By Dennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
Narciso Cadiz, left and Ping Maduli of RHS Lee Inc.
cover the outside of this concrete wall with fake lava rock.
One the lasting delights of the Queen's Medical Center is the lava-rock wall that undulates alongside Punchbowl Street. It's a vestige of the old Queen's Hospital, peeking out of the urban landscape like a dinosaur's fossil vertebrae. It's pieced together like an intricate jigsaw puzzle, a pattern accentuated by where the wall stones are dissembling from tree-root pressure.But as the hospital added to itself over the years, it seemed to turn its back on Punchbowl Street, and the utilitarian, industrial Gropius-style structure is hard to get a handle on. New construction is changing the whole approach, with classic "Hawaiian-style" hipped cascading roofs and pillars. And there's a new lava-rock wall being built right by the street.
Wait, those aren't lava rocks! The contractors from R.H.S. Lee are gluing faux-rocks to a structure wall. The fake rocks are perfectly flat on one side. It's like making a collage from oven-baked cookies.
These fake stones, from from Big Rock Manufacturing Inc., are constructed from concrete and pumice in molds, and artificially colored.
"This particular style is called Old Lava Flow, and we also carry Coral, and Moss Rock," explained Big Rock head Marco Foi. "We have dozens of different shapes and sizes, and you can just mortar it on to virtually any surface."
They will also provide pigment to mix in with mortar the color matches. Price works out to about $4.20 a square foot. You could apply them to any wall in your house, for that early-'70s decorative touch. Oh, behave.
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