 Welcome, everyone, back to human-humane architecture here on Think Tech Hawaii. We're broadcasting live from our exotic tropical paradise in Honolulu, Hawaii. And this is the first survivor show. Having survived Hurricane Lane, us pretty well here, other islands, not so much. And if we can get the first picture up, this is just a compilation of things that I have been portraying here at the bottom right. You see how in one of the most sturdy buildings, because it's this is the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, which is made out of solid stone, they were desperately trying to keep the tables from flying away and tying them with cloth table napkins, which I found rather sort of cute. So they were trying to board up the Starbucks slash ABC store with plywood, and plywood being probably the most invasive materials we have here. Here it comes from the Pacific Northwest, is glued there, a termite treated there, shipped here by the time the rise has little to nothing to do with what we consider to be so sustainable about wood. And so coming back and picking up my car, I took this picture of out there west in the Ewa Plains, we were building three-story buildings with that stick frame and plywood. And then there is a container driving by, so I'm thinking we are housing, hosting the goods we ship in better than people, which makes you wonder. And what makes you wonder, the top right is like at the, the solo after our Tiki show was saying, is Tiki still there and have you been to Tiki's, this is the restaurant just around the corner. And the storm wasn't even really gone, someone already had printed in China probably and shipped it here again, a T-shirt, we're a hurricane lane survivor. So what did we really learn from that? And the middle part is most likely this lady saved us, and there's this article in New York Times that I can recommend, or you say today, sorry, that for several reasons, again, Pele, the goddess of volcanoes, might have been involved that we didn't get hit. So all these things and more, I'm thinking, you know, related to our discipline and profession, with whom could I talk best about this stuff? And next picture, it's someone that I want to revisit because he was one of the first shows on this program here, someone and a half years ago, and that's Dr. Will Chapman. And I know you're a big fan of movies and always make these great comparisons between movies and other things and architecture as being part of life. So I went to my movie library and I brought some of my German goodies here, and this is Elvis's Girls, Girls, Girls, which is still portraying our islands as a grass hut sort of island. But the other one's more importantly, Blue Hawaii, which is here, Blaues, Hawaii, the original German version. Blaues, Hawaii, one of my favorites. There you go. And the descendants, and I watched on the plane, which is downsizing, and if you go back to slide number two, where I collaged all these, these are all things because your previous show was called Howly's Hawaii, and you insist on that I was the one calling the show like that, but revisiting that, these are all Howly's who made these movies and most characters are Howly's, and they're addressing issues on the islands and no surprise, we're Howly's, right, as one can tell. So addressing these issues is something that we want to talk about. So the next slide is you're here to catch up because it's been one and a half years, but also you're here because you're sitting here in an additional capacity that's fairly new, and what is that one, Bill? I'm the serving interim dean of the architecture school now, Martin, which you probably know well, since you're on the faculty of the architecture school. Hi. It's a great pleasure to be back. It didn't seem like a year and a half ago. It seemed like yesterday. Feels like that. What we see here is the building you're now in charge of and its people, and the top picture is its courtyard feature in the middle of it that we just got renovated and we sort of missed a little out on the chance to do something with it that could be a little bit more inspiring because it was designed in a way that we feel very hot in there. It's like a bowl, right? It's open to the top and little to no openings to the side, so it gets very hot. This is mostly an excuse for people to hide in air conditioned rooms, which we have plenty, but you not so much. Explain a little bit the bottom picture and when that was. We had our all school meeting yesterday, and we normally do have it in the auditorium space that we have in the building, and it's a popular auditorium with a lot of people come there and rent it from us occasionally, and it's always been awkward, I think, for the school meeting because everybody, the students would all sit in the back of the auditorium and the faculty sit in the first two rows, and then they'd sort of twist their heads around speaking of like a Linda Blair in the Exorcist and try to see the faculty behind the students behind them. So I think it worked a lot better having it outside in the courtyard space. Though it was hot and there was threatening rain, and we had, you may see in the picture, there's a tent that we put in the middle just in case it did rain that we could all run toward the tent and get covered. But you were right. It's a kind of hot and uninviting space. People have worked hard to make it better. You can see in the upper picture that there's these fans, these sales really, and in fact, during the storm, I joked to the guy that runs our fabrication shop that maybe they would pick the whole building up and just carry it away. But anyway, they do help some. They do, yeah. And you didn't let this, you know, count as an excuse all these obstacles because after all, we were complaining about all these things rain and then we're in the tropics, right? And we come from other places where we know what's extreme and unpleasant. So here it's all pretty relative. So just, you know, hiding in an air-conditioned, dark, you know, her medic introverted classroom is just not a good excuse, right? It's a strange space, I think, in this courtyard because it has the sort of staircase that is both like a stage and a staircase. The treads are of different scales. They seem to kind of go up in funny angles. It reminds you of a kind of MC Escher drawing. So you're not sure where you're going to end up when you go up the stairs. And on top of it, when you come into the courtyard space, there's absolutely no sense of orientation in this space. Students come through a space that we consider really the hallway and the anti-chamber to the two offices. So I noticed today with all the students now back on campus, they're kind of walking through what is really the anti-chamber to the audience, right? The atrium. And then they get in there and then nobody knows where to go. This is not clear indicator. So this is not really about whether in tropics it's more about design and hierarchy and things like that. And regardless of maybe because we just made it through accreditation again, this is the exhibit going along with the accreditation. So even though we have a pretty bad building, that's not a good raw model for teaching us what we should know. We sort of made it and made the best of it. And again, you get us out of the dark classrooms. The next picture is showing a project of ours here at Primitiva 2. And you've been sitting in the back in the review and pretty soon we got out into that courtyard. And here the students were testing large-scale prototyping, plants and watering as features of the building and testing that. So using the courtyard not as sort of this classicist amphitheater in sort of a showcasing way but as an outdoor classroom, right? It would be nice to find ways to use the courtyard in different ways. It would be nice to see the courtyard be continually filled with greenery as it is quite a harsh space as well, right? And we've done a lot to try to mitigate some of that. But I think this kind of exercise where you see plants as in the picture makes an enormous difference to the character of the place. And I see DeSoto there from your last show. They're looking at the model. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, anyway, putting this to a bigger scale, you said basically scaffold the building, let nature take over. That's sort of a thought I had when I looked at the outside of it. You know, the other buildings on campus in the old quarter made much like the Royal Hawaiian, probably had a terracotta block or a concrete block of summer storms, what they would have called tile or a concrete tile. And then they were stuck it over with real sort of cement and they look quite solid and good. And then you come to our building and they use the kind of construction technology that you're referring to there and Eva, where that's where you had kind of steel frame building where the mesh was basically the same kind of material that you would use to line a swimming pool and very thin so that the grill that holds this concrete rusts quite quickly and then it peels up and it does, I admit that today I said to you, maybe we should grow, as you said there was a good German saying, but an old architect friend of mine said, if the building goes bad, you could grow a vine over it, right? Yeah, if I take the tolls, it's the German way of saying it. We were just over coffee, we were looking at a couple books about architecture on UH, which Deso and I will do a show in a couple of shows and you were fascinated by a picture that showed the condition just before they built our building in the early 90s. It was still the old portables, right? Well, there were a series of portables put in in the beginning of I guess starting really in the late 60s and early 70s and if you walk around the campus today, you can still see them and they have this kind of wonderful kind of visionary, Pacific character, sort of residual feeling of almost like military construction. It reminds me also of one of your favorite Jean-Prouvé, although it's on pedal, of course, a wooden Jean-Prouvé. Yeah, I noticed he said the books that they're on would post, but most of them are on kind of concrete footing, so quite nice and I think when they built them, they were called the temporaries. Now they're 60 years old, well eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good point. When the university gave up a few, St. Francis School grabbed them, so they moved a couple over to St. Francis School and if you go to lower campus, there are still a couple there and I often would look at them and think, what a wonderful house these would make and they're very basic. I think environmental studies has their office in one of them as well. Next picture, let's move on, or this is what our tropic here, fellow David Rockwood, does always in the spring, I believe, yeah, in the spring he does an elective about tropical screens so here they're using the courtyard for sort of real condition demonstrations and using the sun and checking it out how it performs, right? So again, if we're stuck with that building and with the courtyard, we might as well do something, take advantage of it in a more sort of progressive way but then next picture, I didn't find one of us because this is our preferred tutoring space when we work with the ARC students on committees, we always ask them to sit there and this is when our friend, well, Bruder was visiting and he was rather disappointed about our building as well and he got excited about this one. He says, well, this is how it should be and what building is that again? This is Saunders Hall, the building formerly known as Portia Hall, I think. For a while it was just the building formerly known sort of like Prince or something and then now it's renamed Saunders and it really is a pleasant and attractive building. Late Ossipoff building. I guess Snyder was involved in it as well and I think it's because of the height of the building it protects the courtyard and then it's open to the breezes below which our building is definitely not there's really no access for it. Well, this is almost the opposite of the antithesis of our building, right? This is doing right what ours does wrong and vice versa. And then again, you notice right away there's a royal palm in the middle of it there's a vegetation there and it's a pleasant space and you'll see during the day people from all over the campus work there and going even further there's another building built way earlier than this one because this was 70s but very early in the mid-century phase of UAH architecture which is the next picture there's a building that a couple generations had made proposals goes back to when Spencer Linaweba was still alive and David Rockwood speaking of him that made studios, feasibility studies to basically move us here and move what's currently in this building into us because what our building tragically probably doesn't get by without is air conditioning and the things that are in this building they might not mind air conditioning as much as we do and what building is that? This is Sinclair Library and it really is a lovely building on campus designed by the predecessor firm to Architects Hawaii, LeMonde, Haynes do you remember the other partner's names? Well they change over the time so it's hard to remember LeMonde and Haynes I know I hear Frank quite well I miss him sorely he was a real gentleman in many ways but even as a library this was kept open not all air conditioned only the video room was air conditioned and this is where a lot of the architecture periodicals would be when you go there you really did they did take advantage of it raises in a way that we don't anymore today it actually is listed on the National and State Registers of Historic Places Very good and can you imagine when you were talking about how disconnected ours is and people don't have orientation and often when we have events we try to tell people where we are and they don't get it I think of building mass above it where this one here not only positioned rides actually the client briefs our university as the client was mandating natural ventilation and orientation doing rides and this creates a great facade an address to the streets so you have exhibits there and demonstrate all the stuff we're doing It's very interesting that the modernisms often been criticized for its lack of hierarchy and sense of procession and movement through a building and the old Bozar architect sort of understood this theatrical aspect to architecture whereas in our building we have the semblance of that without any of the reality of that so you kind of go through and get stuck in the middle and go oh is this the door to the auditorium wait no that was the broom closet let's try this door oh it's the men's bathroom but this one oddly enough you have a really strong sense of how it works it's a cool observation I mean ours is Pomo Bozar so it's pretending it doesn't really follows the principles it just wants to look like but internally it's sort of lost the connection to it so let's leave the built environment and look at what makes us which is our student body and next picture shows you on a review as a committee member and then shows two boards that were selected for accreditation as one of the best art projects so you want to talk about that a little bit and about recruitment these were really wonderful projects and they were by local kid who was actually born in Japan has spent his early life in Japan whose parents really moved here so he could go to U.H to high school here as I remember he went to McKinley high school the other guy came from Korea and he had this wonderful kind of work ethic and he knew how to work with these different materials and he was very interested in modular buildings and buildings that would address kind of the needs of housing which is something I think architects over the historically have often looked at at least since the modern period but unfortunately keep abandoning those efforts and going toward commercial buildings or prestige buildings like museums or something like that and not really making a great contribution to our present housing crisis which we see every day in Honolulu. Absolutely yeah so on the left his name is Akira you know from Japan and then Juhyeong to the right was or is from Korea and next picture you have some interesting thoughts to basically tap more into this sort of us being the most western school in the United States I was previously saying east because I was thinking about her closest to the east depending on how you look at it I don't know either but I wanted to help you out thank you east and west is so close so here we're talking about Vietnam and this is a project that was selected for accreditation again the center piece by Tropical Rockwood here architecture 744 going from the very macro to the micro and it's strongly related to his own research in Vietnam in fact he just got back we did a show with him and again there is some very very great sort of potential of recruiting students from there because we're talking about their great work ethics and again then our local kids might say well hey what about us but I think it's good competition right it shows them they're very high standards and makes them maybe work a little harder I think we have a global track program at the University of Hawaii and we have quite a few people now this year we had kind of not quite a hiatus but a slowdown for a couple years and now it's back on track again and we have I think nine new students from the mainland that are going through global track who are attracted to the University of Hawaii because of this and they wanted this opportunity to work in a place that is Asia focused and we always say Asia Pacific one of the things I want to do is be a little more Pacific Island focused the money isn't there the population isn't there in the same sense and urban development isn't there really to the same degree but I think that we kind of owe it to our Pacific Island neighbors to address some of their issues which include things like housing and I think David just had a one-year Fulbright in Vietnam and really we had a meeting yesterday with international programs people about this and how we could maybe establish a relationship with a couple of universities in Vietnam and I'm planning to next week visit two Thai universities that I'm familiar with a lot of the faculty there including the Dean at Chuala Longkorn and we'd like to resuscitate or really bring back a program that was once very healthy and now is kind of dribbled off through lack of attention there's our colleague Bundit from Ted Pol Studio as well who has ties to that so we got great I guess man and women power let's spend the last third of the show about why we're here and why we love this place we howly so to speak so let's go to the next slide here what are your thoughts about the compilation of these images I really love Martin Denny and I regret that I actually never heard him live I do have a lot of his CDs when people still bought CDs I know my daughters who are in their early 30s laugh at the idea of buying CDs but anyway but the point is some of the ones I have you can't get on streaming music and you can't get through Amazon either and Martin Denny went through a number of kind of evolutions you know and he started out with classic kind of tiki period music and was meant to conjure up places like Trader Vicks and the kind of very notion of exotica and the people that played with them actually I thought they must have little whistles and things apparently they did everything with their voices they just made up parrot calls and monkeys and things like that but he moved at the time and I think he always was a little tongue-in-cheek he had his he had his tiki girls and they would dance sort of a apahali hula in the background and I think he was giving a nod to this whole notion of kind of the in a way the abuse of power relations he was very aware of that so in a way he called attention to it through the kind of mockery of it and I think in a way he kind of called attention to the way we tend to exoticize the other by celebrating exoticism wouldn't that be cool to do that in architecture as well again because mid-century as we keep saying all these people of Frank Hates and Pete Wimbley and Asipov we talk and Alfred Pies they did that in one way or another or even here I put at the very top left because lots of these records have been recorded in the Dome that we had in Waikiki we had one student working on Buckminster Fuller's Dome he was the only protester when it went down it was a real crying shame and there is a direct relationship to progression and innovation in music as one of the arts to architecture as one of the other arts I think so too and we were talking about movies before and I think the movies movies have that same sense of sequence of arrival moving through something that's very similar to the experience of a building in another life I was a historic preservationist and still am many years I've directed the program in historic preservation at UH and I think you can't take pictures of a building and you can't sort of remember buildings strictly in that way it's really experiential you've got to go through the building and it gets me to the little pictures in the middle on the right which is you were hanging out at the Tahitian Wanai and have these great memories of space and place and music and ocean and sort of Polynesian pop design and I think the scale of it the kind of scale of the post-war era that sense that the old Hilton Hawaiian village which really was a village of grass-roofed huts now you would never be able to get past the fire ghost and the pool that changed with the ties things like that there was a much more direct connection and I think there was a connection to maybe the experience of you were talking about howlies but the military coming through Hawaii this kind of experience of the exotic and some of that might have been kind of patronizing maybe but a lot of it was an act of discovery celebration and I think people like people who came here decided they loved it and wanted to be part of it and talking about Pete and running out of time but second to last picture here please next picture this is one of Pete's projects which was the canless restaurant here which again is sort of a twist on Polynesian pop architecture it reminded us of one of our other mentees here Nick Cibitano who has done some research in sort of reviving that sort of archetype here on the island in a rather progressive way using modern wood treatment technologies and stuff like that and in last show with the soto the picture on the right there we were pointing out that we actually have very few restaurants particularly left and we were saying only two and then right after the show the soto brought to my attention that Wailai coffee house which only has that little tiki meeting room or the bar and there is now closing after all these years the Wailana that's a shame, a real shame that was the Wailana but making maybe an opportunity out of that dilemma you have another suggestion for maybe another degree to add based upon that sort of potential and need for indoor architecture that actually isn't so much indoor as it's indoor outdoors here in the tropics but you're maybe suggesting another degree that's hard to pull off there's a kind of I think a naivete a kind of honesty, a genuineness about this era of architecture it was the first discovery and as you know we live in a postmodern time and so everything references something else so now it becomes a reference to that I think it was maybe trying to break past that to really do something that really got back to as you say primitiva where you can really kind of get to the essentials of something without mimicking the forms and opposite examples of course the tiki bar at the Aston Hotel which is really just the sham of it much like a lani or something and of course you don't have that you have that very considered bakery which has its own place and I suppose some of the tiki architecture of Trader Joe's and all those places probably did wasn't Trader Joe's Trader Vicks probably led to kind of the kind of scenography of theme parks absolutely and that's I think good for the last picture here and then I saved this on the on the left from the Soto's big archive selection for that show we did about tropical aviation and I saved that one here for you because I thought it's so perfectly embodying that lure of the exotic with everything you talked about previously about the sort of session with the sort of little dress people and people from somewhere else so just this dreams and obsessions and with that in the last show we were talking about the taboo which is a Polynesian term about this sort of being on the edge of something I would like to do and I'm not quite sure if I'm allowed to this sort of excitement of exotic very much escapism in a way it's funny how places can carry their memory there's a British writer Peter Ackroyd who writes about London he talks about different neighborhoods in London that contain something of the past I always think this kind of a lure probably goes back to the times when whalers came to Hawaii and actually experienced this kind of taboo and in a way that becomes a kind of continuous thread all the way to the tourist industry which then wanted to build on that and very obviously here and so here you have as you said the Howley arriving where they're treated like Cook would say King and I think that's part of the continuing appeal but for someone like you or I who have lived here for decades that doesn't have that in a way this is humorous only but it's sort of we put in obviously Janet when she comes here she loves to indulge in the exotic tropical and wear less and being sexy and so to be gender correct so is Dwayne Johnson which we closed one of the previous shows we were like polemically saying here is our next president who walked in the same hoods than the previous one Elizabeth Warren did say something about him being a vice president now that we have presidents that have come from the entertainment business alone I think before you had presidents that had to learn how to be entertaining and now you just go right to the heart of it yeah yeah yeah yeah so I think in the last show it's great term that ever since resonates with when you were saying basically post-contact construction so I think here it's sort of post-contact subjects that maybe you're not maybe but very obviously you're interested in addressing you talked about so serious issues as in environmentalism and in social housing needs to be addressed but also sort of are what makes us what is our sort of identity what is what we have what no other place has to address these things sort of in a fun way and in a contemporary way and in a sort of forward thinking way right and maybe get away from the sort of denial that we're in a tropical place I think you particularly have been a champion of getting back to nature to some degree to think that people in the 40s and 50s were obsessed with how to make nature work for human comfort and now we just basically condition everything yeah yeah well I think that's a great closing note thank you Bill for being here look forward to see you next time as an update on the time in between and until then you guys all stay exotically tropical and tropically exotic and see you next week with the Soto Brown along the same lines we call the so arky nature or something like that that shows the sort of interesting you know in between of the build and the natural environment and certain struggles that we have here and some developers have that where they tear good old stuff down they want to rebuild and then they decide they don't want to build and then they put greenery in there there's a project going on that we'll want to particularly talk about so and these other things we're going to talk in school thanks to you Bill so thank you again for being here again thanks partner it was a pleasure bye bye