 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Human Jumain Architecture, every other week's edition with DeSoto Brown and Martin Despeng and we're broadcasting live from our lava rock island of Oahu in Hawaii. And here our volcano is not active anymore but today is the perfect weather for this show because today we got the Kona winds, that means they come over from the big island where the volcano is still active and what it blows over is what we call Vogue and what is that DeSoto? Vogue is a combination of aerosols put out by the volcano that turn into smog like air pollution but it's entirely natural, it's supposed to be man-made and we're one of the places in the world that's blessed or un-blessed with Vogue. Exactly. So bring the first picture, two weeks ago we did the volume one of this show here which was about volumetric volcanic building methodologies and as it's often with us, once we did the show, we stumble over something that we said, damn it, we wish we would have done that. So this is one me stumbling out of my school of architecture building up University Avenue, this is awesome church, mid-century church across and it has these amazing stunning look at how the glass is inserted there framelessly and how they basically push the basalt to this sort of sharp edge. So this is a late entry to what we're talking about because this is pretty much a monolithic stear atomic wall but today we want to talk about and you said probably around the 30s where industrialization kicked in and it was too expensive to do it and so one started to basically more clad slash veneer building. Exactly, exactly. So we see a shift from buildings which were made of rock to buildings which were made of concrete but had a rock veneer. So we're talking about volcanic veneers this show and if we go to our next picture we'll see an example of what we're talking about. This is the Cajaleta Hotel, beautiful mid-century building opened in 1963-64 and in the background you see that lava rock wall but of course it's an entirely concrete building and in front of it we see the pillar as well as the curve of the staircase where that plain concrete is visible in contrast to the veneer on the back wall. Awesome and I love this sort of submerged feeling it's like you're sitting in the crater. Yes, that's right. I mean this is cool. So the next one we're doing a little bit you show you emptied your archive and I walked around and looked what's left from that and this is just around my corner in the hood. This is the plinth of the Waikiki Circle Tower and I find this amazing, took this picture from going inside you don't see any car anymore it seems like you're in paradise that we envision although this is Kawa Kawa Avenue and there's a heaviest traffic as you can tell very personally from a recent trip that we saved for later and the next picture is the thing in detail where this is almost like an inhabited at Greenwall right so the mortar is so open and probably came out over the years or maybe intentionally so it's a sort of rock wall. I'm always thinking about resilience when seawater level rise which we have a lot they must have sensed that because this is almost like a barrier that the waters you know come against and they basically you can't literally there's a window down there as you can see but so that's sort of the gesture sort of feels like that and it's definitely a cool example but it's very interesting that the ferns probably they must water that wall to get the ferns to grow there because otherwise they wouldn't be there but that's a very interesting contrast of greenery getting in there so give me another one of the favorites that you always having a lot well one of the net in our next picture one of this is a picture from the kawai kawai surf hotel which opened in 1961 and this again is very much a contrast of the concrete plain concrete floor the lava rock veneer on the left and totally open in the dining area with the kiavi trees right there looking very raw and rugged and very uncivilized and yet you've got this civilized very very wire eames chairs people are sitting on again an interesting contrast very popular at that time they're actually Harry bit Toyo was that that's those yeah and I mean this is why didn't Hawaii stay like that but yeah that's another well so next picture is today and at least no that's a lot there we go so there we go this is on Kohiu and seaside once again we got that plinth and then you got that gastronomy up there and you always said you like that contrast between the rugged and the local and you know carved out of the quarry and then sort of the high tech could have made concrete which you can see in contrast playing off pretty well right give it some green give it some light give it some people and you got a really pleasant local mix that's right that's right so another one is the next one which is I believe it's unfortunately next picture please is endangered this is the former again key sushi on ours on our favorite Kawa street capo thank you yes and it's been empty for a while this is a very fine modern reminds me like a fatalian modernism like a Terani or something like it's a really nice composition and I hope someone moves in there and and sees the beauty of it and the beginning of the end are basically flanked by these by these rock walls and the ones towards diamond head which is the middle one I think perfectly portrays this sort of being offset from its actually structural wall behind so it's not trying to make up yes it is actually celebrating its veneerness right pretty great this was originally a savings in loan okay constructed in the early okay all right so we're we have been talking about sort of the culinary typology we sort of segueing out and showing a shopping right that's our next picture there's the Moanalua shopping center which was opened in about 1955 and again that looks like it's a monolithic stone wall you think that could be structural and that the rocks are actually holding everything up they are not that is just a concrete wall that has been adorned with the rocks but that again one of the reasons that we don't see this as much as because the amount of hand work that is required and even though this is not a stone wall per se somebody had to sit there and glue and attach all those rocks yeah but that's a lot of hand work and again you have the contrast of the Moanalua shopping center sign on the back which is was a neon sign on the back of this rough texture yeah and and sort of like if there's any sort of recipe or secret how to do this successfully and impressively it seems like applying the rock the more the better and and not sort of mixed and with other things and that reminds me of that picture that you provided for our tropical brutalism show how the ancient Hawaiians have correct correct and and that if you look at the really large remaining Hiao structures which Hiao of course are religious structures in traditional Hawai'i they were built with large almost retaining walls or foundation walls that looked like this that were dry stack they didn't use any mortar obviously no cement yeah but again a huge monolithic impressive physical structure to show the power of their religious their religious organization if you will and this gym is unfortunately not existing anymore in that case right and so is unfortunately the next picture in the next project one which is former Liberty House then Macy's in Kailua and now not anymore and at the top right you see how it will look soon it's a sort of pleasant mix of decorated and ornamented as you like to say with some wood with some white with some whatever very generic could be in California or somewhere else exactly yeah but at the bottom and I'm afraid that's going to go away too is which I sort of investigated in as a close-up here and you can see on the left there was this bus stop this bench yeah it was it was a fantastic sort of you're sitting in in your land so to speak right I mean you know what else too the Liberty House the facade was a metal grating yeah which we talked about in one of our previous shows yeah it was a very exotic building whereas the new one we allow ourselves to say is will be very invasive but we let ourselves be surprised we don't prejudge that's better we're sort of going into the another next typology next picture which is well this one before here this is sort of sequwing into this is about the car this is Mark's garage in downtown and this is a fellow founding board member Don Hibbert also been on the show a couple times who introduced us here on an expiry with the emerging generation that this is actually his favorite lava rock and you pointed this out last time lava isn't just lava there is a there is a total diversity and this is a very spongy porous one that shame on me I took the picture and blew it up too much so it doesn't really get you guys got to go there and this is the notion of the of the show anyways we want to go out and look for the things that we're talking about and so we're sequwing into residential uh low rise residential but the next one is sort of more like almost like a motel right yeah this is there were several of these ebb tide hotels and one of the structures is still in existence today uh I'm not sure about this one again the contrast of the plain concrete and the rough textured lava rock wall and the basalt ruggedness that is hearkening to Hawaii's rugged primitive past and yet today in this picture was taken in 1960 we have all of the amenities that you the tourist wants in a comfortable place today and what you just so perfectly say at the rugged you know nature is the next project which is up the gold coast um yeah a multi-residential tower and here once again so heroically celebrate it you know make this multi-story make it bold uh make it I find this this is one of the amazing most amazing entrances I've seen on the island because it's like that little mouse hole there so it's totally understated yeah versus the Victorian way where it's like showing off yeah you know and here's where I am there's no but then there's a sort of you know disappointment once you go through whereas here it's like this non-descript where is the entrance and then the tree next to it and then this iconic you know copper single letter of signage right this is the stuff that really was was making people coming here right and it did not find this anywhere else exactly right right and I really like the contrast of that variegated how bush that's been trimmed so that again it's the contrast of the colors the shape the textures against the lava rock absolutely and this is a natural way to do it as opposed to the unnatural or man-made way of including metal or concrete or tarazzo or other elements which are artificial and as you promised there were a couple more appetites so you got a multi-story appetite there that's oh we got a next picture okay our next picture yeah there's the alamone appetite that building is still there albeit very changed and altered and looking very shabby but again we have I think very interestingly those vertical fins in the center part of where the entrance is to emphasize the entrance canopy and then again the the lanai railings on the side which have the corrugated metal the plain smooth white stucco concrete roof placed on top of it again and this is a this is accumulation of elements of previous show crazy cantilevering canopies slatted yep white fins and then today's show yeah and next picture is another example and once again you guys go out there's more and more but this is again on on kapa hulu at the beginning of it towards the mountains and I always like this once again there's this heroic lava pretty much the same theme you know they did it was almost like the standard it was very standardized at that time a good standard a good standard to have I agree and you have another one from these glory days well let's see what do we have next we've got the victoria apartments this is in Waikiki that's a 1959 Chevrolet in the foreground so we know it's at least in 1959 and very much the same things that we've been seeing the contrast of the different types of materials against that lava rock although what we're seeing there is a smoother surface we're going to see more of lava being used more as obvious veneer where it's been sliced and made slim to adhere to a wall rather than being in its rounded original state absolutely and just stepping out of this typology but sort of related because in the back in the days back in the good days they had the schools close to where one lived and next picture is a school right there always is a church sorry no it's a school it's a religious school this is scar of the sea school you're correct and that's why the girls are in yeah and again very much like what we've been seeing just the contrasting elements the the rounded rock features against a very rectangular structure and a very rectangular wall but the cross on the wall again very strong contrast to make it stand out yeah the plain smooth white cross on the rugged dark background of the basalt and you got one more one exotic tropical and here's the uh tropic surf this is located on Cuyo Avenue in Waikiki very much the same situation and and again during that time as you just said this was a very standardized type of construction for small buildings commercial buildings here in Hodeloo but as that one shows there were nice variations to that theme right here basically the slabs are continued yes so it's like an infill from floor to floor right and that way sort of less archaic rustic right and an acknowledgement of the presence of that concrete floor yeah exactly which is a different color and the next picture is sort of a potpourri of things in my front yard from the top a park shore and then the bottom is next to it and I just happened to I mean this is not a historic picture in the middle but that 1950s SL just drove by so I thought what a perfect there we go back in time and the one in the bottom is that ABC store and once again you can see the rugged park shore one the more chunky one and then you can see that more this is a better picture of the same stone that Don likes so much right and then the the middle part at the very right we go to the next picture because this is my building where I'm currently struggling and fighting to stay because it seems like I might get kicked out so you guys cross your fingers yeah yeah yeah so here's the show I did with my neighbor Tom Miller down there and and we refer to that because now we're going to talk about how cool is maybe a volcanic veneer these days the monocle city guides here is who are headquartered in London as we pointed down in that show think it's very cool because one of their images in their little promotional video they feature that signage so once again it's it's that we see the same sort of theme and standard of the single letter mostly in copper in green and and patinated yes applied to the sort of the font and the the sort of the picture of of Lava Rock right and the next picture is is another building featured in that same trailer and the the trailer is I'm sorry is this is this is basically a publisher a well-known publisher yeah branding RSR city yes and sorry current developers it's not showing any of your modern buildings it's showing but it's showing the stuff from the good old days because it must be obviously still hot exactly as Lava was and and it's also something that you're not going to see done again in exactly the same way so everything that we have of this type every example like this needs to be acknowledged as something we're never going to duplicate and and preserve and preserve for that reason and this is on all away boulevard and I think this must be another version or example of Don's favorite yeah very porous sort of rice cracker like it's very sponge like yeah exactly exactly yeah so we're going to look now at the few examples we found where you know architects and and clients are are doing this again and this is almost like a deja vu once again of a couple shows we did in the past these are some shopping mods and this is the international marketplace how it looks now and we sort of very critically looked at how it looked in the past which there's a picture at the top right where the materials as you pointed out were pretty much from here the the climate control devices were off you know using our trade winds correct and now we basically pretty much got an invasive western corporate shopping mall yes that has none of that anymore but now some of the retailers come in like this one here and basically veneer yes their storefront yes so as you can see there's a whole bunch there and these two pillars and there's actually behind that wooden awning is also a horizontal piece of it and you know the detail I took at the very top in the middle if you go there it's kind of weird it almost I mean I've never seen that lava it almost I'm wondering you had that question before about when we introduced the last show it was like is this real or is this fake correct I mean it almost looks like too lava to me yeah it almost looks like it still flows and that doesn't really you you can't tell in situations like that if that's something that's molded from actual rock yeah you can't tell I think and probably until you go up and hit it with your finger yeah to tell if that's actual stone or if it's well and if you go to koalina it's mostly fiberglass but it looks more authentic than the real stuff so in one criticism we made and actually after the fact one another example after the fact you I think saw a sign that says uh don't go to the center before 10 in the morning or something like that and it also doesn't allow street vendors yeah or even musicians to be on the public street in front of the thing yeah so the public space got hijacked by capitalism yes it did and that's not the only place that that's happened particularly in waikiki exactly and so it also pushed out the little people the little vendors right and they pushed them next picture into at least they're they found another refuge and that's duke's lane but then there is this uh trade center waikiki trade center that also got really well up yeah and it's fronting also a duke's lane and so now that gentrification with this pretty hideous uh classicist yes this is vegas and caesar's palace or something veneer in front of that you know interesting 70s stuff so it's it it gets more and more weird and then this stuff spills into duke's lane i think it's legitimate to be afraid that's going to just continue it's going to be contagious and it's going to gentrify and then you have none of these little vendors left and this particular area of kuhio avenue has been gentrified a great deal it's in the process of being upgraded considerably right at the moment right as we speak and this duke's lane excuse me excuse me this duke's lane eatery which is essentially a food court is evidence of that not necessarily a bad thing because i've gone there and i've enjoyed it yeah you pointed out ironically that there is a restaurant called basalt which you show there you can see in the the photograph and there's no basalt no there's nothing not not even the attempt of a veneer which is our topic but the next picture next door it is they put a hotel into the into the trade center and the Hyatt centric and then there is a sort of lobby wall which is pretty much you can imagine this is cut thin tile like you know and it's pretty much like um if it's at all natural but let's give it that and uh but as you said as you said too this is applied like tile yeah you slice it the back is smooth and then you just glue it up on the wall so there's really not a lot of hand crafting involved as there wasn't some of the earlier but you saw an example which i blindly walked by i've been there the day before and i'm going over each other where they tried to reindue this the real and that's the next picture right and this is at all i'm on a center this is the Hawaiian islands creation store and when this was installed in the 1990s i was very aware that they were harkening back to the use of the raw rough basalt rock again so it caught my attention when they did it because it had gone out of it had gone out of favor gone out of style you pointed out the very interesting stairway and sort of balcony that we see in the picture on the right yeah this continuation inside the store assuming that that's real rock that's pretty heavy that's pretty scary almost yeah but more scary is the next picture which is one more left that's our biggest mall alamwana after its extension and then there is a signage thing and they put this sort of i mean this is the thinnest veneer ever and it's beaten up and it's cracked so our message is like guys okay if you do if you do you know lava rock again which is great and do it more seriously and don't do it so decoratively right and in the in the photograph in the upper right corner you can see that that actually is cracked the exact is broken apart and separated and there's a big crack so that's sort of like an offense to local you know local everything and it clearly is not structural no it's not so the next picture is is the last mall that we did a show about which is the which is the royal hawaiian shopping center as we refer to at the top and so that one has originally been and this is what also a permanent background refers to um has originally been what we call the volcrete the local concrete so i had tried to be what frank like ride called concrete liquid stone exactly so i try to be sort of a man made port right lava rock if you want with aggregate with texture with separate units in it and also keeping kalakaua kalakaua which was a palm grove unfortunately that didn't fly well over the years and they started to cheesecake the front and then one tenant who's very corporate probably the most corporate which is apple who's usually doing a a glass store they were saying well this location is different we got to do something specific about it and they basically use the salt as basically um plates or or um or cladding or cladding and in big sheets and it's a pretty interesting um yeah i i heard a rumor and i had never anyone confirm it that they had to ship this to cupitino where some high guys looked at it and sorted some out and just shipped it back of course then you sort of offset at least the carbon footprint part of local so we shouldn't do that right but you know it's it's good craft it's it's certainly the best you know cheesecakeing off the former work rate and it's an interesting variation on a major corporation allowing a different unique facade that that is not identical to all of the other ones that they've used elsewhere in the world exactly and if you look at the detail sandblasting in that apple there you know this lit thing is pretty is pretty interesting correct well let's go to something else that now now we'll leave we'll go to our next picture and we're going to leave the hawaiian islands and we're going to go to germany which is the homeland of my friend martin here and this first of all on the left what is that on the left that's a funny-looking thing well this is the mouth spowl who many in the arts he considered be our import most important son of hen over germany is courtschwitters and he was a dada artist right dada was weird for most people and this is this is a crazy installation that's a crazy dada original in one in one mizia right and on the right there was a commission that martin worked on with his father i believe yeah for to honor this guy schwitters who is a switters that's right switters who is this dada artist and if we go to the next picture this was a series of light rail stations and the stations all started out with this basic steel framework as you see here and then each one of the stations along this line got a different exterior attached to it that had some connection to where that particular location was and in this particular case if we go to the next one we will see that the idea was to use river rock that was indigenous to that particular location because it had been a rural location that was being urbanized and the attempt to use that rock was unfortunately economically impossible so they had to do a mold of the real rocks and install the mold on the steel skeleton to create the bus shelter or the train shelter that you see on the right that different one yeah that right and so the next one we see how the basalt one then came right and so then again we're going to harken to where this is where the basalt came from and so this particular station on that steel framework you had these basalt panels installed but those smaller what look like just gray dotted uh the the gray rectangles that are dotted around in there actually have a an artistic purpose and if we go to the next picture this again is uh paying homage to switters switters and as a crazy data person he wrote what he said was a poem in 1922 which is actually just the alphabet backwards starting with z and so to honor the poem those individual panels contain each one of the letters in the backwards order and at night when it gets dark you don't see the basalt very much but the interior of those panels is lit so that you can now see the sandblasted letter that is visible and as martin says if we go to the next picture it kind of looks like fireflies i've never personally seen fireflies so i can't say that that looks like that but there are the letters which you can kind of see which light up and pay homage to switters the original crazy data poet and in the next picture one of the things that martin and i discussed was here's a then and now picture so i think on the right is the picture when it was first installed and on the left is the way it looks today almost 20 years later and uh where's very little graffiti on it there's one heart that i can see up there in the right hand corner but basically it remains in pretty much its original condition looking really good and i'm i'm proud that they don't wreck things up there right and yeah in art let's just let's just jump ahead and let's do the next picture and this is the town to the left is the town where the material came from in mending a volcanic area which the picture on the top right refers to and it's amazing to see an entire city made out of their material their stuff right we're saying we're still a rock island we're still a volcanic rock and what we all see is shiny metal it's stucco it's cheesecake all these things why not see our indigenous material and we made a suggestion how on a larger scale one could do that revisit the last show this is the picture at the bottom right the canary islands the way they did that there and then go to the second the last picture here which is a picture uh there's martin which susanne took of me when she was here and we were sitting in holly eva and watching the sunset and when it gets colder like relatively now in the winter it's so warm because it retains heat correct while midday when the sun is blasting it if it would be granite you couldn't see it on it would burn your butt right but it doesn't do with the salt so this means there is some r value there is some insulation because it's aerated by nature right and so the idea is let's go to the next picture aerate the rock the way the natural basalt is containing microscopic small air pockets and those air pockets insulated they don't make it overly hot but they also can give off heat later on and that in the background shows that process being used for concrete yeah so we don't have any specific suggestions here like in the other shows but we just want to deliver it to the audience and the professional community and the emerging ones think about an evolution every introduction of using lava rock in a substantial way correct that's what our last two shows have been about lava rock basalt and the ways it has been used the ways it can be used if you think about it exactly and the next show will be a we'll take advantage that i'm back in germany and so we will find a topic that sort of takes advantage of me being even more distant getting a sort of a very multicultural view again and until then stay warm yep and lava crazy