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ORO Editions Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design Gordon Goff: Publisher www.oroeditions.com info@oroeditions.com Published by ORO Editions Copyright © 2027 David Rockwood and ORO Editions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying or microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Author: David Rockwood Design: David Rockwood Project Manager: Jake Anderson 10

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ISBN: 978-1-972474-21-1 Prepress and Print work by ORO Editions Inc. Printed in China ORO Editions makes a continuous effort to minimize the overall carbon footprint of its publications. As part of this goal, ORO, in association with Global ReLeaf, arranges to plant trees to replace those used in the manufacturing of the paper produced for its books. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign run by American Forests, one of the world’s oldest nonprofit conservation organizations. Global ReLeaf is American Forests’ education and action program that helps individuals, organizations, agencies, and corporations improve the local and global environment by planting and caring for trees.

Foreword Eye Level in Honolulu and Da Nang My first and only attempt to photograph a stranger on the street, actually in a park, was in Honolulu. While walking around Kapiolani Park one day, without an aim, I came upon a Polynesian man with a beautiful tattoo on one side of his face. I looked at him with admiration and was about to walk away when I thought it would be great to photograph him. As an architect, I have photographed buildings without much hesitation, but this would be the first time photographing a stranger in the street. I thought of walking up to him and asking for his permission, but I hesitated. He was a big man. What if he gets offended and knocks me out? I did summon my courage and went up to him to find out if it would be okay to photograph him. He was actually quite congenial and said, “It’s fine.’” I also found out from him what the tattoo meant—it was a mark of status in his community. It was a beautiful and short encounter between two people in a park mediated by the incredible gadget of the phone with a camera. What I did randomly and once David Rockwood does with passion and precision, and as a deeply felt endeavor. David walks the streets of his favorite cities, but with his Fuji X-M1 camera hung from his neck, and makes his encounters with people on the street an archive of urban life, or as he says, capturing “the actions of life as it unfolds unselfconsciously.” As he explains, he would go to a part of a town, walk around taking

photos, usually without breaking stride, and take about 100–200 photos in a 30–60 minutes walk. An architect, professor, and a person with a keen sense of the world around him, David Rockwood has been living in two cities for many years, two cities he now calls home—Da Nang and Honolulu. I imagine David with his camera, walking those two cities he lives with his camera held to his waist, rather inconspicuously lest he stir up unnecessary attention, only to be hauled up to his eye level, horizontally, when the subject seems warm. This book is a selected collection of those encounters. In Honolulu: A woman gesticulates under an umbrella, arguing or showing direction. A man rides a bike caught between buildings, mountains and the sky. A man sits on an undesignated stoop, a bit tired, reflecting on the journey onwards. Cranes stretch toward the sky amidst urban ordinariness, about to take off. A couple with a child walks on, not straining to look up. Silhouettes, signs, shadows, reflections and a face intersect, and who knows about it? A tired soul leans against a wall, head hung low, smoking. Tourists to the city walk back to their hotel after a swim in the sea, clad only in towels. Beach boys prepare for the beach. In Da Nang: Motorbikes, always motorbikes, take families home. A mother on her stoop, preparing for dinner, framed in the threshold of the public and the private. Man sits on a stool while time flies by in a blur. A woman on a bike flanked by buildings, cables, and the sky. Movement, there is always movement in the theater of the street. A couple sitting on the ground gazing back at our photographer. I have been to Hanoi, but not Da Nang, and I know Honolulu as a second home, having lived there for over fourteen years. And for the most part, I walked the city. Walking the city is inherent in me. Whenever I go to a new city, I will get out of the hotel, and walk, most often randomly, and let the city flow into me. As an architect I do not seek stunning buildings. I like life on the street. People, eateries, crossings, chatters, colors, and the unscheduled things that happen there. Honolulu is not always a walking city but I walked it. Since I did not drive, I would take the bus and go places, get off and wander around. I would get out of

my apartment, in my t-shirt and shorts, and just walk over to the nearby cafe for breakfast, saunter over to a park and sit on a bench to read. I thought my apartment was my bedroom but the city was my living room. In a conversation with Dimitri Kim for his ambitious but short-lived journal Phototropic, published from Honolulu, I came up with the term “metrophilia,” a love of a city as a horizontal experience, how by walking the city you engage with civic as well as random offerings, and that includes meeting with people on the street. I said that in the context of tall buildings that were popping up in Honolulu in the early 2000s. I added: Tall buildings by themselves, however stunning they are, cannot claim to be a measure of contribution to the urban environment. I have come to see the phenomenon of tall buildings—that make you look up and strain your neck—as “phallophilia,” as standing alone and erect, which often disrupts the human ecology of the street. David himself admits how trained as an architect one looks at the world from above, while the real world is to be found neither looking down from above or looking up from below. I now live by an aphorism that if you want to fall in love with the city—walk. It opens up a full discourse on how we can make our cities livable and civic, and how we might live together as a community. One needs to love a city to plan it—this perhaps could be a second aphorism. A better philosophy for urban development should be based on an ambulatory life, in living and experiencing the city by walking. In walking, we are with others and we participate in what can be described as the public realm. David Rockwood works in that realm. His photographs from two cities are a testament of that. The French writer Charles Baudelaire celebrated the ritual of walking the city in the form of the “flaneur.” A difficult word to translate from French, as it might mean a loafer in contemporary context, but in Baudelaire’s sense a flaneur is “a connoisseur of the street,” an alert investigator who in wandering the streets takes in the sights, sounds, and spirit of the place. Writing in his book The New York Nobody Knows, professor of sociology William Helmreich mentions walking almost every street in New York City which would be about 6,000 miles. “I love to read about the city, to live the city, to walk the city.” Helmreich confesses

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in a New Yorker article. “I did it in the morning. I did it in the evening. I did it on the weekends. I did it in the rain, in the snow, in the summer. It came to about thirty-five, forty miles a week, a hundred twenty a month, fifteen hundred a year.” In the 1960s, the Situationists, the avant-garde group based in Paris, proposed the practice of dérive that involved journeying the terrain of a city to randomly discover situations in which to enact unprecedented work of political art. Psychogeography, the practice of walking and mapping the city, developed from there. In a beautiful essay called the “Dictionary of Streets,” published in his book Beginning with My Streets, the Polish writer and Nobel–winner Czeslaw Milosz intersects a psychological geography with the lay of the city streets in his hometown Wilno (Vilnius). He does that so that the “aura of the place” may be recorded. With David’s work, I sense a similar thing, a hard thing to do—revealing the aura of a place. David Rockwood’s careful photographs make us realize the world at the eye level and make us recognize the theater of micro-urbanism, that is, people doing small things in which they claim a space in the city as well as live it. David names it “micro expressions,” those precious “quiet gestures and fleeting encounters” that make for the pulse on the street. It may be something very inconsequential and ephemeral but a slice of the enigmatic in which we all move. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, Ph.D. Director General, Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements

Introduction He Viened His Blood To The Camera When Giambattista Nolli drew his plan of Rome in 1748, he could never have imagined what his map, centuries later, inspired for a viewer like me. In his plan, space between buildings is depicted in white, buildings are in black. This simplicity and contrast give a great impression of the beauty of Rome not based on individual buildings, but a living whole. The magic of this kind of depiction is in it filtering out noise. Like a Nolli Plan, the black-and-white medium, in David Rockwood’s photobook, filters out graphic noise and reveals his emotional threads. Without the color distraction, the photographs bring forward line, shadow, gesture, rhythm, and human faces. Lots of faces. Rockwood almost always captures his subjects from a very close distance. Perhaps that is the reason his photos are deeply intimate. And candid. They are everyday scenes from the streets of Honolulu and the streets of Da Nang, rendered without exaggeration, sentimentality, or spectacle. The architect-photographer reminds us of what Jane Jacobs, the mother of modern urban planning, called “street ballet.” Men sit near front doors and smoke, banter over street stalls; women carrying quang ganh walk along the pavement, each step only one among a million steps in their lives. These people are not presented as merely trying to get by, nor are they romanticized by glorifying or elevating suffering. They simply live. Their mission is to live. Rockwood’s camera knows that and observes them with intimacy and respect.

In this sense, his work belongs to the tradition of Cartier-Bresson: the patient attention to ordinary life, the trust that a fleeting gesture can reveal something larger than itself. But Rockwood’s photographs do not feel like the hunt for a spectacular “decisive moment.” They feel quieter, more porous, more continuous. He seems less interested in freezing life at its climax than in letting life pass through the camera with its own dignity. John Berger once reminded us that seeing is never innocent. The way we look at the world shapes what we understand of it. Rockwood’s way of seeing is not extractive. He does not turn the street into an object, nor does he turn people into symbols. His camera does not dominate the scene: it knows it sees. It allows the everyday to disclose itself. Like Jacobs, but through a more photographic and immediate language, Rockwood reveals the living order of the street. His images are like dots and patches in a Monet painting: small fragments that, little by little, lead us toward a larger sense of beauty shared across an ocean, between the very different cultures of Vietnam and America. A doorway, a pavement, a seated figure, a passing woman, a shadow on a wall—each small piece begins to belong to a wider human composition. Throughout the collection, one comes to realize how many commonalities exist among us. The urban landscape is not merely a background. It surrounds us, shapes us, carries our routines, and gives meaning to ordinary life. Streets are not only channels of movement; they are places where human existence becomes visible. Recalling the old line often misattributed to Hemingway, David Rockwood veined his blood to the camera. Through the camera, he exposes us to the quiet beauty of the everyday—in Honolulu or Da Nang. Not as spectacle. Not as poverty. Not as nostalgia. But as life itself, moving, breathing, and leaving its trace in black and white. Ngoc Hong Nguyen, Ph.D. Senior Lecturer, Da Nang University of Science & Technology

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Preface This book gathers 100 photographs from Honolulu, USA, and Da Nang, Vietnam—two cities I’ve called home. These images search for something beneath the surface: the quiet gestures and fleeting encounters that shape a place more deeply than maps or master plans. Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” But perhaps the shaping begins even earlier. Cities don’t arise only from blueprints or grids—they emerge from accumulated emotions, daily movements, and shared dreams. What if we saw the city not as something built from the top down, but carved from the inside? We ourselves mark our territory with repetition, desire, and need. I was trained to look from above—to impose order and analyze form. But the life of a city pulses at ground level, in the smallest acts: a glance, a step, a pause in the shade. These are the micro-expressions I try to see with the camera—part observation, part reflection, part offering. Da Nang and Honolulu each speak with their own accent, shaped by history, climate, and culture. Yet both reveal, in their fragments, something universal. These images are incomplete, of course—no city can be captured whole. But perhaps, in their quiet details, they hint at how we shape place—and how it shapes us in return.

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Technical Notes The photographs in this volume were captured between 2025 and 2026 using an infrared-converted Sony NEX-5N camera with a kit lens, and a Fujifilm X-M1 camera with a 27mm lens. The book is set in Letter Gothic Standard, a monospaced typeface.

Note on Orthography For graphic clarity and consistency in this book, place names in Hawaii and Vietnam are rendered in their simplified English forms. To maintain maximum legibility within the uniform character spacing of this volume, intricate diacritics and tonal marks have been omitted.

Biographical Note David Rockwood was educated at the University of Oregon and Princeton University. He is professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa School of Architecture. Rockwood has also taught and held administrative positions at other universities including Pacific Northwest College of Art, the University of Washington, and Pratt Institute. Rockwood apprenticed with Michael Graves Architect and Batey & Mack, and founded David Rockwood, Architect in 1985. Exhibitions of his work have been presented at international venues, including the Buenos Aires Biennial, Princeton University, The Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, and the National Building Museum. Publications featuring Rockwood’s work include the RIBA Journal, Domus, Global Architecture Houses, Global Architecture – Project, as well as Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterworks: The 20th-Century House. He is the author of Bamboo Gridshells and numerous peer-reviewed international scientific journal papers. Rockwood’s research focuses on building materials, construction methods, structural systems, and urban systems. In 2014, he was named a Fulbright Specialist and received a Fulbright Specialist Grant in urban planning in Da Nang, Vietnam. He subsequently received a Fulbright US Faculty Scholar grant for 2017–18. He is currently investigating urban life using the medium of photography.

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