 Soto Brown in your Bishop Museum. Hi, Soto. Good morning, everybody, or good day, everyone watching this. That's correct. And me, Martin de Spang, in the bathroom studio of the Grand Hotel in Waikiki, the Waikiki Grand, and we welcome you back to this our show, Human Humane Architecture. This is our 260 second one, and you're about to be our 14,200s viewer. So we appreciate that. And we jump right back in where we had left, which was looking at cities and at their urban fabric. And you just sort of reminded us of Rockefeller Center and in New York City for urban reasons. And so and architectural reasons as we discussed. And if we can get the first slide up, you wanted to share with the audience, which is the equivalent for these urban reasons for us here in Honolulu. The equivalent of Rockefeller Center for us in a similar but not identical way is the financial plaza of the Pacific, which is built in the late 1960s. And the reason it's similar is because it is a complex that takes up an entire block. And it consists of multiple buildings, but possibly most importantly is it dedicates part of its space, a goodly part of its space, I might add, to the open free use of pedestrians, meaning that you don't have to necessarily even be going in or out of one of the buildings in the financial plaza to simply walk through the open grounds. And not only are these open spaces for pedestrians, there are places for people to sit. And there also is public artwork, which was created for the space and installed in the space purely for the enjoyment of the public. And this is something that was pioneered by Rockefeller Center in the 1930s in New York City, which gradually spread to other places and us being a recipient of a similar type of building, as I said, in the late 1960s. So 30 years later, and this set a trend for downtown Honolulu, which other buildings subsequently mimicked as well, which was probably an international concept by then, again, of not building on every square inch of the property out to the side, out to the sidewalks, but instead, leaving space for people to enjoy, which is a benefit for everyone in the downtown area, not just the tenants, but everybody. And it's a very civic concept. Yeah, it is. And the author of that is the great American landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, who is most shockingly good example I experienced in the most shocking way, because Shaman Martin, he wasn't prepared when I was invited by Portland State to join their faculty and they for the interview, they set me up in a former motel aid, whatever motel that became a boutique hotel. And I took a stroll around the block. And it was supposedly empty block. And I started it on, you know, the whole city is on a slope, different than here downtown Honolulu. And I started at the top of the block and recognize some subtle cracks in the, and I thought this is seismic that must have been an earthquake. But it was part of the of the concept and the cracks got bigger and bigger and turned into creeks. And the creeks eventually, because everything is horizontal. So then he basically created this urban waterfall wall that crushes down, I think probably six meters, like 18 to 20 feet. My colleague and friend David Rockwood isn't quite as romantic as I am about it, because he lived his Portlandian and he raised his kids there. And he said it scared the heck out of him. When they were there, because there's no guardrail and nothing, it's like the Grand Canyon where they don't have this either. And it's, it's a miracle to me now in these days of paranoia of liability and suing and all of that. It's probably because it has never been touched. Well, I know that if you don't touch a building, you don't need to update it to code. But once you do, you have to. So maybe different than doing just some regular maintenance, they never had to do anything. So it's quite fantastic. We are not well, we, we shouldn't compare. But the irony is that on the other side of the view that we have here, there is indeed something if you look very close, there's a big planter area. When you look at that edge of the planter, you see some blue tiles. That's where there used to be a pool, a shallow pool, and a spout that's still there, you know, spitting the water into that. Not so intelligent, not so educated people have been draining that and putting dirt in there and growing grass. And we said in some show ago, we want that water back, because that's a little whole print from the famous and there's there's the highway, I think, or Freeway Park in Seattle by hot print as well. So these are gorgeous. Very, as you said, you know, very cosmopolitan ideas at a time. But from my experience, at least not in Germany, no where else than in America, it was executed in such a heroic and playful way and powerful ways. So these are really unique things that we believe and we is also Doko Momo, who we have here, because we're doing our next walking tour starting or dedicated to Fort Street Mall, because the only part that's basically out of the sort of more pedestrian walkable part is actually Fort Street Mall, but whole print together with others designed it to be for the entire downtown. And in all honesty, every major European city and I mean, every German city in its core is pedestrian and has been for a long time, right? And even Mary American cities have started that. So this is long overdue to do this to more than just than to just one street, but that street we want to dedicate to and I had just been able to acquire our Dean Bill Chapman to be to do the the opening comments. And he always reminds us rightly so because he is historian, as you are and he says, well, there were some buildings on there before they were pretty nice too, right? And that some like him miss, but I think is it fair to say the Soto, this is a good example of what we always say when you tear something down, you better replace it with something better, which unfortunately these days rarely happens, but this is an example, right? This is really good. And I'm not saying it was better than the one before, but it tried to be as good as it can and it turned out to be pretty awesome. So that's definitely you guys join us for the walking tour. There's the link down there at the very bottom. It's on October 15th and it starts early in the morning and so please do that. We however this picture was taken out of our additional pying mobile as you see the mirror sticking out and what did it had to look at which thanks to Graham hard who brought this to our attention first, we see on the building that wasn't there before and you checked it out a couple of days ago, right? Yes, I did. And what's happened is that one of the buildings, one of the three buildings in this complex, which was originally the American Security Bank building, which my father's office was in when the financial Plaza first opened and so very frequently I visited the 11th floor of this building. That's right. I remember you saying that. That's right. That's right. I witnessed an participant or whatever. This building has a new tenant and they are now adding decorative panels to the exterior and in this photograph you can see them. They're on the two vertical shafts that are facing us in this photograph. And this is something we discussed in a great deal modernizing and revamping buildings to make them look different, to make them look more up to date. As a rule, I'm not a fan of that, Martin, you're not a fan of that. In this case it's not something that I think it's going to be permanently attached to the building necessarily because these are exterior panels. However, it does mean you have to drill into the concrete of the building which means you have altered it forever. It's not necessarily that these are unattractive or that they are disfiguring the building but they are compromising to a degree the original integrity of what was designed and created back at the time it was created. And for the financial plaza to have successfully lasted as long as it has without major exterior changes is admirable and the ones that are being done here are not necessarily something we would have liked but they're also not necessarily as different or as intrusive as they could have been so we go with that. Yeah, I agree but then again they're like oh here I am you know I'm new I'm different but I don't really know who was there before right so I think once again that's why we do this we need to educate these people the new owner the new tenant and saying hey this building is already cool and you being in there is cool so that's enough right treasure what you have versus are we going to talk about that in the next slide but before that we can say the show quotes on the on the right is basically it's not quite as bad as it happened to peter's cheese gold on building which we talked about and with him where they're more permanently turned at least just surely fins that could cool the building into a thermal mass into the opposite and we show quote bottom right is when we were having a cigarette lighter and trying to simulate you know what happens to material that has thermal mass and it overheats so maybe the people and probably it was meant to be just decorative but giving them more benefit of doubt that they probably deserve is like they could have said well if we cover the concrete then the sun can't get to it and heat it up that much probably not the reason why they did this year but it could have been but again um there's a building even new buildings there's a zaha deep building in walsberg so the cradle of walks wagon and it's an edutainment center and she she made a very fluid building out of very fluid concrete that she didn't want to you know insulate from the outside in stucco and plaster so they did on the inside it is not the perfect way because the concrete then in the temperate climate gets cold and then inside it's warm so the dew point happens at the sort of iffy point there so it's not the best dear young generation don't think this is like what we should do but um in some buildings you know um you can actually go in and and insulate from the inside when maybe the inside is less expressed and i would you can tell me from your memory i'm not sure to what degree the concrete on the inside was as exposed what do you are childhood memories of having visited that in the office tell you it was it was completely exposed the interior was just unadorned plain concrete so that was that was part of what i thought was particularly intriguing about brutalism when it got started at this time and as i've said before the first brutalist building i experienced was in city of montreal in canada in 1967 when i went to the exposed 67 world's fair and stayed in a brutalist hotel there and that made a tremendous expression impression on me at the age of 13 that the interior of this building was the raw chipped concrete in contrast to the other elements in the inside and and my dad's office in the 11th floor of the american security bank building was also plain unadorned concrete and i thought that was really a very interesting thing and i liked it and still do wow you know we've known each other for quite some while and been doing shows every week but there's still new stuff to discover i'm highly jealous of you having been at that expo you saw musher softies habitat 67 yes yes we know which is which was his thesis project that he you know managed to build and you saw which we did couple shows about my german pavilion by fry auto and lary medlin who was our guest so and you saw bucky fullers yes grand of your of your country so how awesome i'm i'm very jealous well you're not old enough that's the problem i guess i guess people like me who got to do that i i guess i guess yeah so well i i was one year young so i they could have taken me there but i wouldn't make much of an impression though these days however returning back i doubt that we have to go in and see i doubt that it's still in the original condition where the concrete is exposed i'm sure they have covered it up so then you could basically you know stop start you know building up insulation on the inside um so uh different than in the next slide is a building just like actually from that same year almost same year 68 we're talking 67 68 so this is the sibling of what you experience as a child young age of 13 in uh in montreal and here in chicago and both have the same climate and they were crazy about brutalist buildings and here um top left picture is me on that boat tour that dank ubrick recommended to me to be the wendela and not the architecture sent out one and uh but i had an interesting tour guide who said he came from acting which we could see and that helped him and then he went into teaching and now he teaches the public the interested public about the architecture without being an architect and he's been really been doing a great job the only thing where i think he needed some correction which i then started to talk to him after that was uh when he was classifying brutalism and we talked about that so what how's your reaction to what i share it with you well he was talking about brutalism in a very negative way and he was saying that it was kind of an expression of government uh because brutalism was very popular for government buildings in a lot of countries uh he was saying it was kind of an expression of government oppression and and you know government control because it was supposed to be brutal etc and as we have enlightened people a number of times about the word brutalism does not come from the english word brutal or brutality it refers to a french term for raw concrete or unadorned concrete so it has nothing to do with attitudes or suppression and that's something that the current king of england king charles now newly newly anointed as king of england uh is not a fan of brutalism either and brutalism was used a great deal in his home country for government buildings and particularly for low income housing and he thought of it as an expression again of suppression and government control and that is not where it came from that is not what it truly represents and we don't agree with that and i'm going to never let people get away with saying that because it's not true no as this building here shows it's a very nice fine building by mr murphy mr murphy is someone who's very well established in chicago we might remember his name because the other big one um as he self-acclaimed flesh gordon of architecture as he was called uh german born helmut yann started out in this office well he started out elsewhere too but then he joined murphy and made his way up in the firm pretty quick and then when murphy retired and then eventually passed away at higher age he took over the firm however is still recognizing its root and keep calling it murphy yann and only i think probably been 10 years now he then got rid of the murphy name and it's only yann these days and helmut is unfortunately not with us anymore either because he got run over by two cars on his bicycle at young age of 80 not that long ago so um that is murphy and so uh you see on the other side of that picture at the very top left an example another example of the same era that is very untypical and that is marina city and that's that kind of tropical brutalism that we probably would love to have here on the island because that's a very easy breezy lanai brutalism all out of concrete but concrete in a very filigree way and not so in such a stereotomic clumsy kind of heavy way and embodying the the problem of of thermal mass overheating another master of uh concrete um in his early days is at the very bottom left show quote uh who had passed away also in his early 80s this is ricardo bull fill Spanish architect who in 73 adopted and transformed this former uh cement factory into his home studio and this is one of the most beautiful poetic uh examples of how you can soften up concrete with vegetation which is by the way what my oldest son joey who you know very well the what he found most intriguing also not being an architect was central closet of the pacific and it's volcreti dark color and the vegetation around it he thought this was really the most tropic exotic that you can get it here you can see the concrete looks more bluff colored and this is why similar I believe to the building that had informed me the most which is a brutalist building by the architect that we have a fine piece of or a couple of pieces which is east west center that's I am pay so it's NBC bang in my home away from home link in Nebraska use the same uh beige uh yellow colored sand that they imported from Texas to mix in there to make the concrete look more appealing less industrial right and that is just like uh an example example here in Honolulu of the panam building which I refer to as blonde brutalism because it is not dark gray and it also has the interesting aggregate surface of the multiple different types of rock that are incorporated into it which provides a very interesting texture for you as a pedestrian or someone who when you are close up to it can enjoy but even from a distance you have a different feeling from the dark concrete but I don't favor one or the other necessarily I like them both yeah they're big great members of the same family right yep what sometimes happens in families is when people get old especially they sometimes transform I guess it's a nice way to say and and Ricardo Bofill you know God bless him but I have to say when I was where my students are in school in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1991 and as I said before I was lucky to have have the most progressive professor Alex Mela, hi Alex who then took us to Chicago that was my first encounterment with Chicago but even he was a victim of time in these early 90s and he said what's the form determining factor when you walk by my desk in our desks and wanted to know so there was no consideration of anything else but form and certainly not performance so Ricardo Bofill got caught up in that because the building again we're still on the looking at the picture at the top left that is to the right of it which has this very neoclassicist top by the way we were told in Nebraska that the capstone project the terminal project had to be a high rise and we were told at the beginning the introduction to the typology that a high rise traditionally always had a base and a shaft and has a crown and in postmodernism people were overdoing these crowns we're also remembering one of our best architects on our island here run Lindgren having referred us to Philip Johnson who got you know after starting out modern and has gotten into postmodern high rises quite a bit and there's a shot out there somewhere of us where he was indicating that so you know that was really disappointing to me I thought like oh my god what's going on this is going back in time this isn't anything you know Marina City was so innovative and what is that that is really rather reactionary which the times were because we're talking just phasing out the Reagan era and you know at some point then we're venturing into the Clinton era but in between we had Bush right at that time and my classmates in Germany said oh are you sure you want to go there with someone like Bush running the country and I said well I I'm not afraid I will you know make the best of it so that was it and you know the one right to that is one of these days from 2014 by Handel Architects and that one is doing what many seems to do that's the newest fashion which is what we label these kind of blow in floors or part of floors that aren't you know pushed all the way through but they're not doing much then trying to make the building look more interesting but not from an inside out performative way but from an outside in so this is more the sculpture doing a building and we should be past that at you know way too much into our what we'll have to be as all signs show us the post-fossil era so we're we're not getting there with these kind of buildings unfortunately and again if I would have been here going to school in the early 90s I would have had at the same situation that you had in the early 90s seeing similarly silly post-modern piece of cake buildings and one of them we're going to look now on the on the next slide and you explain to us where that is so and what well this is this is a building which is located on fort street mall which we were just mentioning replacing an older commercial building small retail building and it was built interestingly as an office building but as we were discussing before the show shortly before the start of COVID in 2020 this shifted to becoming being rebuilt or remodeled as a residential building which is what it is now and that was kind of a precursor to what we have seen increasingly which is that people no longer have to go physically to an office to do their work so COVID forced us to become more at-home workers and this is going to be this is very significant for architecture and particularly for downtown areas where people had to congregate for work and no longer are necessarily going to do that so that means buildings are going to be reconfigured and redone as this one has been yeah absolutely and it's from 1991 that same year that I went to America the first time in the heartland that was my year in school and there were buildings like that all over the United States where one was just getting reactionary and nostalgic sentimental about the good old days and designing building in that fashion you and I had never heard about the architect Jin Wang associates I looked them up there out of California which is not a bad thing because some of the best architects here on our island that we will get to return to pretty soon in two slides which is killingsworth Lindgren stricker and wilson they were from there and they did the most awesome tropical exotic work so it's not a question of where you come from physically but it's where you come from spiritually and mentally right and if you immerse into some other you know circumstances and climatic conditions at the bottom right this is the image that could you give to give you the most hope because the interior decoration show some filigree lattice work here that you can think okay maybe it's some kind of Tarzani Janie approach but we have to disappoint you with the next and likely last slide because we're almost at the end of the show but we go there because on the inside it doesn't look like it first of all it's hermetic it's all aced the materials are all imported from elsewhere and how does that unit look to you on the right well one of the things we were just discussing was the differences between an office building and a building into which you live in which if you live in the building you are offered usually and you should be offered a Lanai a place that you can go outside you can be outdoors office buildings normally do not do this and I conjectured that's because they don't want you to be enjoying leisure time you're supposed to be working when you are in an office building so you are not offered a Lanai with sliding doors to go to the outside well when you reconfigure a building that was an office building into a residential building obviously you are not going to have Lanais to be able to use and therefore your dwelling unit is never going to have that access to the outside now it may have opening windows but that of itself is not even a given meaning that this is going to continue to be an enclosed air conditioned box with no access to the outside in which you are forced to use fossil fuel constantly in order to remain comfortable and it's also not we got Stanley Chang's newsletter as always right before the show it's also not very affordable here between four hundred and seven on the square foot two and a half to three thousand dollars is not what we need on the island right so with that we're at the end of this show how you could have done this better we're going to start out with next week and until then please don't stay sort of temperately trampling through our islands here but be tropically exotic exotically tropical all righty see you next week hi thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at think.kawaii.com mahalo