 Think Tech Hawaii, Civil Engagement Lives Here. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Human Architecture here, broadcasting live from our Tropical Paradise in Honolulu, Hawaii. This show is dedicated to look how the built environment could be substantially sexy as the natural environment is. And sometimes we get a little blindsided because we're here. So what do we know? Sometimes we can't see it anymore. So the best way to do it is get peer review and the best way, the very best way is to get external peer review. So today we have the excellent chance to have someone here to help us out with that. And that's architect Will Bruder. Well, thank you very much for this great experience. Thank you for being here, much appreciated. And we want to dive right in because you're a very well-known colleague and architect. I called you the father of the Desert Arizona School of Architecture, and we can get a little bit more in detail after that. But great as you are, you said, I don't want to talk about my desert stuff because I want to experience this place. And from my experience, from a similar, not that unsimilar climate and culture, maybe give you some ideas or some hints, so we're looking forward to that. And so this picture shows how we met actually a while ago in the desert where we found out that we knew about each other from these projects here, which are both civic and civil projects. And that's how we got to know each other and never since are in touch. And now you're here. So great. And so we're going to basically walk through the next pictures. And if the studio can just basically walk and we basically talk while we walk. And this is a documentation of yesterday's day together. We picked you up, and we means if we can get the next picture already, Don Hibbert, our friend, we're spending the day together. And you said, just show us stuff, show us both the goodies and maybe the stuff that doesn't work. So we'll show it all and I will basically take it in and then let it out today. And later on, we're also going to promote your other main event today is a lecture at the School of Architecture here at UH Manoa, and that's going to be six o'clock. Guys, please all attend. So let's start walking. Beautiful. This is what I woke up with out of my hotel room over on the south end of the beach. And the sounds, the surf, the blowing palm trees, and the skyline of this great city. And it was my first time here. So this was really a treat. So we're going to be wandering the streets. We went wide and far about 10 hours yesterday. Yeah. We hit the spot with that beautiful big picture, which is basically how that fabric looked not that long ago. This was all pongrows called Waikiki. And the poms are an amazing tree. I mean, they're flexible. They're structural. They just bend. They're sensual. It's just really a great background for the rigor of the geometries of the great city. And there's a lot of disagreement going on within the community, but many of them say they're exotic. So they're not native to the islands. They basically came. But they're not invasive because no other plant wants to grow in the sand where they do. So they complement. And this sort of terminology of exotic and invasive has been very helpful for me to apply to everything, including people and architecture. Small world because we're having the same battle in Phoenix, Arizona. People, poms, where they come from, where they came from a bunch of camels that ended up in a canyon that was named Palm Canyon in Western Arizona. And they're great shade trees. We have the date palms, of course. And they add a certain stature, but people, oh, they give enough shade. I mean, what's this about? They've been the marker of Oasis, whether exotic like yours or arid like ours forever. Exactly. Small. So then keep on walking here. So we started on this walk. So we were scheduled to meet Martin about 10 o'clock, I think it was, for the official. Martin and I were on the streets already being on Arizona time at 8 o'clock. And immediately these Banyan trees and this architecture going down to the beach towards Waikiki. And it's, oh, my God, we've never seen anything like it. And there's so many clues in our mind for what the face of a building could be like, how you would shade it, how you would sculpture it, how you would fabricate it, and especially with all the new technologies we know about now. So next, please. Great. Next image, please. And again, what grabs your eye? I'm not a surfer by any means, but the architecture of the surfboard was the first thing I really came close to and touched as we walked down the beach towards the city. And these forms and the weather and the wear and the gaps between them and the soft forms. I'm thinking about all the things about the wind I'm feeling and the ocean, the ocean. And this is the ultimate high-tech logical solution, how you build and occupy the ocean. And as you prefer to call the show from the past to the future, as in with any object, there's evolution going on. They had the wood boards way back, and these are the foam boards. So technology is always evolving, and so is the form and performance with it. And our hint is architecture should do likewise. And my sketchbook is my iPhone. I've carried, I pack around it at any one time. Right now I've got 40,000 images from the last four or five years. So I hit the road running, and it's a sketchbook to record my memories. No, and I have to say I had the great privilege to spend a great morning getting all your great stuff and basically shoveling it. And so all these pictures are courtesy and copyrighted Will Bruder. Except the ones where you see Will in and I took these. So you'll see how great of a sort of capture you are of moments. There are beyond, I want to make clear, because when I had produced it, I thought like one could take this wrong and say this is just pretty picture, but you're talking not surface. You're talking substance and the relationship to surface. Yeah, because as a day evolved, it was a really interesting journey to what I thought and then what, oh, I didn't get that right. And then you keep moving around. All right, so let's keep going. OK. So I'm looking at the beach. I'm seeing people. I'm seeing color. I'm feeling the air. It's like, wow, this is paradise. And I look up and I start seeing some architecture. This is a little circle hotel down on the main drag. And it's dated. It's what they call mid-century modern, I guess. But it's an honest, proud little building that's got a fleur about it, almost like the plants I was seeing. The flowers blooming and all these things. So there's an architectural connection back then. Exactly. And then we have something more, I don't want to say boring, but the brand is given away as being a place where you could use decks. But you're juxtaposing, what is this street fabric? And it's a rather abstract analogy to flora, right? Versus today, where it's literal, and they throw like palm leaf pattern on buildings, which you will see too, on Ephesus, which is a different thing. This is 3D. This is full in and out. Every one of those balconies is working for shade, for occupation. As I've seen that building now for two days, because I walked by it three times already this morning in my walk. And it's ever changing, because again, the rich depth of the facade. Yeah, absolutely. So keep on walking. Where do we go next? From our hotel room, we saw a pink apparition on the horizon to the north. And we thought, that looked like it probably had a good place for breakfast. And so we walk along the beach. And that's a historic photo up in the upper left corner that I took from the hotel's collection. And that's what the beach was all about. And that's got to be something we're going to come back to. Because now the beach competes with a highway. It's noisy. It's distracting. It's not about people. But we're going to come back to that. This was, this is that beach a few years ago. And wow, is that something else. But then you're coming up to this hotel. And suddenly you've got inside, outside, it's seamless. It's just the flow of the light, the protection against the heat, the rustle of the air. You're outside, because everything's open. And you're in this wonderful building from I think about the 1920s. And it's interesting, because in Tucson, Arizona, where Martin and I got to know each other quite well, there's a place called the Arizona Inn. And it's a variation on that same pink. Which was really interesting. Which was on my way to work, on my daily bicycle on my way to work. And I took the pictures of when Frank Lark Wright, who is, when you're the father, there's grandfather and great-grandfather. Yeah, he's a great-granddad. Exactly. But again, the blending of landscape and color and place. And also how a certainly imported style works in a similar climate. So it's not invasive. It's exotic as well. Exotic. The magic of these older buildings very often, as well as the quality new ones, is proportionate and scale as old as time. And it's buildings that really understand a body, a context, where windows form, how they form, where the sun comes up, all these things. But in proportionate and scale, these are the timeless buildings of the community. Not the ones that just flash through with style. Exactly, yeah. Next please. So it was Sunday. So where do we go appropriate for Sunday? Somebody said the church cathedral's probably open. I think you might enjoy it. So this, again, is a marker of this mid-century period, but a soaring cathedral right down on the beach. And it was really interesting because the rigor of those structures, I could be looking down that palm grove. I mean, I think about what I saw at the window of the hotel, and here it is in this chapel. That's my wife Louise with me there. She's giving scale to the operation. And then I found these wonderful little oculi that Martin and I, we speculated, might have been operable before air conditioning. But they've been replaced with these wonderful little dashes of color that's like these little rainbow circles of color that mark down the aisles on both sides of the church. So it was a fun thing to be part of. And again, scale and proportion. And Don, our conscious of the islands being with us, this haven't been built in 62. He confirmed that actually not these round ones, but the stainless steel windows are pivoting. So they were able to get the cross breeze. Of course. And now it's unfortunately aced. So let's bring it back. That's another thing to talk about with technology, because if there's ever been a place where air conditioned should be a minor pillar in the pattern, not a major player. I mean, we haven't had the air conditioning out once in our room, once everywhere we can go in. Occasionally we've been in a bubble, right? And all these buildings you've been choosing so far are doing this. And also you haven't shown any contemporary building yet. That's curious about that, too. I'm very curious about that, too, because I'm, well, let's keep going. We've got a few minutes left here. But fortunately, I had great guides. And this is over on the campus. And these are, again, marks of the past with references to deep past. It's ironic. We have the lava stone walls battered in their form, like some ancient civilization. And this is the Heritage Center at the University campus. And these pyramidal forms making reference to that troughs. And interestingly, that open image that we showed of this sort of Mesa-looking form is my Phoenix Central Library, flat in Copper, Arizona as the Copper State. Exactly. And here we're looking at patinated copper on both walls and the roof condition. And then we're looking through at this cylindrical structure, again, dating from the 60s. And it was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. And, you know, what did you have here? Yeah, what did deja vu? I mean, all good things come to one place, it seems like. But I'm really inspired walking on the campus. This is my first steps on the campus. And these are the first two buildings I see. Yeah. And this is one studies, by the way. And then you were going, next picture is you were going deeper and down into it. So, again, this idea of public art, I learned about the history of public art, being very seminal to really thinking in the architecture of Honolulu and Hawaii. And we're finding these little artifacts. I mean, it's, again, this building was so well done in how it connects the Ray True Pass, which is its mission to explain to a very contemporary thing. And they're timeless buildings. I mean, again, I've designed mid-century modern buildings. And it makes me feel old. And I like to believe that buildings in their character and things are the markers. Every old building was new once. We have to remember that. And the good ones last, and the good ones become part of our culture and our history in time. They're timeless. Yeah, timeless. And so to have artifacts like this in communities, important thing. And so we moved on to the next one, got deeper into campus, which is officially not a part of UH, but an independent institution, which is East West Center. And this is early young IMPay, full of all the vision that he had with all the, again, baggage he was carrying. Because he probably knew Frank Lloyd Wright, obviously, as well. But he also knew Kibusier. And that's a famous French architect that changed the way we looked at the world in the 20th century. So these are great indoor-outdoor buildings. This is a climate where you can amplify this whole synergy of inside and outside, the tectonics of it, whether it be these large forms, these precast concrete beams, the seamless flow between the landscape here and the buildings. And you can see the occupation. I mean, there's recreation. There's fun. There's contemplation. There's conversation. There's people with their iPhones. There's people that are just reading a book and enjoying the place. But this is timeless. And these are support across from the theater there and sort of a meeting place next to a beautifully done Japanese garden. And then the housing was what really grabbed our attention. That's next picture. And there's a housing in the back, but you're also looking at landscape and the sort of interaction with landscape. And there's public art things. Somebody was having fun. And it might have been the night before. It might have been spring fever here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Easter egg hunt, I don't know. But this is what architecture and landscape do with each other to make place, to make this whole idea of city and community happen together. It was totally magical. I mean, we were wandering around on a Sunday morning. It was a week after, I think, two weeks after Easter. But I mean, here's the synergy of just everything's coming together. And people are happy in this place. They're using it. They're enjoying it. And that's why we do buildings. And these you wanted to see also from the inside. So we try to get into the dorms next picture. And this is Halle Minoa, which we also ran a show about with one of the residents a couple of shows ago. So you guys, if you're more interested, look at that. Yeah, and we talked our way in. I'm pretty good at that after all these years of knocking on doors. You did a good show. So suddenly we went to the desk and we couldn't get the proper idea. And somebody was feeling sorry for me or saw my passion and my interest. And the next thing I know, we've got access to the elevator in the top of the building. And that's next picture. So you were stunned by these spaces. Yes, because these are these open verandas at every third floor. So the way that building's set up, I think you'll all find interesting in that what you've got is you've got a layer of sort of common space, kitchens, meeting, hangout spaces. And then the students go one level up or one level down from that open veranda to their own rooms. They're almost like monastic. I mean, they're almost like you're in a convent or a monastery, but they take advantage of the direction of the air and the breezes off the mountains behind us and off to the sea. And then you get these horizon views up here and the bike bay, which is on one of the verandas where you secure your bike and then take it down the elevator. And we're looking across the skyline, which I think people recognize pretty easily there. There's markers on that skyline and the city has a wonderful skyline. It's really very, very special. So that's super cool. And then there's another communal function next picture in that zone. Yeah, people were, there's kitchens that open out onto the veranda. So you dine on the veranda, back up picture there. And there's a young woman there that's offering us some food for lunch. It was about lunchtime. We passed on that. But these are individual student kitchens. They all have their bounty and they prepare it. And again, living in a great piece of architecture like they've had the privilege here, let's them go into the world sort of having good expectations and understanding of what the difference makes. Look at that skyline out there. That's pretty interesting. Over there in the, let's see, let me get out of the picture there. So, ironic. We have the circular building. I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, being very fond of. And then I'm sad to report that just like in Arizona and Tempe or Tucson, we have this sad new manifestation of really awful dorms for profit. They come with no architecture. They come with no soul, no spirit. It's cheap buck stuff with big rents for rich parents to put their kids up in the sky campuses around America. I mean, the built environment of the university is a place that through time from Jefferson and University of Virginia, it all started with the law and everything. I mean, it's hard to form our opinions as young people. Now, I couldn't agree more with you and I have to tell the audience we have not been agreeing on that beforehand, but we match because we ran a show about that project and the other one next to it, which is a nice single loaded corridor, easy breezy and make that comparison. Exactly, exactly. So our platoe to UH as a client is reconnect to your pretty high standard of the past and stuff you do these days, that's the benchmark. Always the benchmark. We learn from the past to build the future. Exactly. It's very much what it's about. And I think related to that, the next picture is another good example for that. Right, and here we have, people see a building with louvres or light their area, they think about the environment. Well, a building is an environmental, if you see louvres on four sides. It says it's not, it's just a charade. But somehow it's a way to sort of put lipstick on a pig and decorate up this barn, right? But it's running a scam on us to make it pretend it's sustainable. Cause we're looking from the rand again of the dormitory vibe by pay in this point and one's real and one's not real. Yeah, and the real one has these two to three feet depth interstitial facade space that sheds out the elements, which is the sun and the rain. Exactly, the rain is a big thing. Yeah, that's amazing. Good stuff. And so then we went, next picture, we went deeper. We looped around on campus and on the way out, stopped by close to where you're gonna speak tonight. And this is one of the late Lottie Merasepops here. This is Saunders Hall, sort of a tropical brutalist piece by him. And I shared with you that's my preferred teaching space here at place. And we have buildings like that in the desert. There are early buildings before air conditioning was even talked about or sophisticated. These buildings thrive as gathering places for the students, for the faculty, the flow from the skins and to these courtyards. And it's all about, again, the courtyard buildings of desert pass for us in the desert. And likewise there, but that was a thrill to see that sort of space there. And you having done many civic typologies, a whole bouquet of them, but you're certainly sort of known for one typology more than others, these are libraries. So we basically came home now here with the next project and showed you one of your siblings. Next picture, please. And this is Sinclair Library here. That, and again, here we have jealousy, we have open, we have air flowing, we have a building really timeless, but of its time. And for me, I look at things like the Loubert Jealousy is on the upper left. I'm finding on the globe over there in the upper left-hand corner where we are exactly and forgotten. But right next to me that weathered brick condition. That was as fine as anything I saw in the art museum a few hours later, but I really like how materials have this ability for integrity. We're reading the mortar being stronger than the brick. We're looking at what 50 years does to something. And yet great cities are about those memories. They're not about repainting them all the time. And so that was a thrill to see that wall and its course through time as well as the horizon. Next please. And then in between, you never forgot about what sort of the next picture, please. The center of all that is us in the tropics. And we're in the foothills of the jungle here. You go one more mile, you end up in a jungle with a waterfall. And again, we have the vibrancy of life. We have the surprise of the bloom. Oh my gosh. And we have the poetry of death and passing in the dead fronds again up in that upper right-hand corner. And I see all those offering clues to young architects and developers and builders and people wanting to think about how should I build a house in this place? It's right in the landscape. There's all these clues for us to jump into. So as you can tell, we wanted to go on and on and on and tour the whole day, but you wanted to see other things and you had a thing to, which you already said you wanted to go to the museum. So we had one more piece to show you as the big, maybe the final. Yeah, a lot of the architectural to it. And the conclusion, and that was that. Now, this is your state capital. And I was overwhelmed. I had known of the building. It never thrilled me. It was competent. It was interesting. It was well-proportioned, well-scaled. It was at the end of the architectural phase of our tour at about three hours plus in. And I drove up to it, and my God, it's, you have the best capital of any state in the union. And you have a piece of architecture that's totally celebratory of your confidence and our time that exceeds the US capital by 10. Because we were living in a project of time of isms, which we still do, I guess, but you have a unbelievable government center in this building at the heart of it. It's invention. It's nature of sustainability, which was 50 years, 40 years, again, before it was part of the conversation. And what you were given by the architect, Warnocky, John Carl Warnocky, a timeless. And I will be going back to this building on Monday, when I have, next Monday, when I'm here for a brief time, because I want to get farther into it. Awesome. And we will get back to it here on the show because we have one of the still-living eyewitnesses who was part of the process and the project. And he's going to come on the show and basically talk about his experience. And then you're interested in the arts a lot. So you wanted to see the Honolulu Museum Art, which is the next picture, where we left you alone and on your own. We spent the next three hours, three and a half hours, until they locked us out of the museum. And we were really surprised, pleasantly surprised. City of 700,000 people plus, I know that's the boundaries, but I've learned that boundaries have new definition. Honolulu isn't a city. It's the biggest city in the world, and the world actually, because it goes 2,000 miles out on the islands. It's all part of the county. And that was fascinating. But these museum buildings, again, architecture of museums is about the poetry of presenting armatures to enjoy art and time. And whether it was Noguchi here, or a contemporary sculptor, whether it was this whole idea about the world reflected, I mean, you are to be totally applauded and have this strong a resource. I could have been in New York yesterday and not been more ecstatic and excited and enriched by what I learned. The presentation of art through cultures, the building itself, with its courtyards, with its shading, with its use of water to cool psychologically by sound and flow, all excellent, and then the mix of the art that we felt and we saw. Beautiful curation, a real point of pride for you to sort of have the one, two within a couple blocks of your great capital building's architecture, and then this fine, fine museum, and what a perfect was, Family Sunday. And so we saw the families participating. We had a wonderful lunch, and I'm not paid to offer this endorsement, but it's one of the best lunches I've had in any art museum. We traveled to a bunch of them, and then just learning. So I consider my adventures with Don and Martin here to be a great thing. I gained so much, and I should almost be pain for this trip to you, for what you taught me. No, it's priceless in many ways, and let's spend the last couple of minutes for Will having walked all that, and having observed all that. I'm sure the way I know you, you have a couple of recommendations for us how we could keep Paradise Paradise, or in some parts even make it Paradise again. Okay, three observations. Okay, one is that you have to get rid of the one-way street along the beach. You have to turn that into a pedestrian place along with a contemporary European-style street car, not a light rail, a low-speed connector that would link from the capital and the art museum, and one end of town to the other. The distance is just about right as far as miles. People would love it, the scale, the hotels would love it, the beach connection, because I'm sure with those street cars, there's gonna be a simple way to strap on surfboards on them. It's gonna be great. It's gonna add to their architecture. And just the audience, not to confuse with a heavy rail, that's what we're doing here, we put one like this, like you're talking back in Tucson. Yeah, and Tucson has one right now in Portland. I was still there, and in Portland, it's free in the center too, that's another thing. And the one in Tucson, that was on my year phasing out. It took them a year and not more, and it was not a big deal. And again, that street without the noise and the pollution and the energy of the car, it is a beautiful people street, it's a shopping street, it's a entertainment and discovery street, it's a wedding street, it's everything. It's a city of great cities. Number two, looking for my hotel, lots of tall vertical buildings, respect for the difficulty of building in a mountainous place, efficiency. But it's strong, but it's ill-defined right now. And again, I would suggest that you should be thinking in the next couple of years to create the building that will set the new standard for thinking about a sustainable continuous architecture. I would advocate a tower, maybe a thousand foot tall, 1200 foot, the cities from San Francisco not to just be like them. But I would suggest that using an architect like Renzo Piano, who has been a master now for almost 50 years of sustainability and construction, creating icons like the Shard in London, like the buildings everywhere that he touches, the new Whitney Museum in New York, but a tower of- They're not superficially beautiful, but substantially beautiful. They're not about style and decoration. They're about the substance. And I advocate for that because the young architects that are being trained in your community, the young urban planners, they need a new role model other than mid-six, three buildings to look at for reflection. To have a high rise like that, and then be given the charge as a young architect in your community to work on the small lots that once had three and four-story buildings and go for these pencil towers that are starting to become part of many environments. Skinny towers. Great. Skinny towers. Easy breezy, I think, is a word you use often, but it would be so great to see this city grow with that vitality because that's not for lack of sort of economic force and willfulness that the city is growing and changing and it has vibrancy, but I want to come the next time, in five or 10 years, and see the future, not celebrate just the past. Absolutely, I will. One more minute left for number three. And number three becomes, I want and will be challenging at my lecture tonight with the students. I'm gonna share my work this evening, but we're gonna talk a little bit more about the walk we had because they are our future. I would like to believe that between the community, the professional architectural community, the development community, that a bunch of propositions can be given to the young architects in town to put them at the heart and soul of defining the Honolulu architecture of the 21st century. And they become committed and engage in that thing because they need to raise the bar with all of us. And as mentors and the fathers of architecture and the timelessness, I can't wait to see what they'll be capable of and what they're gonna be doing. Thank you so much. And with that, see you all tonight. Next picture and last picture here. At six o'clock in the auditorium of our School of Architecture, it's gonna be more of Will. And also here is the link to his website because I'm sure for people who saw the show, this was just an appetizer. And they're hungry to have more of you, timeless Will Brooder. So thank you very much for having been with us and inspiring us. Thank you so much. Hopefully we'll see a bunch of you tonight. And please come up and say hi. And the questions can go as long as you want to have the conversation tonight. So look forward to it. Thank you. All right, see you all tonight and next week. Bye-bye.