 and 31st episode of think-tok-wise human humane architecture and we're broadcasting life again from our trans-cultural triumvirate triangle although we're currently missing one leg who is DeSoto Brown who is rushing to his Bishop Museum and we don't want him to repeat his legendary rollover and his bug beetle back then so drive safe DeSoto and we will speak on behalf of you because we can't add you to the show while it's started but the other location we have is with our legendary legacy leisure legend Ron Lindgren in his Long Beach, California hi Ron good to have you back hello Martin it's great to be back good and with me would you wish so all back in Munich Germany and talking about mid-February our temperature is a little weird because only in Honolulu it's where it's supposed to be in the I think 80s or in the low 80s and you have what 90 degrees looking forward to a very hot Super Bowl Sunday all right and we have 55 here which is too warm for mid-February it's supposed to be cold here so something is going on which might be unfortunately climate change so we're going to wrap up Ron basically critiquing the most recent high-rise rental development in Waikiki and which prides itself to be the first one in two decades and for that let's get the first slide up because what else has happened ever since last week last week's show on the top right what is that we have our consultant our exotic escapism expert having an event right Ron yes we have someone who's just had a birthday a happy belated birthday and she in the upper right she has shown leaning out over one balcony lanai about coffee railing and I'm leaning out over another and we were both enjoying the charms of the islands yeah and this is the Kahala Hilton which is the heyday of your your fantastic work on the islands by your business partner and friend at Killingsworth and Suzanne's name actually when you look it up it actually means Lily surprise surprise that's where it comes from a name wise origin wise and that is how they named this project we're reviewing because they say here it was Queen Emma's favorite flower we have been going through and basically checking the building in its bones and doing a checklist and gave it good marks for basically typology because it is a rental and not another hospitality design which we have enough in Waikiki and we need a rental so badly we also said it's it's orientation is in the right direction principally running Malcolm Makai and it's the fenestration is principally not too bad because it's not a entirely hermetic place building it has lanais but then when you look deeper into it we had some criticism and the pictures at the bottom basically are me making up for correcting what I've said because I'm still working on the conversion of inch and in meters on metric and the other one and as Iran said only if you work for government on government projects you need it the metric otherwise you guys got got stuck with the inches so what I meant to say is that my Waikiki Grand Lanai which you see on the left has is probably like three to four feet so 1.2 meters approximately while the ones on the bottom right which are three top apartments here back in Germany are significantly deeper they're up to like you know two meters which is approximately six feet and you were you were saying wrong that only that qualifies it to be a real Lanai right if it has sufficient width yeah I I think it's fair to say that Lanai is actually an out a room that is outdoors large enough to furnish anything less than that to me is just a Romeo and Juliet balcony whose only purpose is to provide a place to turn around and wash the glass or at the Lillia to tinker around with the through wall air conditioning units which are rather distressingly visible that was part of the design of the of this apartment complex and that's sort of way the continuous balcony again is not does not create Lanai spaces as we would like to see all people in Hawaii be able to enjoy yeah for that let's go to the second slide and our producers max at Michael magically uh wizardly brought the soto in so he didn't roll over again on h1 so we're happy hi to soto good morning hello good to have you back okay Ron so since we kicked off with this in our volume one and I did it on my own on behalf of us last week Ron please share with us your additional observations above and beyond what we had said uh when we look at the building here at its entirety again yeah uh one of the things uh about uh the Lillia that makes it so important is that it is as Martin had said earlier in decades that there just haven't been uh any rental apartments new rental apartments available and here there are well over 400 that will be available questionable whether they're affordable uh small uh units that really are just a studio go for a little over 2000 a month one bedrooms one bath go for uh in the mid 2000s and then the two bedroom units and there are quite a few of those uh go for just slightly under 3000 dollars 3000 seems to be the number not to cross in right now for a two bedroom unit and we're looking at high-rise uh living both to buy and to rent and uh we'll be talking a lot more next week about just the cost of you know single family housing in the united states and what a crisis that is uh affordability it's it's it's really sad to realize that many of people in the lower income levels spend so much on their rent every month because it's just that expensive uh that uh what they have left over after they paid those rather large rents is maybe four or five hundred dollars for the rest of the entire month that's in fact it isn't enough it isn't enough to feed a family of four and and so food inefficiency grows and that also grows towards homelessness uh renders all over the united states are facing owners right raises in those rents in in fact just in the third quarter of last year rents all across the united states jumped up an amazing 10 and if you were lucky or unlucky enough to be in the sunbelt states people uh there in cities uh are paying 18 even up to 28 percent more this year for rent than they did last year and those in miami amazingly enough had a year for year increase in rent of 49 percent now that's way above any of these problem problems we're having with all expenses getting larger and larger this is beating that to the punch and housing crisis is more and more a serious problem and we'll be talking more about that next week yeah and the the rental rates here they're a little bit quiet about them I think the ones you mentioned might actually be the one I think you said about the residence it's a bishop place in in downtown on the little which we will have to talk about too and but so on the internet you don't quite find much but I think you read the utesoto you remember that somewhere in the press there was criticism about these not that affordable as they wanted to pretend right is that right oh yeah yeah I know that that is that is very much the case and in fact uh people complain a lot in letters to the editor of the newspaper about how it was just a token amount of um places for available in this building one and two but they really aren't that affordable and when you get down to how expensive they are as ron just said so on one hand yeah there is some affordability but on the other hand uh even though it's not a luxury condo it's not that easy to move into it if you don't have a huge amount of money yeah so let's go to the next slide and look at the building again although is it the same building no that is the that's the supposed princess cut you and lani that's the building that has been discussed as being potentially destroyed and all three of the of the buildings on the site being replaced by one new condo but we're going to be talking more about the princess cut you lani and the importance of lani's as we go through this yeah and we intentionally took the took the picture from the same kind of angles so this is the parallel street uh calakau avenue while the liliya is on kuhio and on the next slide there's something really interesting to see as a de-evolution of what you just said so right absolutely so if we look at this these three buildings from left to right the building on the far left is the 1960 tower that's part of the three tower complex of the princess cut you lani and the important thing here is look at the depth of those lani's they are as ron was just saying akin to being a separate room of the same size comparable size to what would be indoors behind the sliding doors the next building in the center is one of the outrigger hotels built as part of the outrigger chain opened in about 1970 and you can see in that 10-year span how the lani's are now tiny they're at an angle so they're not exactly comparable but we've gone from deep wide ones to skinny ones which are just kind of an afterthought and then finally in the distance is this new liliya and of course on the side facing towards us there aren't any lani's at all and on the side that is parallel to the other two buildings we see those wavy or sort of angular zigzag lani's which provide a little visual interest but as as ron just said they barely qualify if at all for the term lani because they're just little skinny platforms on which you've also got your exterior air conditioning unit so you don't have a lot of room there yeah and the middle building which is set the outrigger that is architect as the developer roi kelly who used to work for the architect of your childhood to soto vadi marasipov and then went on his own with his wife and started to be a hotel developer and right design skills to design them so he's to be blamed usually you ron said we say you know the architect doesn't play the role anymore but back then in this case big times and let's go to the next slide which we see illustrated what you just already said ron because there's a similarity here about half a century ago that the attempt was to make the lani's interesting so they gave it this wavy curvy linear chair to it and the lani has the kind of the zigzaggy and we also threw in the show quotes that we did about the princess k hotel and the one at the top left reminds us that these you know hotel chains or developers of apartment buildings like to schmooze with the royals because they named their projects after them here uh literally and you you once said this is odd because this isn't really even the location where her estate was but it's further away and that's right so the liliya it's odd as well because besides the name dropping they don't really make any reference to you know what what does the flower have to do the project so it seems to be pretty much sales pitching in both cases we don't want to basically forget to say that we hope that this project here the princess k is going to stay because there's this which we think a pretty sad proposal to replace it with something that we were elaborating on in that show that isn't any bigger or better or anything so we were saying what's the point if we go to the next slide this clearly shows um we took this picture um at that perfect time of the day when you see the performance of these lanais uh you see it with the shadow angles their triangles and you see that not only is the glass sliding fenestration that could overheat in the shape but also part of the lanais in the shape which is even better because then you can actually only then you can really use the lanai outside so a really good example but again this is two buildings down the road did they not look at that obviously not right it's so obvious it's there and along the same line go go to the next slide and you uh this solo tell us about the history of these buildings well the building on the top is one of what was called the ebtide apartment hotels and they were developed very quickly 1959 and 1960 and inexpensively and the purpose was to sell the individual units to individual owners who would then let the company rent them out or use them as hotel rooms and so this is basically a quick and dirty building from that time period but it does have those really deep lanais and as you can see in this picture it was in the process of being renovated that particular Waikiki ebtide business model ended up not being successful people really didn't make money so it was not it was kind of a not a get rich quick scheme but it was something to sell to people in the euphoria and excitement of the building of the building boom of statehood in the lower left corner we see the new liliah building but we also see here in the on the right uh one of the old low buildings of this time period of the old days and this building was built in 1948 and of course it's easy breezy it has absolutely no air conditioning but it's also got this very wonderful touch of individually made unique railings which have a breadfruit or ulu tree theme so the leaves on there are all custom made and on a low budget building this is something you could never even think about doing today but it was affordable back at the time when this was built again in the post war boom in 1948 yeah also it's it's a late entry to a show we once did that was called the crazy cantilevering canopies look at the how much that is cantilevering out as to provide what we need in the tropics protection from the sun and the rain which the liliah is unfortunately doing insufficiently and going back to the top building here uh while it hasn't might not has been successful as you said uh the solo as a business model but it's been successful in in other ways for example is it something that the liliah prides itself to be mixed use but mixed use is basically that the grocery store stays on the ground level and all the retail and then there is all the living above it in this building here while bicycling by i i noticed um and found it interesting that there were actually businesses stratospheric into the into the top stories and i found this particularly interesting and the building is oriented the right way it's facing north and east and the lanais are deep enough and as you said the solo that was just the way to do it one was generous even in very sort of dry cut developments like that this is not a this is not an exclusive development right that's rather direct and dirty and cheap but uh it was generous as far as that lanais were just the attitude of the time and now at this point we took this picture about four months ago um it seems it was under remodeling uh it's indicated because they boarded it up and this boarding it up gets us to the next slide so we here we see the liliah's plinth uh the retail plinth under construction and it's boarded up as well and we kind of find it ironic that the material of course these sheets of plywood aren't local they're shipped in from the mainland likely but wood we have on the island and we've been talking a lot about how one could reinvigorate uh sort of a wood um industry on the islands but here it's only used for these temporary purposes of construction or hurricane protection or kovik boarding up as you uh did pictures to soto where they didn't want the vandals to you know break into the stores while the invasive stuff uh as glass and and other materials they're not from here that have to be shipped in and labor uh they're labor intensive and and carbon intensive and so they stay while the wood goes away and we just want to refer to the top uh show quotes of tropicare wood who had once with his emerging generations investigated in tropical screens and they came up with these really impressive uh wide variety of systems that could fold up and down and in ways the traditional wood jealousies haven't been doing that so that's just an encouragement to saying you know rethink the way you build and and build obviously more tropically exotic as this getting us to the next slide because these are people that we just you know snack shot it while we were doing our scavenger hunting detective work for this show here so these are the people who live there these are residents these are not tourists this mermaid looking woman here with her surfboard and the guy with his boogie board on a surfboard they are the residents of the neighborhood and looking at these people wouldn't you think they would prefer a lifestyle different than uh you know let's face it the liliah you know even giving it the benefit of doubt and and uh but it's still pretty much the old paradigm of double loaded corridor with territorialized rooms uh that is the model of the past century right or of the past millennium we have to say so wouldn't you think it's time for something new who gets us to the next page and you tell us what it what that might be well that's one of the uh that's the latest iteration of the primitiva and primitivas are the the the structures which are proposed by your immersion generation students at uh and in this particular case we've got this curling round ever spiraling upwards structure which is actually open and we're going to see how that uh kind of plays out what you would be like what would be like to live in that and what the advantages are of trying this whole new way of living yeah and to the next slide this is a compilation the potpourri of show quotes from a show that we were all part of and that you guys can go back and look at it in details but summarizing it's basically uh addressing what you Ron said the housing crisis so civility and its threats through social inequity is besides covid and climate change the biggest challenge of our times and this project wants to tackle it in a way to say do the most with the least so basically use compression tensile system uh versus tensile systems here versus compression uh you know don't do these costly facades that just basically as you run call it refrigerate buildings because otherwise as I call it you get microwaved in them so all these things basically value engineer and the best certain sense of the term and not the corrupted one that it unfortunately has gotten down to so um uh next slide which is second to last uh we're sort of wrapping up with a couple of minutes left so where does Kohio end on the diamond hand side where it where it meets Kapahulu this is in our hood you do uh to sort of look down on that from your place I look over it from the side and explain where and what that is well that is the school that's the Jefferson school that is right at the end of the alawai canal as well and what you've got here is a proposal to turn that into a cluster of primitiva three cones or pointy things which actually are not just pointy things there are interior spirals and they're open on sides and etc all kinds of wonderful things in there but that is in reference to Alfred Price who was a famous architect from your part of the world from Austria worked from the 1930s onwards and this is one of uh this is near where his one of his last commissions was as an architect which is the entry to the Otululu Zoo but one of the things I just want to mention too in Alfred Price's case he also was the architect of the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor he was one of the instrumental people who started the state foundation of culture in the arts which is the his whole thing for the rest of the end of his life and I want to thank him for that because that's how I got hired at Bishop Museum 30 plus years ago through a grant that SFCA gave to Bishop Museum and that funded me for the first two years and enabled me to make that my lifetime career so thank you Alfred Price I pay homage to you absolutely and the irony is when he got the Arizona Memorial and the entrance to the zoo which is right over these were the last commissions he ever got and he then reinvented himself and became instrumental in policy making and the policy here was that he uh put in place that you can obstruct um the view of Diamond Head with ordinary high rises but we would think as he looks mildly down on it that he would have approved this because primitivas aren't really buildings they're living organisms little mountains themselves and Laura McGuire just did an exhibit about him and the presentation that you attended the Soto yes and let's go to the final slide here because the Lillia we think in summarizing had opportunities but it didn't quite step up to these and we believe they might have stopped at this point what you see here which is the building under construction and it already provides everything that Primitiva has proposed basically you have the shelter from the sun and the rain that's all you need and then you can basically throw in uh Tropical Rockwoods and his team engineered tropic-heared screens and there you go and on some funny notes about these horizontal you know steel cable guard belts which are quite you know tropical exotic you once told us the Soto that's the short quote at the top left that Thomas Magnum uh was giving his son Alias Sollig sorry Tom Sollig Alias uh Thomas Magnum uh was giving his son driving lessons in your front yard outrigger canoe club by your architect Asipoff and that didn't quite go so well as well as the Marina City Tower in Chicago has the same guard rails for the parking garage and blues brothers you know it demonstrates you know how can how you can drive through them but again cars are cars and people are people because people are not that heavy so people wouldn't do that right so we're basically encouraging the developers and the architects to be more you know not just figurative but literal about so when you have a flower or a plant as your inspiration then you have to live up to that not just formally or you know sales pitching wise but inherently performatively and that basically makes us be at the end of the show only to announce that we're going to revisit one of these where a developer basically brands it after sugarcane and that one we looked at two and a half years ago when it was under uh you know proposed but now it's close to be completed and that is uh not a rental project but one where you can buy the units and that will make you run elaborate on uh where we are in America and in the world as far as that home ownership and all the challenges so until yeah so uh let's see you all for that next week and until then please stay literally and figuratively easy breezy bye bye