 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Hello, thank you for being back with us here for our Spring Break edition of Human-Humane Architecture here from our innovative island of Oahu, Hawaii. And DeSoto and myself. How do you do? Good, good. Nice to see you. Likewise, what are we gonna do for Spring Break? Do we go to Cancun or? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're not gonna go there. We're going to go to someplace here. Oh. We're gonna have a staycation. Okay. And we're gonna go to a kind of a cool place. Okay. Is it new? Is it new for you? It's not new, in fact. It's behind us and it's the Ilikai Hotel. All right. Let's check why that might be cool. Let's get the first picture. It gets us back to the mid-60s here. And this is where, as you can see on the ride, people were shooting these people here in this culture. Yes. Shooting people to the moon. Shooting people to the moon. The picture below is saying hi to my best buddy, Dan Kubrick, my first American friend. And when I came to his parents' house in Omaha, Nebraska, he opened the two-star garage. There was a 67 Pontiac GDO staring at me. Like we see in the picture in the bottom. Yeah. And this was one. And so I sent it to Dan the other day and said hi. And you were driving in that classic vehicle up there. I was being driven around in the 1961 Buick Special. Later, the 1963 Chevrolet Chevy II station wagon. During that time period, yes. Exactly. And next picture is the building we're talking about with his two neighbors. Yep. From right to left, it's the Hilton Hawaiian Village, the rainbow tower that we have featured in shows like Kaiser's Mainstream Hawaii. Also Tropical Tourism, our expert Suzanne is back on the island here with us in the studio. Hi Suzanne. And then in the middle of it, about Edwin Bauer's Lagoon Tower with John Williams. And we also had briefly touched on our building in the very left corner in one show. And that is between the palm trees on the top left, the Ilikai, as we said. And it's put into perspective in next picture. It also relates to a recent show of ours, right? Yes. And what we discovered was not well because we went to the, we went out to Makaha Valley. We looked at the remains of the Makaha Valley Inn. And that was a project that was also done by Chin Ho, who was the developer of the Ilikai. Originally started by the Dillingham Company. Financially, they needed to divest themselves of that. Chin Ho took it over and got it built, starting in 1964. And next picture also familiar to us is the architect of this building here because he was the architect of the Alamwada building, which was built I think two years before we said. Yeah, 61. And it was built a year before he built the space needle and talking innovations, as we pointed out in the show. It had a couple, but one that relates is the flying saucer, the revolving restaurant, formerly the La Ronde. And he tested it for the space needles a year after. But the next picture shows the context actually pre the Ilikai here. We can see the construction site almost in front of us. We still see the talking Kaiser. We had a show that called it his avant-garde Kaiser Hawaii and it had still the dome. Right, the hills in the Hawaiian village. So the Hawaiian village was Kaiser's development and you see that in the bottom corner. And that was really very innovative but the Ilikai was gonna be built just a little bit after this picture was taken right down in the bottom of the lower left. And recently we showed it in another show, next picture please. We found this little iconic little diagram that shows all the icons were considered to be icons that were around at that time and the Ilikai is there at the very left corner, right? With the Waikiki and the aluminum dome. And the dome. So all these innovative, I mean this was top notch. Yes it was. This was really cool. I mean this wasn't anything. You didn't see it in a lot of places in the world. No, no, this was far out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You saw the coolest and the most cutting edge. Cutting edge stuff. And the next picture is our permanent background picture and that is a pretty well done rendering. That was all pre-computer ages. So this is hand drawn and basically watercolor pretty much. And it basically shows because as you pointed out Dillingham passed it on to Chin Ho and he had enough to do with them all. But even Chin Ho as we heard in the next picture please because he tried to sell it from paper. He designed it and tried to basically sell units as condominiums. And even he, you know being pretty powerful and pretty prosperous we should say, right? Had a hard time. And we want to just show these two diagrams here floor plans because the left one is from back in the days. And just the way it was drawn, sort of playful, the lines don't stop where the other line is. They you know the boats and stuff and the color runs. And they also called it pretty much here, Mountain View and Ocean View and Ocean View. And the other one somehow, someone's not in the picture but it's basically said city view. You can barely see as the blue is a little light here. So it just shows you the left one is really the, and you pointed out something interesting as far as this configuration. Yeah and I did not remember this until I looked at this again. Each of the wings of this hotel are a different size and a different length. They are not even. You can't see that when you're actually looking at the building itself. But in fact it isn't symmetrical which is quite unusual I would think. And something also unusual next picture shows the layout. This is two typical layouts of hotel rooms slash condominiums and they're rather large. And that is because it was originally conceptualized as condominiums. And then it didn't sell that well. And he had to basically make it into what we call a condo tail today. So a combination between a hotel and a condominium. And they've been struggling with that. It's a rather complex model. I learned that from my building I live in that we did a show about the Waikiki Grand. It's hard to get a mortgage for these because it's not either of the ones. So it's kind of in between. So people are struggling. And you've got transient people coming in and out. You've got residents who don't want transient people et cetera. So it isn't necessarily an easy mix. And just like maybe like Makaha, this was next picture please, was a bumpy ride to get it off the ground. And these are the ones to the left is one that you like a lot because it made you think a lot when you were kid. Yeah, when I was nine or 10 years old, that picture on the left of the Ilikai Hotel was really perplexing to me because clearly the background was a real background of Waikiki. And the building looked like a real building, but I could tell also that's a real red carnation lay, which is a very popular lay of that time period. So I was really intrigued by how they put this together. And as you pointed out, this is before Photoshop. So it had to be done with a real model with a photograph. But not a real lay. You don't grow a lay that's big. That's a model isn't very big. That's a lay that could fit her on the model. I know, I know. So next picture is finally breaking ground. Here it is under construction. It's pretty much what Kurt Sennberg calls a staklan-ni. So it's post and slabs construction here. Next picture. And when it was basically, you contribute this postcard here. And there it was. And it was this rather chunky. It was huge. Monstrous almost. It was huge. The ilikai when it was constructed looked immense because it was nothing around it. It was built on what had been flat, open ground. There were no other high-rise buildings close to it that were that tall. So it really stood out. Exactly. And next picture is basically also from the early days. And it's almost like you want to compete with nature. There's diamond hat and there is a man-made mount. Absolutely. That they created. Absolutely. And almost it was erupting. Capitalists was the volcano, right? That made it basically erupt. Next picture we want to look a little bit inside. These are our original pictures here. And I paired it with, again, zeitgeist-wise. There's Kennedy in 63. Turning onto Kalakau Avenue in Waikiki. Cruising through Waikiki. From Kapahulu Avenue. It went past the Waikiki Grand. Wasn't there yet? No, no, no. Where you were. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also I have to apologize because I got screwed up last show because I was saying in 73 was an SS. And so later it was, of course, 63. And that was the time that we always used cars as vehicles for thought and reflection. So here is the early 60s Lincoln Continental Convertible. That's the sort of bourgeois, that big, proud, patriotic car. And that we think is the Ilikai, right? That's the attitude. And you brought this up and I think if we go to the next picture, we'll see that too. Because you pointed out that this is the lobby of the Ilikai, which is not extreme. It is meant to attract more of a middle-class type of clientele. So they're not trying to be extreme. But like the Lincoln Continental, it's clean. It's sharp. It doesn't have a lot of embellishments or stuff on it. It is a modern structure. Absolutely, yeah. And so also shown in the next picture, and I found these two ads from way back about the Lincoln. And so this is the night's atmosphere. This is sort of glamorous and glitzy, which Kalakaua has always been and still is. And so was cruising in that Lincoln Continental that's very elegant and just very American. I mean, me as an Americano, this is what America was. And at its best. And also, I think we go to the next picture, we can also point out too that that nighttime fountain that we see there, we've seen in the other two pictures, was part of glamorizing the Ilikai as a nighttime destination. And you pointed out that one of the features of the Ilikai is this outdoor elevator, which was really innovative at the time. And I can tell you, people were really astonished by it. The elevator shaft on the exterior is illuminated at night with this blue light. So that's part of the feature of the exterior of the hotel that makes it exciting as a night. The next picture gets us up to a rooftop restaurant on the top of the eye that has two little brothers. And when we show at the very bottom right, that's from the show with John Williams here. This is the top of Waikiki at Winbauer building on Kalakaua, a couple blocks over to Diamond Head. That one is revolving as was the next one above it at the bottom right, where Elvis sits there. And that was the Le Ronde of the Alamoana building. This one here wasn't revolving, but it was still pretty much. And a rooftop restaurant on top of a high rise was also very typical of that time period. So if you built a new high rise, you put a rooftop restaurant and that's where you went. And when I went to Havana, Cuba, on top of one of their tallest buildings, which was built in 1958, they have a restaurant there too. So it was a must, it was a zeitgeist must. Absolutely, oh yes, completely, completely, yes. And also next picture, which you already saw on this one here, this is like the branding of it, right? There's another illustration down there, a watercolor they created the whole scenery, the atmosphere, the lifestyle was sort of, you know, was designed. It was totally designed and you pointed out too that in the picture, which we will see in the next photograph, that's a rendering. These are both renderings of a building which hadn't been built yet, but in this picture it's there and that's the smaller tower, which is on the other side of this complex that now encompasses the Ileacai and that other tower. And then interesting enough, talking branding, this one is now branded to be the modern and that speaks for itself and they celebrated actually the times, it's sort of referring back and say these are cool days, so let's bring them back and whereas the Ileacai, we can go to the next picture, is pretty much kept original authentic in its main parts, but way back they were really indulging in it and celebrating it up to, as you can see here, music, recording. And once again, I love the sort of 60s, it reminds me of the fishes in the, what is it called, the apartment building, the complex, the proletarian paradise, exactly, the little fishes there. This is very sort of pop modern, right? Very abstract and it's not trying to be sentimentally Hawaiian. No, but it's modern and the word Ileacai means surface of the ocean, so that's why that illustration is focusing on the surface of the ocean with canoe on it and diamond head in the background, that's the name. And this leads us into how much the Ileacai promoted itself. Exactly. Which they did a great deal in the 1960s. As just the term exotic was popping out of my mind, next picture, the exotica movement also was related to it because here's Arthur Lehmann, once again, as one of the three from the exotica movement and once again, here is in the Ileacai. Right, and live at the Ileacai with the logo type on the wall behind him in the distance into exotic tropical birds which have nothing to do with the Pacific Ocean. And but then it was also sort of communicated beyond the island and through America pop culture and you surprised me because unless the very third one, I did not know of these three, so tell and teach us. Yeah, okay, so our next three pictures, let's go to our next picture. Here is the first of several visions of the Ileacai as it appeared on television shows in America in the 1960s. The first, Shindig, which was a rock and roll music show and they came out here in 1965 and did two shows taped on location. They shot a bunch of stuff at the Ileacai Hotel to promote the Ileacai Hotel and that's what you see on the right, they're on that deck by the pool. In the next picture, we go to another TV show. This is the pilot film for the TV series Gilligan's Island. They came out and shot it here at the Alawai Yacht Harbor. In the background, you can see the Ileacai under construction. The crane is still there. You see the Kaiser Hospital, you see the trade winds apartment building and here are some of those soon-to-be castaways about to get on the minnow for the three-hour tour before they get washed up on Gilligan's Island. And finally, we go to... And that one even made it to Germany, the one you're showing us now. Oh, of course it did. This was hugely popular. It's the popular all over the world. Yeah, yeah, no, not this one, but Jeannie was coming up now. Okay, I bet you had Gilligan's Island, too. I dream of Jeannie, very, very popular in the mid-60s, and there on the right is Barbara Eden playing Jeannie. On the left is her, quote, master, unquote, Major Tony Nelson. They came here for several shows, the shot on location in the mid-60s, and in this particular episode at the Ileacai Hotel, Jeannie brought King Kamehameha back to life. And I mean... That's a funny one, yeah. And look at the total piece of art, word of shirts. The shirts are the same. They're not literally... They're very abstract. They're very abstract, right? And so next three pictures is us quoting our colleague, Kurt Sandburn, and saying what is the... What kind of context you recall in and around the Ileacai? And he was sharing with us these three here, these projects, and this was the new Otani in Tokyo, as you can tell from the picture at the bottom left, very similar, a three-winged star with a revolving sky restaurant at the top. And this one became popular in pop culture through James Bond. Yes, and they filmed, the film You Only Live Twice was shot in Japan, and it's supposed to be the headquarters of a giant economic company, and you can see in the picture of Sean Connery with that in the background. Exactly. But whereas we're trying to point out, the Ileacai predated that one. This was in 64, so Ileacai must have been the trend center for that one. Again, imagine innovation started from our island. And here we are out here. How amazing. Next picture, and it informed another one built the same year, that was also in 64, and this is the Hilton in DC, and this has a more sort of concave-shaped wing form, but again, very, very sort of similar. And the third one is about half of a decade later, this is pretty much the Hilton in Las Vegas, as you can tell. Correct. And it appeared in another James Bond movie, which is Diamonds Are Forever. Yeah, but also another tragic sort of popular thing happened, which we're sort of half-blocking there, which you pointed out. Yeah, this was the scene of a significant fire. And so reality does unfortunately re-intrude sometimes into Hollywood fantasies, and this hotel, this Hilton in Las Vegas, was badly damaged, a number of people were killed in a fire there. So it's not all glamour, unfortunately. No, no, no, no, no. And the next picture, at the bottom left, you saw from that previous one, you saw they also have events here. Correct, Danny Kane. But then there's a connection here, next picture, that basically Elvis Presley, who was very sort of involved in that project here in Las Vegas, in 69, he was playing there, and he was promoting it, as you can see, all over the place. I even found that picture at the bottom right, where he must have been part of the ground-breaking ceremony, they have hard hats, and he's there and signing something. And that book, by the way, when Elvis started that Las Vegas appearance, which he did, he went back to live performances, he's got a tremendous amount of publicity, it really publicized the hotel as well as Elvis. So it's a big comeback for Elvis and that hotel. And then there is a connection, no surprise to us here, next picture, because it has to do with the Ile Kai and Elvis Presley. And that was when his coming back was in the 70s, but this was early in the 60s around Blue Hawaii, where they basically rented a hotel room, as you can see here, there's Priscilla and there's this very sort of 60-ish, very poppy, you know, and here they are. And so there's Elvis in residence at the Ile Kai. Exactly. And we saw him in Las Vegas in a building, we see him in, oh, and another similar building. And talking TV and movies and TV series, the next picture, probably most known and promoted, the Ile Kai had been through Hawaii 5.0 here once again, thanks to Stefan, my German version, Hawaii 5.0. And in that second season here, I found one which plays majorly in and around the Ile Kai and the screenshots here. And once again, you got all the features you were talking about, the sort of the pool with that sort of splashing, you know, Bohemian kind of fountains. And also the hotel rooms, whereas the hotel maybe is more international style and not very localized, but the hotel room, as you can see, the walls were woodclad. Even the light switch has the same materiality or look, and you pointed out the shoji screen. Yeah, right. And so this is very typical of the time period. They had shoji doors, shoji-inspired doors, very popular here for hotels and private homes that look like Japanese traditional doors, except now they're not made of paper, they're made of translucent plastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But most memorized by many people, the Ile Kai was next picture at the opening scene of every Hawaii 5.0, there was the crazy helicopter almost seeming to fly into the building. And then... The close-up, the zoom-in and close-up of the star, Jack Lord, incredibly important, I mean, it's made a huge impression all over the world, that opening sequence, because it was so dramatic and so well done to zoom in on him and have him turn and look at you in that same shot, amazing. And you, we just found out that at the time this was shot, Jack Lord was actually living in one of these that could have been his penthouse apartment. It was, it was. And he subsequently moved to the Kahala Hilton, or the Kahala Apartments, next to the Kahala Hilton hotel. Which we were talking about in the previous show, which is referenced to at the bottom right here, very much. Right, right. And then we have the number, the next picture is, we also quizzed our one and only expert of modern Hawaiian history on the island, Don Hibbert, and said, what are your thoughts? What should we not miss out? When we refer to the Ileka, and he said, you should certainly not miss out on the Sheraton Waikiki, which was built in 71. Yes. So several years later, almost a decade, you can say. And the only thing you can really find online, I mean, just compared to the opulence of stuff we have just shared, you find a postcard here and there. But for some reason, this one here has never made it up to that iconic. No, they didn't promote themselves as much, but also at the time that the Sheraton was built, Waikiki had been built up a great deal more. It didn't stand out quite as much, although when it was constructed, it was promoted as the biggest hotel in the world when it opened. So that is a big deal. But that shows you that within those intervening years, it was not a big deal as you think it had been. That's how fast went a little bit changed. And that's next picture. That's also what Dan then refers to when we quote him here with his book, that he basically says, yes, the town, the neighborhood grew around it. And so it was sort of, I guess, undoing its iconicness, because again, it wasn't self-standing anymore. But the next picture is again, going back to the original dreaming and envisioning of the Ilikai, again, this early sketch, very abstract artsy. As you pointed out, the signage has been kept until these days, never changed. And in hotel industry, as we know, and Susan knows as our experts, you got to have an overturn. Every so many six years, you got to do something new. It's for the people still coming. No, it's very unusual that their main sign, as you pointed out, above their front door, they have never changed that logo type. They have changed their logo type in other types of advertising, but not that. And when they observed their 50th anniversary, of course, you go back to that 60s thing. And just like we've said before, everything goes through a cycle. So that logo type would have gone through a period where it was very outdated and considered outmoded. And then it gets back to where it's cool again. Exactly. And there we are. And talking cool, literally and figuratively, next picture, as we had observed the building a while ago in our show about Lanais, it's from its foreplanned, as we said before, very Western, double-loaded corridor. But then it got exoticized through having Lanais wrapped all around it. You got sliding doors. So it's pretty much adapted to the culture and climate here, as one should do the architecture. And then when we were referring to it, a while ago, next picture, I was sharing with you some emerging academic observations here, and you were intrigued by these, right? I was really intrigued because the plan that we see there shows that the Isekai is situated in such a way that it is either taking advantage of or it was built with an awareness of the weather conditions that are normally going on. So it is facing into the trade winds. So the trade winds are going to go on either side of it. And that is much better than what we've talked about putting something flat against the trade winds or this way. They're aerodynamic. Aerodynamic. And also that that's more of an awareness of sort of an environmental consciousness than I think I would have thought at the time people would have had. Exactly. But again, referring back to our most commercial classic show about John Graham's Alamwana building with a sun-retractable louvers, then maybe it's not so surprising. No, I guess not. And people just said, this was the pre-fossil era. People just had it. They were not thinking air conditioning. They were designing with a natural system. Exactly. Air conditioning was too expensive. And you made use of things to get away from it rather than just automatically install it. So next picture is me basically on my way back home from the shows. I'm not looking at what Concernbird called basically an offense to the environment. Directly in front of you. Exactly. That new timeshare tower. But you scoop by and cruise by the Isekai. And then if we can get the camera to the table here, my CD of Elvis Presley or Loa, Hawaii, right? Yes, yes, yes. And there's one song in there where Elvis actually basically welcomes Jack Lord as being in the audience. Which is really cool. He loves Wi-Fi. So there's this connection that's supporting and branding. And this was also really important for Elvis. This live from Hawaii concert that was shown throughout the entire world, 1973, 74. He landed in a helicopter next to the Isekai Hotel after arriving at a little airport. Comes back to our subject tonight, Isekai Hotel. Absolutely. And phasing out, we always look into the future and say, what are the lessons learned from that? So the next picture again, what did we learn? Well, we're back to Primitiva. And our Primitiva is our cylindrical sort of fantasy tower, if you will, that is putting into effect a variety of other types of ways of living that are different from the average sort of big box standing up there in the sky. It's got more open space. It's got greenery. And as you were saying, instead of looking at it, you can look through it, because a lot of it is open. Yeah. And in that case here, we provocatively put it as one of the testing locations in front of the narrow side of the Alamoana Hotel. Because there, actually, you could sort of house all the working forest people that work in the mall. And instead of having them drive far out west and get up in the morning at 3 o'clock and commute back, trying to make a living and struggling, what we're saying is basically you got to evolve sort of the genetic code of a neighborhood and update it and should basically sort of renew that sort of notion of innovation. And now we've got different issues. We've got social issues. We've got affordability issues. Which were not really prominent at the time that I was built. So you can't build Ilikai literally again. And you shouldn't. But in the spirit, you should move on and design things like permittiva. And the next picture we have on Lanspecture, that we also shouldn't stay in the building range. But we should look at the urban fabric and basically sort of referring to Don Hibbert's book, Designing Paradise. You should redesign paradise in substantially renovating a tourist neighborhood, a tourist town. You just made a really important interesting statement to me, which was let's think of Waikiki as a box of jewels or jewel box. And if you were to look at, for example, a display box that has a bunch of rings in it, each one of those rings might be different. Each one of them might be designed differently. There is a unity and a coherence to the entire jewelry display. But each one of those of itself is something that is important and should be looked at. So let's work towards that. Very good. That's supported by our tropical tourism experts, Suzanne. So with that, we'll leave you with that. But hopefully we see you next week. And until then, you guys, please stay innovatively exotic and exotically innovative. And see you then. Bye-bye.