 Good to see you for our 215th show of think-taker-wise human-humane architecture. And we're continuing to do what the Hawaiian culture was always doing, being very curious about other places in the world that they can learn from. And since they were doing in mid-century, we're, Utisoto, we're growing up, getting the best of all these worlds. So today is just the two of us. We have our island's legacy treasurer, Bishop Museum historian, DeSoto Brown, with us. Hi, DeSoto. Good morning. And myself, Martin Despeng. We're missing out on our third party, Ronald Lindgren, who's still consumed with his home improvements back in his Long Beach, California. And we're talking less surfacial nature, but serious substantial one. And we'll keep reporting on that one. And also we're worried about his one beach over, which is Huntington Beach, which is suffering, just points out how bad fossil fuel is, because there's an oil spill there. And it's basically making Huntington Beach famous, Huntington Beach inaccessible. Just one more reason to get off that nasty, black fossil fuel stuff. So in order to still live up to our international profile, having been awarded the show of the year last year, having broadcasted from all over the world, we have our exotic escapism expert, Susana, stepping up. And we send her to the place we are reporting about, which is her second home, where she has sweet 16, as you can see her there, down there. Basically went for three years until age 21, 16, or pretty much, yeah, in that range. And she went back to celebrate her Bono's mom's 80th birthday. So congratulations again. And we also have our Tiki Basement expert, Stefan's wife, Kirsten celebrating her birthday. So celebrating birthday show today. Congratulations to you all. And who else is this birthday is today? So Suzanne went back there, as you can see, it's getting cold there. So she's wearing a sweater and a coat because we're talking about similarities, but also differences, right? And she said, well, there's a saying, the coldest winter is a summer in San Francisco, but she said the coldest winter she experienced was not in her very sort of subzero, the varial where she grew up, whereas you are basically used to and both the architecture, whether like the locked timber and yourself with your cheap wool woven attire are prepared for that. But in Portugal, you think it doesn't get that cold and doesn't get below zero, but it gets down enough to then be very damp and moist. And these traditional houses that you see in the background there, both her visiting, revisiting on the bottom left and then her then in that lake at the bottom right, basically they don't have furnaces. They're these old masonry stone houses that get really, really cold. So there's a difference besides all the similarities, there's still sufficient differences. But our last show also seems to have been an encouragement on an other end and that's been portrayed by the pictures above and you tell us what instance this soda. Well, we're gonna be talking today about the island of Madeira and as we just were saying, that's part of Portugal politically. There's also in that area of the Atlantic, the Canary Islands, which are part of Spain politically, then the Canary Islands have a lot of similarities like Madeira does to the Hawaiian Islands because the Canary Islands are volcanic just as our islands here are. And in addition to the reinvigoration and re-new eruption of Halema'uma'u the summit crater of Kilauea volcano on Hawaii Island, there's also this major eruption going on on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, which is being a lot more destructive than our eruption is because it has destroyed almost, I think by now a thousand buildings right in the midst of a populated area. So I've been watching that and seeing a lot of similarities volcanically and geologically between the Canary Islands and the Hawaiian Islands, but we're gonna go back to the island of Madeira and look at a particular hotel there that is particularly interesting, attractive and has a lot of wonderful features. Yeah, and the picture on the top right just to say that was just after we ended the show, I thought you had invited Kilauea to be sympathetic and to be in solidarity because it started to show activities as well. And lots of people are going there and wanna see that spectacle. So this was just that article that says lava eruption of Kilauea spues pillars here into the Hawaiian skies. So there are the two volcanoes being talking to each other, I guess. Exactly, yeah. Okay, another sort of global phenomenon next page. Again, you're right. This sort of gets us back to the architect here is that sort of global pandemic of room renovations in hotels which no hotel seems to be immune against even the best ones as we keep pointing out top right show quote from last couple of shows about the Monaco Beach Hotel. Hotel pretty much stayed intact and authentic but the rooms just seem to like every what Suzanne tells us every seven to 10 years seem to need to get that overhaul in whatever fashion it is. So that the tourists, the guests, the paying customers so to speak are basically still feeling they are in an up to date and hip environment. Which again, the question is what's so hip about this carpet here? What's about so hip about the sort of get decorative kind of wooden battens up there and all these things that sort of questionable because next slide, we found online that this is how it looked like. And you see just like in as we've been talking and recommending at the next interval of renovations to have the Monaco go back to their original and rebuild it back to the original. We were talking here to the hotel manager and we're instilling in her to say why don't you do at least and we were thinking to begin with restore one back so like as a historic kind of reference and then if people would like it that much then you could say, well then we keep on going because if people is the customers, right? What they want, do you think you have to do? You see here it's way more sort of restrained and it's all custom made, custom designed and custom made and not so overdone as Larry Spricker was increasingly courageous being critical about what they did to his monolani. So let's move on. Let's get out of the hotel room next slide and get into the hallway. And what did that remind us of this soda which we show quote on the top rise? Well, it reminded us of the Kahala apartments which are built outside of the Kahala what was originally the Kahala Hilton Hotel and what is particularly interesting I think in these groups of pictures is the detailing that is evident in the picture on the left where the room number is set off in this really striking manner where there's a little sort of depressed area that's got a light above it and I'm glad that that is still there because this is a picture you took, correct? So that detailing is still there in the hallways otherwise you've got a similarity of being able to look down to the end of the hallway and see an open door or an open window, not open but I mean open to the light which is certainly a more inviting thing than a closed off and entirely concrete vista but I'm particularly fond as I said of that picture on the left because that's a really cool detail that I've never seen in a hotel before. It is and the bottom right shows there is something that we wish or we were first curious that we didn't see it in the Kahala apartments but the reason is because the end units where you wish it with some sun and light pour in as it does here at the bottom right of this hotel it doesn't do it at the Kahala apartments because there's the most pricey unit facing the ocean so they didn't wanna interrupt that but if we go back to the picture above which is the Kahala apartments you basically have light from the side pouring in every now and then in these intervals where these sort of circulations come in from the side so you have that. Yeah and the very top right picture is the 1315 Alamoana Boulevard where we also wished it would have that end light of the tunnel so to speak and our friends and tenants Alexei and Nicole by the way hi we have to get together it's been a while it's been too long who are or have been renovating a corner unit an ocean corner unit. Alexei walked me through the hallway and he grew up what they call behind the iron curtain he grew up in Russia and has seen hotels double loaded corridors of that socialist era and we will get to talking about socialism when we put Nimay or the architect here in context further down the line and he was like really paying attention to the even the unit numbers and he was pointing out the new ones the hideous ones that tenants had basically replaced and he pointed out to a couple of authentic ones and original ones and they're really sort of crisp and delicate and they choose a nice typeface for that so it's the devil are positively speaking God is in the details so these little things as room numbers really matter so we urge everyone not just owning hotels but owning condos to do research and if possible and you make it possible because if there's a will there's a way you bring it back to the original and talking being iconic let's now move back from the hallway into the main circulation space, next slide Wow, right? Yeah, that is something called graphics that is something from the time period in which this hotel was built in which was opened about 1976 or 77 and this was a fad called super graphics meaning that you put the numbers that were for identifying rooms or floors or even exteriors of buildings you could make them part of the graphics you could make them part of the appearance of the building and here we see that this is obviously the fifth floor because five is huge but it's very typical of that time period and it's something that again should be preserved because it was the original intent of how the building was done so I'm grateful in this situation that that's still there because it's really distinctive looking and you wouldn't see it today people would not do it today it's not the 1970s anymore. Yeah, and given their sort of basically demonstrated through that big display in the entrance foyer of the lobby where they speak about the architect and have a sketches up there you would be hopeful that they're aware that this is all stuff to be maintained that carpet however looks kind of dated and has seen its better days and probably carpet for I always think carpet in the four public buildings is stupid to begin with but I mean speaking about the behind the iron curtain I had the chance in my when I was a student or the equivalent of the AIA, the BDA in Germany we had a trip long planned and finally approved by the GDR that was the year before the wall came down and they put us up in this intercontinental hotel that they had and that was like the thickest carpet I've ever seen in a hallway and that we heard that was sort of soundproofing because they weren't so good in solving their technically so there's a sort of funny a carpet is a funny sort of similarity between communism and capitalism in America and all these communist countries there this is a, but anyway so the carpet is a keeper he's just gotta pick a new one with the same color best case of the same brand because it's about authenticity so we could have thrown in also one of our favorite modern master buildings is the Alamoana building of the mall that they stripped it off the beautiful shading feather cape stupidly, but the situation when you get off the elevator is not on similar it's actually there's they sacrificed some unit space that they could rent out and bring the natural daylight from the side to where you accept the elevator and go into the hallways so a similar kind of situation sort of luxury that seems to be a no-brainer for mid-century which now these days we try to squeeze out every square foot it should be rentable and sellable so we miss out on these great opportunities and we forget that the people who buy them or rent for big money gonna suffer from that for the rest of the duration that they live in there right, so how they made that fenestration architecturally, let's go to the next slide this is a detail of basically the same sort of checkerboard facade continuing over the lobby so you basically don't see any differentiation on the first glimpse the second glimpse you see behind it's more it's open all the way to the other end so at the next at the second glimpse or at night you will see it's not a hotel room it is the very, very generous so a semi-public space that you get into when you're getting off the elevator or in a very sort of pre-fossil or hopefully in the future post-fossil way again there's another way to get up and that particularly fascinated you overall and in its details and that's the next slide yeah this is a really striking circular staircase and I am very fond first of all I like brutalism so I like raw concrete the central spine of this stairway is kind of this untreated rough concrete which you can see it looks like it was just built fairly recently but it contrasts with these other elements which are smooth and finished I really enjoy when architecture puts contrast together smooth surfaces versus rough texture surfaces so that you see them combined and in this stairway the concrete of the steps itself is smooth and then there's another little level on top of those that is maybe marble and then this beautiful sinuous curve that goes down of the railing not only the polished wood on both inner and outer sides but the two parallel lines of the metal bars that continue down as well I just think that this is masterful and I love the way it looks and I'm really happy to see this and I'm glad you took a bunch of pictures of it because I'm probably not going to get to Madera itself to ever see this in my personal life well we hope so don't say that everyone will see and you also I teach you at times you know weekly German lessons and you teach me sort of cosmopolitan terms and I have to say bad student I have I haven't memorized enough so you got to help me out one more time and share the bridge again between stalactite and stalagmite and say what's the context here about that okay okay so stalactite comes from the ceiling and it has to hold on tight so that it doesn't fall a stalagmite which comes up from the floor might tip over and that's the thing I learned 60 years ago in school all right so I should be able to memorize it from now and so this is like we say this because this seems to be like the core it seems to be like shooting up from the ground right almost like lava shoots up and even the materiality we like to call here volcrete which is our word invention of volcanic concrete where you use the local ingredients that they have been using and the absolutely you know engineering ingenuity of this one here is is that these stairs are obviously can't levering off that central core and go to the next slide that then gives this fantastic you know play of light that the light is pouring through the gap between as you perfectly put it this sort of smoothened out and sort of like leaving its texture of making more industrial concrete in comparison to the very sort of brutalist almost like reminds us of our Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center and other Paul Rudolph basically fluted sort of block and chiseled away and bush hammered kind of concrete and then you see these stairs there projecting out and next slide is showing what you already said but more in detail is this very super sexy differentiation between the structural stairs slab and then the one that you actually touch with your feet and there is they're distinguished by materiality so you step on that your right probably marble what you said you know but that one is carried very elegantly by that smooth concrete that then sort of projects out of that sort of lava fountain of Volcrete beautiful, beautiful, beautiful I agree so let's go to the next slide and we found one image here online that intrigued us because first of all it's reminding us and the audience about what we continuously say we never paint concrete because once painted it's ruined and concrete in these days when you use the fiber reinforced mesh and not rebar as they could rest there's no spotting issue anymore so for sure today more than ever there's no problem with that but even with old buildings I still even though you said you know sandblasting the old paint off is pain in the butt and it's hard to do but you can do it and then there are sealants there that you can put over it and you know they're even still there in Nacolasi so you're retaining the original authenticity of the appearance of the building which is so much stronger in its rawness of that extruded concrete bar than it is where it's very sort of neutrally painted white these days and we last minute through in while rehearsing that little show quote in the very top right up there in reference what we see at the bottom of the big picture this little right right because in the picture below the large picture there are these animal drawn carts that people are riding in right next to in front of this hotel now in the Hawaiian islands we stopped using animal drawn mass transit way back in 1901 that's when there had been animal drawn tram cars they were called and they were replaced by electric street cars here in Madera these look like they're pulled by Buffalo or by steers and they are obviously to take tourists around just for fun but it's an interesting contrast between that very archaic type of transportation and this modern 1970s building and we were also talking about the texture of the concrete that you can see on this side wall of the building which is still looking kind of fresh and perhaps sort of raw but you don't have to think that that's a bad thing because gradually through time that raw quality is going to go away and through the through weathering and use and whatever it'll go away and you don't need to paint it to make it look different just let it weather and become as you were saying a little more textured almost to the point where the concrete is not as hard surfaced but because it's got microscopic hits in it it's now almost a little textured almost like velvet certainly doesn't feel like velvet but it's got a little more it's not quite as raw Okay, I had to get a new phone my iPhone SE pulled me through two years of COVID long distance teaching just hotspotting all the lectures everything so and talking sort of like dragging and the mule it was basically time to it was getting tired and so it needed to be replaced so I got a new phone I'm still not used to all the functions so there's like an Apple based newsletter feed in there and it popped up and I read that Jamie Lee Curtis is warning people to get plastic surgery she said let yourself be aged and grazed and that applies to people and building right people age the most naturally and the most beautifully and the most gracefully the way they are and that's true for all I agree and in the middle of that of that front of concrete you see that shadow reveal and that's where the light pours into the end of the hallway right that's the end of it but on the other end of the building continues to be very spectacular even gets more spectacular let's go to the next slide for that one so it pours into the ocean with a sort of wavy sort of you know flipped on the side wave of of mullions that if you look at them in an angle they stagger and this is a pretty huge window wall and the profiles are amazingly fragile and elegant for that so go to the next slide and on the outside it curves around to the exterior leisure areas here and this is portraying perfectly that Niemeyer the architect grew up in the tropics because he recognizes you need to wear a hat a big hat in the tropics that shades you first of all and then also it rains and that's similar to us here so every building in Hawaii should recognize that but decreasingly buildings do that and there are buildings online we're a little sort of paranoid with all the copyright you know dilemmas so we're preferably taking pictures that we took which was our goal to begin with but every once in a while we spice it up with something and check the copyright but there are pictures out there where at this point again the hotel was closed we were there and the manager kindly let us in but you know there are pictures out there where people have on their lounge chairs on their sun deck chairs and basically enjoy the shade there that's really and look at the crazy we once did a show crazy can't leave ring something like that canopies canopies like a late entry for that one yes look at that one yes so we are getting close to the end of the show but let's do one more slide here and that is sexy curving is about me my it doesn't stop anywhere right it's the architectural exterior it's the architectural interior and it is the furniture design and everything is basically custom design and we will touch on the aspect of of the vintage of of architect design furniture next week when we wrap this up but this is sort of a pre glimpse for that so yeah so maybe we do talking pre glimpse one last slide using as the goodbye slide so next slide because this is the this is the bar there and we will share with you the detail that next week and again you're and I'm not absolutely sure not everything in the hotel is still the original but most of it is and and this one here we after a long sort of you know looking into it and analyzing it and the pictures and talking we believe it is and why that is we leave for next week so you're gonna tune in again next week we're gonna zoom into this and do further detective work together right all right and until then see you next week obviously until then stay all Polynesian and Macaronnesian Lee exotic bye bye bye