 Good to have you all back for another episode, which happens to be the 213, so think they're wise human, humane architecture. We're broadcasting live from all over the places, although two are the same places, but the other place is in Long Beach, California, and we have our leisure legend, hardworking, Ron Lindgren with us. Hi, Ron. Whoa. And besides me, we have our statehood kid, DeSoto Brown with us in his Bishop Museum. Welcome back, guys. Greetings. Greetings. All right. So actually, last week wasn't the show, there was some technical glitches, but the week before when we were in preparation for the show, that was the commemoration of the 20th year with the World Trade Center disaster. And so we obviously could not think about that. And besides all the grief physically and emotionally that will be there forever, obviously, and that being commemorated, we were thinking as far as our discipline and our profession. But if anything, architecture for all of us, I can say, is basically human event and activity that spatializes and only then becomes form, and not the other way around as postmodernists used to do that. So that being said, it reminds me of the theory of relativity, Einstein's, because when I finally came to your holy land as a student in the early 90s at age 25 or so, my peers were saying, how can you go to such a country where someone like Bush runs it? And you guys have heard that Bush basically said what 9-11 was then, back then with external attack, we might actually have internal attack. And he was pointing out to what happened in January of this year in Washington, D.C. So the message is obviously, be kind to each other, be nice to each other. And again, I would have never thought I could feel so much for Bush, but again, all things are relative, right? So if- Time changes things as well. Absolutely, yeah. And talking, if you analyze it sort of architecturally, and this is sort of always walking on raw eggs and the fine line, but and it's probably up for more shows, as we already said, we will do. But if you look at the typology that was targeted, right, you can describe it as a male and money dominated, high rise, vertical high rises, some call it fellow symbols. And so that was attacked. And the architect, Minoru Yamazaki, turning to a positive and getting us into the show, also has blessed us and left us with two projects on the island and first slide for that. And one we already started too many years ago in 2018 did a show about. And that is 1350 Alamoana Boulevard. And to a certain degree, talking, you know, this recent weekend with this sort of event, next weekend we have an event coming up in my culture, which is the election of the president. And, you know, talking male dominated typology, there is also the female obviously, and then there is the feminine. And obviously, it's associated for many, you know, that women give the birth to our children and they raise them and they care them. But also in case of Angela Merkel, who doesn't have own kids, but I feel she adopted all of us and millions of immigrants as to be her kids, and was doing a pretty good job for almost two decades. I'm kind of very anxious to see what's going to happen. We have another woman running, she's the leader of the Green Party, but I'm kind of curious if she's able to make it. So we will see. Cutting the corner to architecture, I want to throw out that these buildings here are very feminine in their touches because they care because they basically are wonderful biochlametic buildings that not just look cool, still until today, but also feel cool inside because they're very biochlametically designed. And next slide, the other project that Yamazaki has built on the island was built even earlier before 1350 Alamoana Boulevard, and that is even named after a female. And who is that guys? It's named after Queen Emma and Queen Emma Gardens is the name of the development in the heart of downtown Honolulu, and we're going to do an entire show about that. So we won't get into too many of the details right now, but something that does pertain to what you were just saying, Martin, about male and female, feminine and masculine. The architect Yamazaki went through a number of bouts of criticism during his time for perhaps being treated as overly feminine, or his work was perceived as overly feminine. Personally, I don't see that, but that is something that we've been discussing among ourselves recently, and we will get to when we do our show about Queen Emma Gardens. And we're very happy to have you, Ron, as a Zeitgeist colleague of Yamazaki, because he was obviously no offense, you're a young guy compared to him. He was the next older generation, but still, you were around in the heart of your profession when he was also practicing. So we look forward to your intel insights into that, Ron. But give us a little appetizer for that, so people will watch that show too. The primary thing to understand if you don't realize this is that Yamazaki at the age of 50 was commissioned in 1962 to design the World Trade Center, which we've talked about this recently. And Yamazaki was a modern architect who dealt a lot with ornamentalism, and the people loved his work. The architecture critics not so much. They felt that it wasn't modern enough, utilitarian enough, and it wasn't austere enough to be true modernism. We'll be talking about Yamazaki's work on the tower during that show later on the Queen Emma Gardens. Yeah, we will also talk about who you see there mentioned his partner in crime, the structural engineer, who played a key role in the project, and that's the great Alfred Yead. And this is a poster of the great exhibit that Bunda Kanistakon has put up there and it's out there. And what these two gentlemen at the very bottom left are doing there, also let's keep that for later. So, talking vertical high rises, and these are sort of shorter vertical high rises, but let's return to horizontal high rises and go to the next slide, because this is the continuation and actually the conclusion of our volume five about the Monarchy Beach Hotel on the Big Island by SOM. And so we're sort of at the end of observing what what it used to be and what it luckily and still in large parts still is, but now we want to look into the future, what could be its future and what could be the future for hospitality design overall. So this is a picture of the contemporary hotel room. And it's also finally giving us, you know, as we all hopefully, you know, after the last four shows really love the hotel, this puts it into perspective, talking theory or relativity again, what's the price for it. And so guys, let me know what you think about all that. Well, you got it, you have a listing right here of a price of 759 euros, which would be a nightly rate for the Monarchy Beach Hotel. But Ron, you have looked into this as well. And it's not, that's not what's called the rack rate. That's not what everybody has to pay. Yeah, the fact is that room rates vary somewhat in almost all hotels, largely because of the variation in views. The rooms, the typical rooms that have an ocean or bay view would be about $1,150 a night. Now, when you consider that you want to have your family vacation, your two kids are raring to go to enjoy all the wonders of the big island of Hawaii. Well, two rooms plus feeding those buggers, that's about $3,000 a night. So that's the clientele that we're talking about at the Monarchy. It's not for everyone. Yeah. And we're looking, I was going to just say too, that we're looking at a picture of the hotel rooms as they appear now. And the hotel underwent a major renovation after an earthquake in 2013 caused some significant structural damage. Most of the hotel was okay, but they did need to do some repairs and they took that as a time to do a major renovation. And one of the things that happened, interestingly, was that they knocked out walls to enlarge the sizes of the rooms. So what we were content with back in 1965 for a luxury hotel, nowadays people want bigger rooms. And so the number of rooms in the hotel actually was reduced to make the rooms bigger in addition to the other changes which Martin and the rest of us are about to discuss in critique, let's say. Yeah, and that gets us back to the top right picture with your colleague and friend, Larry Stricker, Ron, who was fairly nice, you guys are nice to begin with, but he was excusing the current owner for what he had done in the renovation and not sort of maintaining the wooden shutters there because he said that might have been too costly. But then again, this was estimated to be a 100 million renovation and it ended up being 200 million. So give us a break, costs cannot be an excuse. That's sort of a lame excuse. And so I'm feeling the same, if I'm pulling out 1150 bucks for what down there looks to me as sort of a peer import raton, sort of like a standard. And we also were thinking that what looks like wooden floor, that is probably laminate. So again, that is not the standard we're talking about. And I want to even be more cynical because you could basically reside in the Grand Hotel in Waikiki, the Waikiki Grand that is a proud to be a two star hotel as we show it at the top left. And you see, you get the same finesse of a guardrail that's very cleverly designed and comprised of an opaque bottom part and a translucent vertical part. And while you might feel because the general public talking about customer's taste usually conceives vertical guardrails as prison like, I have horizontal ones, right? So mine is better. But it's only a fraction of the price of the Malakia Hotel. So guys, just really give us a break. Don't try to follow a taste of customers where unfortunately in that zeitgeist there might not be a taste right now anymore. So where is this going? And so go to the next slide because some of us basically have memories from how it was authentically and who are these guys? Well, that's me. The invitation that you see on the right hand side was given to was sent to my parents. And I didn't remember until I just looked into this that my parents had been guests at the opening of the Malakia Beach Hotel in July of 1965. And then a few weeks later after that opening, the entire family went to stay at Malakia for I think two nights to check out this wonderful new hotel. So that's a picture of me in 1965 at the age of 11 with the brand new Malakia Beach Hotel behind me. And as an 11 year old, I was very impressed with a lot of things that we've talked about the openness, the blue tile, the art objects that are scattered around the hotel. Just the general design of the bottom floor where you had this two story effect where you were eating your breakfast and lunch in this open space facing out onto the bay was magnificent when you had your lunch buffet. And again, these were things that as an 11 year old, I didn't know about architecture, but I did know that this was a special interesting hotel, particularly in this very rocky, dry setting that you were looking over this vista. And yet you were in this incredibly comfortable, magnificent new hotel that was very modern, but was also not sterile was not anyway. It impressed me a great deal. So yes, I have personal memories of having gone to the hotel when it was brand new. And as you can tell, made a big favorable impression upon me. As one can tell, so immortalized in your memories and others. And so next slide immortalized also through this book here by Don Hibbert, Our Conscious of the Islands, Designing Paradise, which also featured most of your projects, Ron, and that's how you got to know him. And again, he is describing it the way it was. And so people, this book is still out for sale. So guys buy it, it's an awesome book. And then you have expectations to see it the way it was. And next slide. Luckily, this time, guess what? The owner has actually agreed with us. They must because here you see a current sort of, you know, depictions of the client, how he wants people to see. And they basically commissioned this photographer, Gray Malin, to put a car that's familiar to us. And we will talk about when we resume our auto architecture show. This is a car that at least once it reached you because for that, before that it came out of the darkest ages of my culture. But by the time it reached you, it was nothing but a positive hippie mobile. And that was in the 60s, early 70s when you got it, the thing, the VW181. So they're right on in understanding these times and sort of re-celebrating them. And as you mentioned, Ron, and this is a teardrop has been for Larry and for us because in the Manalani, in the 200 million dollar renovation, they threw out these wonderful blue tiles and put wood over them. And here, they're still there. And another proof of evidence how this, you know, might be sort of re-appreciated is this image up there by the artist Nick Kuchar, who's starting to become famous on the island, who was again using a similar thing, VW181. So that all being said, when you would do the next renovation coming up at some point, how would you renovate it? And we have a suggestion for that. Go to the next slide. Surprise, surprise. Why is that surprising, guys? Well, it's surprising because what we want to do is go back to the original appearance. And the way the hotel originally looked, and pardon me, Bella, I'm trying to get to see what I'm supposed to be looking at. The hotel originally had this interior view. And you can see that it's got several features. First of all, it has those wooden shutters. And second of all, it's got a Laohala mat on the floor. And a Laohala mat is a native made type of thing. Laohala comes from the tree, the leaves of the hollet tree. And mats like this used to be available in the 1960s that you could purchase. And now, of course, they're extremely expensive. They're no longer as available as they were. And it would be very difficult to get a number of them to put in hotel rooms. And also in this view, you can see the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel logo, which appears in the sky above the woman sitting on the lanai. But also you'll see that on the bed, there is a hat that has a hat band that also has that same logo on it. Mauna Kea Beach Hotel was the first hotel in probably Hawaii to not only create a really recognizable logo, but also to sell it. You could go to the shop at the hotel and buy clothing that had that same logo on it. You could buy towels. You could buy terry cloth robes, et cetera. And that was the way to identify the hotel. It's also a way to merchandise it and to also advertise it when somebody's wearing your clothes. Yeah. And talking merchandise and the logo up in the sky, we put this there provocatively because it's the same logo they still obey to. And so we think then still obey also to the design details and have no excuse to bring the wooden shutters back, have no excuse to bring this mat back, have no excuse to put this more quality raton furniture in that is above and beyond the peer import one that you currently have. So no excuses, guys. We look forward to that one. And going to the next slide, which is our last view of this horizontal high rise and actually the other one, having followed by your firm, Ron and your business partner, Larry Stricker. And we threw in that little, we've been talking about United Airlines, who was also the owner of the shoreline seaside hotel that talking LE and Ed Killingsworth were doing as their only spec project that we did a show about. But also this hotel, which are exotic escapism experts, Suzanne did the homework on top of us. She found out that United Airlines was actually the one who bought it from Rockefeller and then it went into other ownership. And this gets us actually to concluding SOM. And while SOM was doing one other project for my university at UH, the engineering school, as far as hospitality, it actually stayed one hit one there, Ron. And you are the one to tell us the intels about that. Yes. This slide, a broad view of this urban hotel. This was the first hotel that the San Francisco office of Skidmoregs and Merrill were approached to do in the islands. The second hotel also was very urbane in its design. But that turned out to be a problem with the client. This was going to be the Coppola Bay Hotel. The client, when they finally saw the model of what the building would look like, realized that at least in his vine, it was to urbane and he didn't like to see that sitting on his countryside. Well, that was a boon to the Killingsworth office because Colin Cameron, the head of Maui land in Pineapple, then came to our office, commissioned us to do the hotel. And then I was honored to be the project architect in charge of the working drawings for the hotel. Yeah, let's go to the next slide where we see your fine masterpiece, Ron. But, well, maybe save for the next slide, what sort of, you know, what's the history of this one here. And let's go to the next slide. Because, well, talking clients, talking wirehousers, Ron, that gets you going as far as memories. Yes. Skidmoregs and Merrill, Wirehouser, Ed Killingsworth, they're all kinds of ties. The picture up at the top is of what was called a ground scaper. It was a skyscraper on its side. There were a number of these being built in the late 60s, early 70s. This happens to be for timber products and a timber land company, Wirehouser. And they had Skidmoregs and Merrill designed this building. It has some similarities to the Mauna Kea in the sense that this is a series of terraces that step up and back. This is five stories. All those terraces are smothered in greenery and vines. There's this wonderful balance between a 130-acre campus of open forest land and this building, which is very recessive in the sense that it doesn't stand out very much. The landscape and the building have a wonderful balance. The landscape architect for this building happened to be Peter Walker. And Peter Walker was a great friend of Ed Killingsworth because they worked together at Sun Valley, Idaho, the ski resort there. Ed was the master plan planner there for a number of years. Pete Walker planned the landscaping. And this building, unfortunately, was abandoned by Wirehouser and the fate of that property and of the wonderful balance between a site and a building hangs in the balance at the moment. Yeah, these similarities again go even further above and beyond, Ron, because this might have been been formed by the Mauna Kea because it's by Charles Beset. It's designer as well. And again, as you said, Doko Momo that we all members of and fans of basically bring this to the public attention and say this is a keeper, this is a saver. So that gets us to the next slide, which is, Ron, you have the original magazine with you on hand and please hold it up into the camera. And this is from the early 90s, right? A magazine that gives a ranking about the best public resorts. And guess what? The one that we've been praising rightly so in the last five shows, this included only ends up on number five here. So which are the four better ones? And one of them we just talked about Kapalua Bay, but that one, the show quote, we kind of moved off the column here because it's unfortunately torn down and replaced by something really hideous. The Kahala Hilton, which is Ed's first pioneering piece of your guys' work here, the last renovation only substantially and not surfacially has been performed by you, Ron, and it's up for the next one. So we urge them to do the same thing, just dust it off, if not commission you because DeSoto so nicely says you earn, you deserve your retirement, but at least consult you. So do that. The Mauna Lani we had touched upon didn't go so well, 200 million dollars spent for seriously basically violating its tropical exotic nature. And as of this morning, Ron, me, the patrolling observer on my morning job, the Hali Kalani, October 1st, they're reopening, getting closer and closer. It continues to look like they're just only doing sort of slight touch-ups. And I was joking as the next show will be about the great Oscar Niemeyer, I think they're a little inspired and do an Oscar-y kind of a bar kind of thing that is sort of, you know, metal studs that kind of, you know, curves out of the Haltry restaurant, but that can easily be washed away by the next, you know, larger storm while all your bones will stay. So no worries about that. But again, needless to say, the little sarcasm in this here, getting back to serious, there's a really urgent need to raise these appreciation and attention for you guys' work. And luckily, Eric Bricker is doing that at the bottom right. He's getting out of the bushes basically advertising what he's doing next, a movie about your guys' work. And hopefully that will, all the ones left who own a killing's worth and don't know what they have, they will after that. So in the few minutes left, we go to the last slide. And looking into the future, I leave it up to you to discuss what the future of hospitality around your core competence could be for the island. Well, this is a fantasy view of what might be the future of Honolulu. And we see the existing high rises fall sort of falling into ruin and being covered by vegetation being replaced by Primitiva III, which is the project that Martin has, his emerging generation of young architecture students have recently designed. And the fantasy is, again, that the Primitiva III will be not only where people live, but also visitors come and hang around for a while and live like local people do. That might be the future of tourism. And these are quite a different type of building, which we, Ron, you could talk about what you think that Primitiva III is like. Well, it's sort of the ultimate expression of what Martin and the next generation that he is talking to are striving for it. And it has two words, easy breezy, open to the elements. You don't come to Hawaii and sequester yourself in a room, or even if you do, you have the opportunity of opening doors, windows, louvers, whatever they might be, or maybe there are no doors, windows and louvers. And the breeze is passing through. You've got a view of the ocean. The glorious sun is setting off in the west. It's living in the tropics in the most elemental and satisfying way. And people who come to Hawaii now are not living that way as much as they could, and they deserve it. And in fact, that's what $3,000 a night should buy someone. In fact, it's the opposite, because besides easy breezy, it's inclusive, right? This is for all the people. The most with the lease, we build it with tensile system. And so it's the opposite in giving paradise back to everyone, which decreasingly we have, right? And by the way, we're not the only tropics, right? There are other tropics out there. There are reopening the islands for us Europeans again, as you might have heard, and so and other countries, but still there is increasing competition. So next time this gets us back to the Macaronnesian Hawaii, which is the island of Madeira, which is one over from the Canary Islands, that you just saw just before the show said there's a striking similarity in many ways, and very recently also, as far as volcanic eruption. Yes, exactly right. More about that next week. See you back then looking forward to and until then, stay increasingly inclusively tropical exotic. Bye-bye.