Retiring UH professor to build cities of future

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Bruce Etherington, who retired this month after 37 years as a University of Hawai'i architecture professor, can't point to a single building he has designed in Honolulu. Still, tens of thousands of people around the world live in his homes.

Bruce Etherington has taught architecture at UH-Manoa for almost 40 years. Etherington's passion has been designing low-cost housing for the world's poor. And now he wants to design modular cities. Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

The interlocking block system he developed with the help of UH architecture students has been used to build more than 50,000 homes on four continents. Now, at 77, he's turning his attention to building whole cities based on the same approach.

"He's a remarkable gentleman. I'm constantly amazed at what he's managed to accomplish overseas," said Elmer Botsai, a former dean of the UH School of Architecture. "It boggles the mind to think how many people he has helped over the course of nearly 40 years."

Etherington left his mark on hundreds of students, too.

"He had a lot of respect among all the architecture students," said Lorraine Palumbo, who took a plumbing class with Etherington in the 1980s and now works as an architect in Honolulu. "Even when he wasn't around, there was an understanding that he was off doing greater things."

Etherington shrugs off the praise. "I wish I could have done more," he said.

In the early 1960s, Etherington walked away from a successful, well-paying job with a Canadian architecture firm. Using a relatively new prefabricated modular design system that is still one of his trademarks, Etherington's firm was cranking out hundreds of bank buildings, sometimes as many as eight a month, when he "saw my future" and decided he didn't like it very much.

So he set out to travel the world, looking for a place he really wanted to live, visiting South America, Asia, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean before ending up in Hawai'i at a time when the construction crane had yet to become the state bird and you could still "sit on any sidewalk and enjoy a beautiful view."

Back then, in 1963, the only UH architecture classes were offered through the art department, where Etherington quickly became a teacher and administrator. A few years later, he literally put a fledgling department of architecture on the campus map, commandeering and reconditioning some unused engineering buildings to give a growing number of architecture students their first permanent home.

"The program was kind of an orphan one, but we fixed the place up ourselves using material we scavenged from a downtown site, and that gave us our first visible presence on the campus," he said. Etherington headed the department until it became a full school in the mid-1970s.

Botsai said Etherington deserves credit for helping establish the architecture school. "He clearly was the one who got it going and carefully nurtured it in the first few years."

The real focus of Etherington's mind and work was elsewhere though. He says it was a moment in the Philippines in 1969 that changed his life.

"I was on a tour of Southeast Asia riding on an air-conditioned bus when I caught my first glimpse of the slums of Manila," he said. "I looked out and wondered how do these people survive?"

Even though he was told it was too dangerous to visit, Etherington headed straight for the heart of Tondo, the sprawling slum on the shores of Manila Bay where nearly 1 million people live in little more than cardboard boxes. Even so, Etherington said, the people had their own social system; with little government help they set up their own public works, garbage collection, police and education system.

Right then and there, Etherington decided to help. He spent the next two years living off and on in the slum, building his own shacks out of scavenged packing crate material, trying to develop a better squatter house.

While he got to know his neighbors, Etherington was approached by a local priest, Father Schmidt, who told him of the 350 people in his parish who were about to lose their homes to a development project. Schmidt challenged Etherington to come up with homes for them — homes that were both inexpensive and able to stand up to fire, earthquakes and the region's fearsome typhoons.

Etherington brought the challenge back to UH, where he and his students came up with the idea of a mortar-less, interlocking concrete block system that the residents could use to build their own homes at a price far below any other method.

"That was the beginning of the whole thing," Etherington said.

Etherington used the system to build a subdivision for those first 350 homeless people in Schmidt's parish. Then the Asian Institute of Technology outside of Bangkok, Thailand, asked him to build a demonstration project, and soon local agencies and officials developed a "mutual aid" system that had the poorest of the poor contributing their labor to build their own homes, which resemble blocks of garden apartments.

Today, the Lok Bild system is used all over the world, with several hundred small block factories across Asia. The technology has been appropriated and developed by governments, private developers and humanitarian agencies in Central America, Mexico, East Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal and elsewhere. Etherington never patented the system or tried to control it.

"Today it's the pre-eminent method of rural housing in Asia," Etherington said. "Basically, we gave them the system to use and the people took the design and ran with it."

The beauty of the system, Etherington said, is that the construction blocks for every part of the home — walls, ceilings, floor joists — can be made right on the building site by people with only a few days training and a few tools. "None of the components weighs more than four people can carry," Etherington said.

And the homes can be built for just a few thousand dollars, which translates into a mortgage of only a few dollars a month for those who need them the most.

One of Etherington's former students, Nuttapong Intuputi, brought the system home to Bangkok, where he has developed it into a large, profitable company, with dozens of workers, a fleet of trucks and more business than he can handle.

"The beauty is that you can make a lot of money with this system, because it's cheaper than any competitor," said Etherington, who is now a partner with Intuputi in the business.

One place Etherington's invention has never caught on is Hawai'i. And it's not for lack of need or trying, Etherington said.

"The need is here for true affordable housing, but we've never been able to make much headway with the people in the government. They just put up too many obstacles when you try to change the way things are done."

Still, Etherington is forever grateful to what Hawai'i provided him. "I couldn't have done anything without the support of the students and the university, which gave me endless opportunity and freedom."

Etherington isn't slowing down in retirement. Today, he's heading for Bangkok and a new round of work, including his plans to develop a new kind of city, one that's based on the low-tech, modular systems.

"We can and have to do better," he said. "Cities are the most inefficient human endeavor ever undertaken. We have to go back to building new, smaller cities that grow organically. We can build modular cities where all the services fit together better."

Etherington said he's looking for a client, perhaps an Asian country, that will take a chance on developing one of his city plans.

"I could do it for one-tenth of the cost and cut a city's maintenance bills in half," he said. "Everything starts with the people's desire for better housing."