 is Human Humane Architecture here on Think Tech Hawaii. I am the co-host DeSoto Brown. I am the Bishop Museum Historian. And joining us from Germany is the host of this program, who is Martin Despang, speaking to us via Skype. Martin, good day to you. And there he is, up on the screen. So today we've got kind of a playful program, and this is called Crazy Cantilevered Canopies. And we're talking about canopies, roof canopies, overhangs, things like that, that were, in many cases, in the mid-century period, treated very interestingly. And we're going to bring it up, of course, to the modern day as well. So Martin, why don't you get us started and tell us what our first program, I'm our first image is. Good to talk to you DeSoto and the audience. So I'm tuning in from Germany again, as you said. I moved back to the south of Germany, which is climatically certainly the most coldest part here. And so, you know, at times you can't even survive wearing a winter coat, you got to go inside, inside of the building with thick walls. Right. And when I came to Hawaii, I recognized that's not the case. You can be comfortable. And I started to discover the most comfortable space and place to be is actually under a tree. And if we can get picture number one for that, this is a special tree here that was brought to the islands, wasn't native to it. This is a monkey pot tree. And just look at the geniosity of nature, how it starts on a single spot and then branches out crazy, as we call the show. I mean, this is a crazy cantilevering canopy to its most ideal, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And yet it stands up. And as you were saying to me on the phone last night, it provides shade, it provides comfort, it provides evaporative cooling from its leaves. And you really can't improve on it a great deal, except that it is not impervious to rain. And that's something that we need to do when we build canopies, is to protect ourselves from rain, or in your case in Germany, snow. That's true. So let's make this really popular, this solo, right? Let's use someone that everyone knows who's associated to our islands, and we have been working with him before, using him for getting people excited. So get number two. And there he is. And there is the very youthful Barack Obama when he was a young man in school. And the two views of the building you see are the Punahou Circle Apartments. And that was a building that was built in the late 1960s. And that's where Barack Obama grew up, and that's where he lived when he was attending Punahou School until his graduation in 1979. And the front canopy of the Punahou Circle Apartments, as we see here in this slide, is this wonderful zigzag, kooky-looking canopy that shades people as they are coming in and out of the main entrance off of King Street, or Baratangya Street, excuse me. Mm-hmm, absolutely. And we get to the next picture. Actually, one of the first when we started collecting and sharing objects and canopies, the very top left one is the one you shared with me first because you drove by it. This is the bowling alley in Kahala. And you said, look at that one, and it won't be there anymore for much longer because it will be demolished. And if I understood you correctly, by now it's demolished. So what we want to make clear and get people excited about is don't demolish these because these are really, really unique. Me as a practicing architect, as my other side, I can tell you there's probably no way with the wages and material being so expensive for why being one of the most expensive places to build in the US and in the world, you cannot spend that dedication and passion anymore. So the second part of that picture is another one that's existing. That's on King Street. And so our pletally already up front, it is keep these. That's right. And these canopies, although in different places, one on the Wiley Bowl building from 1958 and the other on the King Center building on King Street from the early 1960s, they both have this very sort of upthrust corners. They've got support legs that are canted at an angle. And then the corners of both of these go up dramatically. And they're pretty eccentric looking and that was what was popular back in those days. But as you said to me last night as well, there can be a use for this and that you can direct rainfall to go to a specific area to either drip off or go into a drain by using these forms, which as I said at the beginning of the show are playful and eccentric and something that you could not replicate today. So something we really need to pay attention to and want to preserve. And that specific one on King Street started to remind us of some exotics or non-native influence, actually like the Mandarin Pavilion of the Asian architecture. Correct, that's right. And that got us to the next picture which introduces an example of nature, which is very exotic, although we quite excessively discussed where these come from. These are palm trees, but I love the version of the coconut palm tree who is an exotic species that comes from Asia and then can populate itself by its seed being the coconut floating through the ocean for thousands and thousands of miles, making landfall where no other plant can thrive and grow roots in the sand. And ever since, there are the symbol of tropical exotic islands. So coming to the hospitality industry, which runs our industry, and this reminds me of my dear friend Suzanne who is here with me in Germany and studied that in Hawaii, in fact. And we talked about that quite a bit about that exotic appeal. Correct. And so here we have a blend, a combination of this exotic artifact and the artificial artifact of canopy and how they can marry, right? Correct. And this is in Waikiki. This is at the end of Lour Street at Kalia Road. And it today is over a Denny's restaurant. This building was built in the 1960s as well. There's a zigzag canopy, again an eccentric type of form, but it's got holes in it for palm trees to grow through. And what that meant was that at the time the canopy was constructed, there were already palm trees growing there which they built around and accommodated in their building. And as you can see in this picture, the hotel is called the Imperial Hawaii Resort. It's one of the Imperial Hawaii Resorts, but well before there was such a brand name, this building was built. And it too is one of the surviving canopies that we want to maybe make people aware of and so that they have some awareness of and appreciation of them. Mm-hmm. And it's all over the place. This was really, really popular. Next picture, number five. This is Alamoana Mall, Ryan. Correct. And this was when Alamoana Center was built in 1959. They actually brought palm trees to the site, planted them, and then constructed the mall level parking around them. So in this picture at the top is the, there's also a zigzag canopy outside the Sears store and the palm trees were planted. They were tall enough at that time to extend up through essentially two levels of the shopping center. And subsequent to this picture that we're looking at here where you can see both levels, the picture below that you can see that when the mall was completed, all you saw on the upper level, when you were parking on the mall outside Sears, were just the crowns of these palm trees standing in front of yet another zigzag canopy popular at that time, which as I said, was 1959. And this project unfortunately, as some say, me including included is that it's not existing anymore. Correct. And been replaced by something less exotic. That also applies to the next picture, which is your favorite building, which shows that in the category of zigzag, you can either apply it to, a canopy is a part of a building, or you can apply it to an entire building and which building is this one? We're looking at the center. This is the Waikiki Beach Center, which was a changing room and showering facility for both men and women. There were bathrooms and changing facilities in this structure. There were also surfboard racks connected to it. It was a very angular structure. It was on Kuhio Beach, and it's about where the Dukahonamoku statue is today. And so it existed from about 1961 up into maybe about the 1990s. And the entire roof line of this structure is zigzagged. It goes way up in this very sharp point. But as Martin likes to say, the beauty of this is it's entirely open to the weather. So it isn't closed off. It gets trade winds going through it. It gets maybe some rain sometimes. But basically it's open to the air, which is appropriate for Waikiki, where you're out enjoying the warm sunshine and the warm beach. Exactly, and staying in Waikiki and just a little over and still existing is the next picture. This is Foster Tower, and the left part of the picture is donated by our fellow Don Hibbert, who wrote about us in his fantastic book, Designing Paradise. And he says in the caption here, how can you sort of make a concrete box look appealing to a tourist? And he says by putting a surfer in front of it, so riding on a wave. And the wave is also a literal architectural means at the bottom of the building, which you can see on the right part of the picture here, where once again a crazy canopy and we're introducing another way of it, which is the wavy crazy candle-y ring. And if you guys walk by, which you please do, you see something strange, which is that the palm trees don't grow through the holes anymore, but the holes are still there. Correct. And that also applies to the next project, next picture number eight, where the entire building is not existing anymore. And this is a Pete Wimbledey project who is probably our exotic master, who we touched on a couple of times already in the previous shows, right? With good reason too. Let's move on to number nine, where we see another variation of that theme, having palm trees growing through roofs and sometimes not single, you know, tailored holes for the trunk, but the bigger ones that a courtyard likes. Yeah, right. Which also applies to number 10. And which project is that? So, no. Well, what we see here are two shopping centers. We see the Kalihi shopping center in the large picture from 1955, 56, and then we see Alamoana shopping center in 1959. And in both cases, we've got a hole in the roof, which not only lets in the air and lets in the light and allows people to see the sky and the clouds and so forth, but it also allows plants to grow underneath those open holes so that you don't have a entirely concrete expanse, but you've got some greenery in there as well, which is part of the experience of making things nicer for pedestrians and for shoppers. And that's like, especially Alamoana mall prides itself and sells itself as being the world's largest outdoor shopping mall, which certainly applies to the circulation, but these days, unfortunately, not so much anymore to the shops. They're all aced and then people have the doors open and blow the ac outside, which always drives me crazy talking crazy topic of the show here today. But this is, these are the good days. These are the pre-fossil era. And so embracing the outdoors, celebrating the outdoors is the theme. And in this hole, you can see that it's basically erectileinial hole, but then the corners get soft-edged. So some soft, some organic form is introduced and that gets us to number 11 where some architects have been getting excited about that one, like this project here, which is a diner, which you told me last night that when we prepped that this is not necessarily specific to Hawaii. This is actually the whole diner architecture streamline era was really popular in California. So once stayed over, it was brought to Hawaii and also seemed, you know, pretty fittingly here because once again, as you said, it provides us with a necessary shelter for rain and sun. Correct. But go to the next picture, number 12, you can also apply it to a building more, more enjoyably as this roof here is a hyper parabolic roof where, you know, you can almost look at the building and saying this, the whole building is a hat. It looks like a hat. Yeah, it does. And a hat we probably could have used as another familiar to people device has to basically provide the same for your hats. Yeah, right. And rain protection. Yeah, we've got two pictures here. We've got one small picture of the hyper paraboloid, whatever the heck it was. It's the lobby of the Wakey Key and Hotel, which opened in 1956, really extreme curvature. And then below that, the big picture is Motor Imports Company, which is located on Kapilani Boulevard and it sold imported cars. And that's a Toyo Pet car in front of it in 1959. And this lower one, the big one, looks like a Pringles potato chip. It's the same type of curvature, but it's applied on a grand scale to an entire building. And that's not something that you're gonna see anymore. I don't really think. That's a great analogy to Soda. I will use that. And let's go to the next picture. I have the same crispy feel about that canopy here. That's crunchy and just so, really good chips are thin and crunchy, right? Yes, yes. So this canopy looks like that too. It's just the minimal use of material, once again used to something to give shade to cars. So tourists came to Hawaii wanting to enjoy the exotic, the raw, the jungle, so to speak, but didn't wanna stay away, wanna go without their comfort, their American comfort, right? So you really use this excessively in different typologies. And the next picture, number 14, is such a thing as well, where you just wanna provide shade and rain protection for something you wanna display. And you come up with this, this is maybe our craziest here, right? Where you just cantilever, off-centered, asymmetrical. That's more crazy than a tree, because a tree battles itself out. There's branches on both sides, whereas this one is going only to one direction. This is crazy. And this is kind of a showroom for heavy equipment, forklifts, bulldozers, and things like that, which is located on Sand Island Access Road in the early 60s. And what we see here is this floating disc, which has this off-center support on the left, two very skinny little poles on the right, to cover up a bulldozer, which is on display for sale. And that was specifically, as you said, made so that you could see the object, in this case the bulldozer, from all sides. You didn't wanna cover it up, you wanted people to pass by and say, oh look, I wanna buy that bulldozer. Well, it's on exhibit, and that's what you can do. So, as we're onto something here, this is some research, you know, serious research topic, and when you get serious about it, then you can see there's these different ways of doing it. Another one we wanna look at is in the next picture, and this is going back to Alamoana, and it's heydays, it's original, easy breezy nice days. And when you look closer, you can see that the post, the column, once it starts to become the roof, it's actually like, looks like it's organically growing into the roof, and we call that the mushroom system. Correct. And in addition to introducing this structural methodology, you see the perforations again, punching the hole through, and this combination makes it really, really delightful and pleasurable and very creative, very sexy. Yeah, now we can keep going with this mushroom analogy of a single stalk supporting a roof, and I think in our next picture, which is Bishop Museum, which is where I work, let's go to that, and this is the Bishop Museum Planetarium when it opened in 1961, and it has a support that's very mushroom-like as well, but you pointed out that this is really copied from Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Johnson Wax Building of the late 1930s, which had a series of columns like this supporting a roof over a common office area that was like a translucent light illuminated roof open to the sun, and so here we see it some years later, used here in the Hawaiian Islands as sort of another mushroom type of thing. Absolutely. When we think about the most popular example of what we're talking about, we go to the next picture, that's probably our capital. And our capital is also using the mushroom principle, pretty much in detail, and the picture I took on the right side of that photo here is that when you move back and look at it from the distance, because so proportionally, the pose is so tiny, so thin that it basically almost gets invisible, so you end up just like with a tree. When you look at a tree from a distance, you don't see the trunk, you just see the canopy, so it starts to float, and this is rather spectacular, and once again, I cannot tell you how excited I was when it was part of the walks and the demonstrations around the last presidential election, and the dynamics and the civic power and pride of that building, which is absolutely amazing. I mean, a demonstration of democracy I hardly ever felt before, and achieved by what we're talking about, this architectural methodology, and just a very good way of just doing the most with a least, which I think we're well advised to look back into in the future when we design buildings. And then also the next picture here, which looks similar, but it's a different typology. This is a bank, and look how playful banks have been designed in the past, and once again, being so generous to provide outdoor space. So this is not the interior space when you get the money from the people, and you just, you know, and then make them go away. This is like, this is saying, hey, come in, be welcomed, you know, stay comfortable, stay outside. And when you look at it more detailed, you can see a refinement here of that there isn't the mushroom top anymore, but there's something we call a tree top. This is literally borrowed from nature, but once again, you see like the beams, you know, becoming like branches on a tree. Yeah, they really flow in a kind of organic way. And I was gonna say in the state, in the situation of the state capital, those columns and the way they grow at the top look like a palm tree. This looks like a palm tree, or another type of tree as well, in the way it is structured. And our master, our structurally engineered master we see on number 19, and I had the chance to still meet the fabulous, fantastic Dr. Alfred Yee, who unfortunately passed away not long ago, and he is the creator of so many of these crazy cantilevers amongst them, the project on the left, and which one is that to sell it? That's the tree tops. We need to go to the next, we need to go, there it is. That's the tree tops condominium or apartment building in Waikiki, which I believe has been demolished. But it again is extremely unusual in that these horizontal elements come projecting out, and sometimes they support a balcony, and sometimes they just stick out. So sometimes they're part of a canopy, and sometimes they're just elements that stick out on their own that rest upon another horizontal member that you can see very clearly there in the photograph on the left. Let's bring this up to date. And this is so exciting for people like me coming from the cold part of the world, where especially in times of extreme energy efficiency in the built environment to save our planet, we cannot do things like that anymore. We have to firmly connect elements once they project out from the inside to the outside, while at the same time, they obviously have to be structurally connected. So firmly disconnected, structurally connected. So this is a true, this is special that we can do this in Hawaii. And I don't think in recent years we have done this enough, but we did it mid-century. So a pletally for that is to do it again. And the next two pictures is how I demonstrate how excited me and my firm is about that. So the next picture, number 20, is a community grocery store we did so many years ago where the property line is actually following the facade at the bottom on the picture of the right that we wanted to can't leave route. So here we go. And we had to go through some serious, significant effort in order to do that. In fact, here, the client has to pay some money to the city because he can't leave resolvers. So there's some real passion for can't leave route. And the next picture is a more recent project, the urban waterfall canopy for a subway in the city of Bochum. And it actually introduces another materiality because so far we have predominantly been talking about concrete or a lot. Concrete in the tropics is very attractive because it doesn't corrode versus steel. However, there's some nice examples of crazy steel canopies. And we want to take a chance here to also refer back to some shows we've done in the past for people to maybe revisit. And number 22 is one of these. And where is that the soda? Well, let me look at this. This is rainbow drive-in. Rainbow drive-in in our next picture is located in Kapahulu. And you talked to the owner of rainbow drive-in about the canopy that they use there, which not only is decorative, but it also generates electricity. Does it not? Absolutely. No, no, it is absolutely. And we want to say hi to you, point it out to Jim Gusukuma. Hi, Jim, that he's very much, you know, reconnecting to this crazy tradition of these cantilevers and canopies. And what we didn't know and he even didn't know, although it's down the road, that's number 23. And I drove by there on my daily bicycle commute to work. And I always saw this canopy. And one day I saw the owner of the building and I approached her and she said, yeah, that was my crazy dad building that. And he was a structural engineer. So this is a canopy in front of her residence. And only if you really pay close attention, which I try to share with you and having done this close up at the top left, you can actually see the roof is not touching that wall on the left. So it's in fact sitting on these toothpick spaghetti skin using analogy, you know, to food. You talked about the crispy chips, you know. This is spaghetti's. And it's just amazing. I can tell you, if I go to a structural engineer these days talking about, you know, exceeding wind loads and hurricanes and seismic loads, probably pretty impossible to do this again. So this is another keeper. Right. And it's supported entirely on the right. It is not supported on the left. So in this picture, you see those, as you said, those two V-shaped spaghetti-like supports. That's the only thing that holds up this entire roof. And it is a crazy canopy, totally. So to build crazy canopies on our exotic, easy breezy islands of Hawaii is possible. Number 24, our very inaugural show of human main architectures, Les's Lanai. So this is on Maui. You guys can look back into the show and he did it. And another one of our favorite guests is number 25, is Nathan Tuthman, hi, Nathan. Nathan's elevate structure is a fine example of contemporary crazy cantilevering canopies. And he is currently in California. Probably time to do another show at the bottom left. You can see his very recent CNC and prototype version of that. And getting close to the end of the show last, but not at least looking at all merging generation. This is also a previous guest, Chris Chiqueta, who was talking about another project. But in this case here, this is a project he did with my colleague, Wendy McGuro. And now some years ago, which you can see the young generation getting excited about that thing, crazy cantilevering canopies. Right, which is fantastic because it isn't just a thing of the past. It's something that's applicable today. It's something that deserves to be brought back today. And as I said, it's not just because it provides actual use, but it's crazy, it's kooky, it's fun, and it's something that kind of excites our lives and adds a little bit of interest to things. Otherwise, just plain boxes. Well. All right, so let's do it again. Let's do it again. Well, I think that is gonna bring us to the end of yet another human, humane architecture here on Think Tech Hawaii. And we were joined by our host, Martin Despang, in speaking to us from Germany. And I am DeSoto Brown, the co-host, speaking to you from here in Honolulu. And two weeks from now, we will be back with our show and what's gonna be our show that time, Martin? Oh, that's super exciting because this is a project that's gonna transform as well. This is the Blaisdell Arena. And in many ways, it has a lot to do with what we've been talking about today. Yes, it does. So it's gonna be the past of the Blaisdell Center and the future of the Blaisdell Center. And Martin's gonna make some recommendations for that. So until our next Think Tech show, I'll say, well, Martin will say Aloha from Germany and I'll say Aloha from here in Honolulu. Goodbye, everyone.