn't become more glassy to the top because that's where you overheat. So at the top, the architect unfortunately turned to formalism and didn't stay so much with performative measures as they did on the lower parts of the building. Right? Yeah, but it's still a very iconic structure, the castle and cook building. You're absolutely right. It's not as firm as well as it could, but it is iconic and is part of that very important financial plaza construction. And I believe that's the next thing we're going to look at as well. We will. And I endorse what you just said and we continue to try to convince our CEO and founding uncle Jay Fidel who we see here talking to a bunch of... Oh yeah, we need to go to the next slide. There we go. There we go, exactly. There was some interesting on-shore features of that composition and that traces back to one of the most famous architects in the landscape area of brutalism and that's Lawrence Halprin. At the very bottom left of this page, you can see what used to be what he is very well known for, a water feature. And unfortunately, the client had taken out the water, had put turf in there. So we urge the client to be aware that they have a Halprin here and if you have a Halprin, you basically conserve it. So please put the water back in as we're telling the clients or the owner or the tenants, whoever. And if we jump to the next page, this is the encouragement for you to do so. So this is one of the most famous Halprin pieces here. This is in Portland, so not that far away. And this is Kella Fountain. And the bottom picture is one that I took when I first ran into it, literally. It's just like threw me off because it's a fantastic proletarian approach to bring the waterfalls that normal people can't go to because they've got to drive for a long while to get into the mountains. And here Halprin brings that sort of natural feature, waterfalls into the city with his brutalist public pool, which is amazing if you haven't seen it, you've got to go there. Yeah, and I can say too that these forms are very hard-edged concrete. And yet the water flowing over them softens them. And that's something that you and I have discussed of the use of vegetation to soften and contrast with the hard concrete of the brutalist structures. We're going to be talking, we're going to see a little bit more of that as we continue through here. Yeah, and why don't we jump to the next page here because it's not authored by Halprin but very much in the notion of Halprin. This is one of my favorite places in downtown Honolulu here, this little canyon here approaching, again, American saving banks at least previously on the left side. You can see here how it has everything that a tropical jungle, a man-made jungle needs. It's got shade, it's got wind, it's got water, it's got sun, it's got seeding. And here again, we're checking this out with the emerging generation. Very, very fun place to be and shows how alive and how less, you know, brutalism is not brutal, it's very gentle, right? I agree completely, this is one of my favorite places too and I think it's really successful and just as with the fountain we just saw, it starts as a small creek and a small source of water and goes around to the front of the building where it expands into a giant pool, which people can sit next to and which is a beautiful feature of Tamron Square right where we're talking about. And we'll move on to the next page. Why are we continue to do this getting so uptight and overly excited about tropical brutalism because it's in danger? And it's also up for being on the register because it takes 50 years to be eligible to be conserved. And so we're talking 70s and they're coming up. Actually this year here for many of these pieces and unfortunately some developers take advantage of not quite being 50 years old and here at the top we lost what warehouse by Steve Vow which we did a show about. And we have sort of lost but not really there's some hope if we could retrofit our poverty most other most iconic piece of tropical brutalism which is the Rosalind Shopping Center which we keep talking about and I want to bring back the pictures you showed last time next page please here which was until the end of the last century it maintained its original very brave and very sort of ambitious design agenda of sort of bringing back what Calacao Avenue was at the beginning of the century was a big palm grove and one street being cut through and in the 70s the architects wanted to bring this back and it lasted until I think you said at the top left you took this in the early 2000s. And that is when basically the bling sort of capitalism and the mercantile typology took over and cut down all the trees and had to put its corporate signs not just signs on it but it's facades right they can stick it on cheesecake and all these things which is very unfortunate so I want to guide you to where this design intention is still noticeable and actually to be experienced and we should go to the next page this is the backside of the Royal Wine Shopping Mall facing the Royal Wine Hotel and you can see it still sends the original design intent there is a jungle in front of this sort of chunky piece of bush hammer concrete you can see some monkeys in there at the very top left doing some maintenance right so check this out and imagine how beautiful that was very very sort of intellectually a sophisticated approach that unfortunately didn't survive a predator capitalism of bling commerce but I'm really glad that you were able to take these pictures and show that that element still exists on one side of the building even though it's been lost on the other side that faces the street mm-hmm our fellow Tropic here David Rock would encourage us to get off the island at least well in my case physically not without sort of mentally let's jump to number next page number 16 which is an icon of architectural modernism by the architect Ricardo Bofill who is sort of unfortunate of me and not without his contribution considered to be one of the most postmodern architects but he started out here again in the heydays of brutalism in the 70s with his own home and studio moving into a out of commission a cement plant so there's this sort of ruin this concrete industrial ruin that as you said before he used green and vegetation as the major element to soften it up and then inhabit it in a very warm and cozy way so it's a great sort of artifact from what led to brutalism in general and sort of with the vegetation us having a 12 month growing cycle potentially at our islands than anywhere else in the world where is this located? this is in France Bofill is a French architect so it's somewhere in France because there are palm trees growing on it and next to it so it must be in the south of France because it has some tropical yeah it's got some tropical elements to it so let's go to the next page and make some suggestions how to continue the evolution of the tropical modelism on our island this is a project here by a colleague of mine from a while ago at the school I first taught in Bremen in Germany this is Clemens Bonnen who did a project for a client and he was basically applying at that time fairly new and still pretty cutting edge technology which you call ultra light concrete and what it is that you engineer concrete in a micro ferocity that it causes trisillions of little visually almost unnoticeable little air bubbles and infuse them into the concrete so the concrete basically is insulated so you can build exactly the way we're used to from tropical brutalism but it performs better because the concrete doesn't overheat as you perfectly demonstrated with your lighting little experiment there and we did it out to that this is not unlike the traditional Hawaiian which also doesn't get hot because it is filled with air spaces the thatching on it is composed of multiple small individual elements with air between them so you don't build up the thermal mass that then retains heat perfect building scientists you are by now yay and moving on to the next one there's also another way to basically make it more tropically appropriate for brutalism and this is not to use concrete in sort of a steratomic way that we have seen before chunky way, massive way but a more light way a more airy way a more sort of ethereal way if you want so here is one of the last shows here with John and Mayumi Hara who have shared with us how our mission probably you know who we consider the master of brutalism in general and thanks for bringing the book and just having hold up the book this is about Paul Rudolph and this is a book by my former colleague in Arizona at the University of Arizona Christopher Dolman who wrote this book about pretty much here his early phase in life which he spent in Florida where he grew up and then he transitioned slowly but surely to actually the east coast, the upper east coast and that's where he fully developed to be the master of the more steratomic so this building he chose for the cover that we saw when he were holding it up and here on the upper right is sort of in this sort of transitional phase in the early and so this is a suggestion and there's another if we go to the next page another example from architectural history by a Swiss architectural firm they're called ATLDA 5 and they were very early starting in the we were doing research and finding out in the 50s and surely 60s and 70s and I think ongoing we were doing very innovative high density low rise housing all concrete and then softened with vegetation as one can clearly see here so moving on to the next page we have opportunities like that plenty on the island this is the new construction here on the slide number 20 on Picoa Street close to Capliani Boulevard again making basically concrete frames and then we're very disappointed they get hermiticized and fixed glazing gets put on it and it's all going to be AC so we wish leave this open put in the good old glass jealousies the evolved technically optimized form of them obviously and then there you go and so don't miss out on opportunities that you create right right right so the basic structure could be handled differently you could still build it the same way but what you put on the facade and what you face it with could be something different that doesn't necessarily require tremendous constant use of fossil fuels exactly so me being here next picture is sort of this sort of deja vu with our own work here and you know when you said Martin you know doesn't your work from the past look somehow brutalist and I have to say well it's a lot of concrete yeah it's a lot of framing it's a lot of massing so here we got examples from transportation from education from in habitation and I have to agree and say yes there's sort of a brutalist thinking behind it in a very sort of inclusive and in a very social and proletarian way as concrete being a good material being very durable but also being very suitable for you know being creating a stage for social event and activities but how this is Germany and we're in Hawaii and so how could we do that in Hawaii and let's go to the next page and this is Timothy had closed the article referencing me with suggested propositions, polemic propositions for an evolution of tropical brutalism and what are we looking at on the first slide here well we are looking at some of the projects we look at three of the projects that Martin has done in his classes at the University of Hawaii Manoa this is the first proposed building it's called Primitivo number one it's a circular building that has a concrete interior core but then as we've been just discussing we leave the exterior open so that you've got places for people to congregate who live in the building you've got the outside coming in you've got places where there are not only gathering places but private homes or private spaces as well and you also are open to the elements and so you're not heating you're not cooling you're just living in a more tropical environment and we move on to the next one which no surprise is Primitiva 2 now this is a different structure it's not circular or cylindrical but it does have an open quality to it there's the proposal that in some cases there could be a water curtain wall exterior rather than a solid wall you again are living with plants you're living with a sense of being open to the environment and we've also got those exterior stairs that's something we've talked about in the past for something that isn't required here we don't have to include we don't have to enclose our high-rise stairways but we can leave them open so that's another way that we are getting away from the enclosed hermetic sealed environment and why we moved on to the next slide here as we say it just like in a palm grove you know there's like a consistency all the same species but then each individual plant is different right correct so based upon that sort of biochromatic tropical genetic code you can grow what we see here on this page a sort of a jungle system a grove that most likely you know it's material it's stuff it's going to be concrete because making a skinny tower probably concrete is the most appropriate material to do so so we're heading to the end of the show so let's go to the next slide which is that's why we're doing this because then you end up in a fabric that is basically the framework for inhibitation of the national environment and it's going to be the birds and it's going to be the sun it's going to be the rain it's going to be the people and all live in happy harmony in their main jungle and we want to close the show with the last slide here which I was so thrilled to see that Tim's article was back to back with his other article here about promoting a lifestyle and at one point we're going to do one of our most challenges shows is going to call a dress code a dress code it's going to look about skin it's going to look into skins and how we have a first skin obviously the second skin is what we wear and now we're dressed up you know more than we usually do where we're out on the beach right correct and then the building facades are the third skin and we should be critical about the second and the third skin as this article points out right because once you know in a jungle no lion is dressed up right they're dressed up naturally and they don't put on different clothes no they do not nature has provided them with all the clothes they need exactly so I think with this we're at the end of the show we're going to see each other again in two weeks we're going to have another show about Harat Hawaii and this time we're going to talk about his design for the West Oahu campus that's right that's right and until then we hope you all stay as sexy as the beachy brutes and we'll see you again in two weeks goodbye and thank you everybody bye bye