 Good to have you back to another episode of Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture, which happens to be our 206th episode. Good to have you back. And we're broadcasting life again from the opposite ends of the world with you, DeSoto, this time not in your Bishop Museum, but back home at your childhood home built by Osipov. Yes. Your 101 year young mother. And your dogs with you. I'm in Munich, Germany near Munich, Germany. And I have the pleasure to have my son Lenny with me. And what he brought me, and we can get to the first slide already, because it has to do with that, is this beer here, this bottle of beer. And again, I'm saluting now to you, our 11,000 viewer. And I'm holding this here up. It's originally green. I don't know how the green screen probably makes it ghosted. But what I want to point out is that rooster here. So from that Hanover home to hometown brewery, nothing, Deutsche Reinheitsgebot from 1500 or something like that. Their logo is this rooster here. And there's a rooster there, too, where we're going, right? We're going to, with some call, Europe's Hawaii. And that's the island of Madeira. And you and it belongs to Portugal as far as government. And you have known why they're an official mascot is that rooster before, right? Why that? Yeah, I have a co-worker who's Portuguese, and I mean local Portuguese. And she taught me that the rooster is a symbol of Portugal. And it goes back to a very ancient story from hundreds of years ago about a rooster crowing and saving a man's life, who was unjustly accused of a crime. So that's why it's this tradition that's associated with Portugal. Yeah. And this rooster was greeting us every morning on our way to breakfast in what turned out to be, by our choice, the hotel we stayed in on our, basically, fit of our unfortunately, which means honeymoon research trip. And we basically walked by this guy every morning and greeted him and saying, hello, Galo. And hello is the German way of saying hello, as you can figure. And Galo is the Portuguese word for rooster. And we figured out where this guy comes from, right? Because it has to do with architecture. He was on the roof of the original building of this hotel. I just asked you how old it was. And you weren't sure that they obviously have replaced that original building, but they saved him from the roof. And I just wanted to say too that unfortunately at my house nowadays, I am plagued by feral chickens, which is something that we have a lot of in Hawaiian islands ever since the hurricanes of the 80s and 90s. And I get wakened by roosters crowing sometimes way before dawn. So I'm not a big fan of roosters. All right, we were better off because this guy was just quietly greeting us for breakfast. That's right. That's right. He didn't make any calls. Exactly. And the middle picture on the right gives us a little bit of a clue when it might have been built because there's a car there next to it. And we can get to the next slide because that car is very familiar to you personally, the Soto, right? Yes, because that is a Volkswagen Beetle. And I was the owner of a Volkswagen Beetle back in the 1970s. But unfortunately, of course, since Volkswagen didn't change very much over the years, it's impossible to tell exactly what year those particular cars are. Yeah, these seems pretty early Beetle bugs, I have to say. And the building in the back was obviously what the previous one was replaced with. And me knowing the location from firsthand, I know that this elevation here must have been facing east. So the other one west, and this is as we keep analyzing, isn't the best of orientation because the early morning sun and the late afternoon sun, even worse, gets in. So, but still a nice modern building here, kind of clean and simple. Go to the next slide and that introduces us to another terminology of Portuguese and Mediterranean nature. And that is Lido. What is that, the Soto? Well, Lido means either a public area of public beach or a pool, a swimming pool that's open to the public. And it is a term that's been used in Britain, but it's not commonly known in the United States. And, you know, sometimes we're not so much about public, right, when it comes to pool. I mean, there's public pools, you know, for the kids. But this is an interesting thing here, because as you can see, there's this historic picture, they were all up on the wall in these frames, as you saw in the rooster picture. And I took them from there. And this is where they have used the natural sort of rock of formations here and basically leveled them out with concrete and cement and built these sort of artificial pools in there that are however sea water fed. And when we go to the next slide, we can see a picture from our first night when we came, we're walking around the cliff. And you can see that pool is still there pretty much basically in the same shape as the original one. The top slides is a picture that I took very early in the morning, one of these days looking that you can have a glimpse at the other islands in the distance. And the next picture shows us the whole scenery at daytime. And you found that interesting right here with us. Yeah, well, this is built on a very steep cliff, very rocky area. And normally you wouldn't be able to swim there at all unless you were able to get down to that coastline where there's an artificial area to swim. And the hotel is up on the top in this swimming area down on the bottom, at the bottom, obviously at sea level. And the only way to get between the two is the elevator, which you can see in that shaft that's very clearly visible there. And we're going to talk later about how eco friendly this resort is. And one of my questions was, well, how do they, if they're being so eco friendly, the only way to get between the two levels is by electricity. And as you said, they generate all their own electricity with photovoltaic panels on the roofs of their building. So you still are being friendly to the environment, even though you have to use electricity to travel between these two. Yeah. And let's go to the next slide and stay on that Lido level here for a little longer. And the top picture is actually from another part of the island, the northwest. The main feature in that little town is that larger public pool where actually the tide is basically feeding directly and spilling over into the into the pools. The bottom picture is the hotel pool. That's not the case. It's pumped into there. But as we said before, it's also sea water. But something that we found interesting is that I'm talking origination of the term Lido public. This one here is a public pool that's open. This was on a Saturday on a weekend. And the most people who are starting to roam in there is actually local people and they hang out there. And we said that's something to learn from because, again, pre-pandemic in Waikiki, right? And you told me back then in the Hades of Waikiki, you, Hawaiians, found it interesting. And you went there and then at some point, not anymore because it was just crowded with tourists who really didn't care much about you guys. And then recently, what you witnessed and me having been away is that tourists basically left and locals came back. And now we're back to the original condition, pre-pandemic condition, although pandemic is still there, but we've decided to open up. And we're capacity-wise almost back to the pre-COVID level. And so most likely the locals are going to go away, right? Which is sad because this is a good example of mingling and blending being a good thing, right? Yes, exactly. And then the next floor above that, and we can go to the next slide and you see us very happily here at breakfast, which is the restaurant, the primarily the morning restaurant. I think they serve other meals there too. And you can see how shallow that space is, right? You can see the natural rock wall in the back basically built into the space. And it's all basically naturally ventilated, easy breezy. We obviously like to stay on the veranda there, which we call a nigh. And then let's go up one more level, the last level on the next slide, which is the restaurant. And it also has a nice open lounge party where you can have your drink at any time of the day and also in the evening. And we found that sort of shading device interesting, right? And it reminded us of a good friend of us, right? Yeah. And what you see is sort of, I guess that's a vinyl fabric, a kind of a translucent fabric that's up above. And it's lashed to what looks like sort of crudely finished wood framework. And so you get some level of light through it, but it's not a solid, opaque roof as you normally would see. And that's particularly appropriate for the tropics. And this was, were we thinking this was at the Holly Kulani, refresh my memory now. I'm trying to talk. Yes, Ron's nice similar trick to basically provide more outdoor seating space while covering it from the rain. And the sunny has used the same trick. Yes, exactly. Right, for the dining room or the exterior dining room of the Kulani. Right, right. So next slide, some more reminiscences of back in Hawaii. This is basically the walk from the hotel through like an tunnel that's open, at least view wise. Otherwise, it's covered with glass and leads you to the spa, which our exotic escapism expert, Suzanne, enjoyed twice. And so this is a very sort of dramatically sculptured sort of trough. And that would remind us of what we see above there in the show quotes and remind us what these were. Well, what we're also seeing is the use of natural basalt rock that's been crudely kind of chipped away. And that is, we see that a lot. Certainly Bishop Museum has stone that's made the same way. We also have seen the use of natural basalt rock in traditional Hawaiian Hiao construction or foundations of Hale. So this is something I can relate to from a land of basalt rock as well. Yeah. And obviously, the top left picture is our state capital by Warnakee, where the chambers are basically in, you know, in this battered way stacked, so the walls are not straight, but they're leaning over. That's what you call battered in architecture. And at the top right was the show we did that was sort of the therapy of some storage for me coming back after my sabbatical and being confronted with this third project in our hood on Calakai Avenue, right next to the big banyan tree where the hula shows are going on, which used to be a pretty modest small hotel with small rooms, just like my Waikiki grant. And they converted it into a suite on, you know, one suite on each floor, which we read ended up being the most expensive renovation. We're wondering, you know, how that would even work out on such a, sort of such a scope high end in that location. We laughed that they basically say they wish that that banyan tree wouldn't be in their way and obstruct their views. We had a hard laugh about that one. So next slide, there is an ability to connect right from shortly before the spot as a courtyard, which is also a theme that we've been dedicated several shows to also being a prominent typological feature in Hawaiian on UH. And you can basically go up to the next level, and that gets us to the next slide, which is that level. And that's basically the hotel, the primary hotel outdoor area with a pool that's more private for the hotel, also a seawater pool. And you can see to the right of that glass roof that we saw from below in that second to last slide. And we can also see that round spiraling staircase. And then in the front, you can see a little bit of a piece of a piece of guardrail, and that gets us to the next slide. And I'll let you share with me your impression about what you see here. Well, this is Suzanne doing yoga on the lanai. Is this the lanai of your room or the further down other places? It in fact is, we didn't tell them upfront that this is a special reason for our trip, but I guess they must have sensed that they indeed gave us a space in the most top floor on the best end. So this ended up being our room. That's your honeymoon suite as the singing boat. Exactly. But what's behind her is a glass railing. And we have talked in the past about how we don't like glass railings for a number of reasons. For one reason, they block the air movement. However, as you pointed out, Madera is not as warm as the Hawaiian Islands. And so in the winter there, when it gets down into the 50s, it would be more, it would be better to have the protection of a glass railing from the wind if you've got a colder wind blowing at you. Here on Oahu, certainly we never have a cold wind blowing. So it's not the same situation. That's right. And go to the next slide and look at it from outside. It's facing basically south. So basically they versus the previous manifestation where it was oriented the wrong way, they fixed it here. It's facing south. But just like my Waikiki Grand, which is slightly off the Dillingham grid, and therefore it's facing straight south, basically shades the unit below. And the top unit that doesn't have a unit above then gets the sort of louvered screen out of this, as we were told. It's sort of a composite material that uses rice as a component. And they also said that's a sustainable feature, which yet has to be, I guess, discussed and decided. But at this point, it's certainly weather is obviously better than maybe just natural or just wood. And the next slide, you can see this is basically in the summer, the sun is really high up, but almost doesn't need the louvers at that point. But again, when it gets more into this time of the year to the end of the summer or the beginning of the summer, I'm pretty sure the louvers are pretty effective to basically shade for sure the room and parts of the lanai. You can see at the distance on the left part of that image, you can see that other sort of tract of the hotel. And let's look at that on the next slide, which there it's even louvered horizontally. And I was really surprised because the louvers didn't seem to be like calibrated as they would have been designed according to the sun angle. But I have to say at that time of the year, you see it's all in the shade inside there. There are windows that you can they're operable, they're sliding windows or these kind of awning windows that kind of interested you before. So overall, again, it all comes across as being pretty, pretty natural. Everything is performance based and basically that way defines its form. We like that. The next slide is the circulation. It is a single loaded corridor, which we also like hotels in the past in the good old days, only had single loaded corridors before predator capitalism basically brought double loaded corridors that we don't like too much. Here, however, you see on the on the right side of that picture here, there's the glass curtain window wall behind and then there's curtains there are translucent so that the light in is actually residences right behind a little bit. So it's probably for privacy. But reminded us of our friend Ron Lindgren, who with us is very curious to see how the renovation of the hull of Kalani that must have just been completed how that turned out. And we hope in a way that it pays tribute to the to the authentic character that that one gave it. And one of the sort of potential improvements that at the end of the three shows we had with him about his work. He agreed with us that he said one should or it could basically open up maybe the the northern circulation hallways a little bit more to the breeze. So the same thing we felt here that it was rather sort of interiorized, at least from the kind of the breathability, not the visibility was good, but breathability wise. Next slide is and the dog obviously agrees with that. It loves fresh air, right? So there we go. You know, get the dogs to power. So here in the lobby, you have a monitor and the monitor is basically showing all the features that the hotel management things are noteworthy to share with the audience. And it's about community engagement. And it's about environmental engagement. I picked these sort of icons there with your logos from awards or certifications the hotel basically got. And I there we probably should get the initiator of the hotel was Roland Bachmeier who took over the sort of the empire of hotels that his father had started out on the island and Roland as you can tell from the name is German. And so he basically had recently sold the hotel, but it's still very much engaged and in touch. And so we should probably when we want to find out more details, we should probably reach out to Roland and potentially do a show of him to go more into the details. But for us in all honesty, it was actually more important not to have this sort of like a name dropping, you know, greenwashing, you know, all the sort of the scientific it was more than that the whole time really came across as being really natural. It was hardly ever stuffy in there. It always felt good. So it was just built right and just to the spot. And, you know, okay, so how does this like, you know, how much, how much did we spoil us, right? How much loan did we pick up like for our honeymoon, right? How much was it worth it for us? But this seems pretty, pretty luxurious, right? And it is a resort. Yes. So, you know, let's go to the next slide and surprise. And this is on our way out. Suzanne basically saying goodbye. And, you know, we did the most populist thing that we probably shouldn't have. We went to one of these, you know, you know, online booking platforms booking.com here and found that steal of 86 bucks. It was a little more in our case, but not much more down there is where you should go. This is the official link to the website. And you should book on there. And also I picked from that from one of the German, you know, travel agencies, the, I mean, stars, it doesn't take much to pick that, right? So it is, you know, rather high in rank, but it's not five star yet, right? And the next projects we will show in this sequence of in the future weeks, where we further compare hospitality architecture on these both very similar islands, we will go to five star hotel. So there are five star hotels. Oh yeah. This one isn't one from the ranking one, but it surely feels like one. Yeah. So very much so let's go to the next slide and you are curious about that one because it shows other pictures we as, you know, we're told by J. We have to all make sure we own the puppy rides. This is the only one I picked from the travel agencies hopefully and be quoted as always down there. So they should be okay. But it was all interesting for you to see how it fits in there, right? Well, this is a very small footprint. This is a very small space and it's also located on a cliff. So they don't have a lot of room here. And as you said, it's in a residential area surrounded by houses probably, which were there before the resort even got built. So it doesn't have a lot of room to expand and it can't be a great huge expensive thing. What this does mean, however, is because it's so small, it doesn't have as much requirement for electricity or power. So you said that the photovoltaic panels which you can see in this aerial view are on the roofs of the buildings supply enough electricity for their use. So I don't know if they're 100% off the grid, but they certainly take care of a lot of their own needs for power. Well, as you point out, they do well on the 101 or biochromatic design, cut down consumption, get orientation right. And the last of, you know, demand you have, you cover yourself with renewable energy. Obviously the whole life cycle of photovoltaics isn't, you know, totally figured out from cradle to cradle. But, you know, this is pretty good. If everyone would do that in Hawaii, we could be pretty happy. So we want to encourage people. Let's go to the next slide. Roland has actually reached out to us and we have here the links of two awards he has been nominated for. So if it's not closed, we would like you guys to join in and check out the hotel. And if you agree with us, you could vote for it. And that's, you know, the Portugal's Leading Green Hotel Award and the Europe's Leading Green Resort. And also the location we want to point out, here's a map again, it's actually not in a very sort of slamboyant location. It's between the major city of Honshal and the airport. And we made the comparison to maybe one of the neighborhoods that are probably going to be redeveloped soon. It's going to be Caiuli, right? Yeah. So where Bishop Museum is located, Bishop Museum is sort of an upper Kalihi towards the mouth of the valley. But down below, next to the Kapalama Canal is where Command Mayor Schools is planning extensive redevelopment of particular property that they own. And one of the things they propose there is a hotel. So we'll see how that works out. But this is an interesting location for a hotel, which wouldn't be a resort hotel. It would be something for people who are there on business or for family. Yeah. So this is one a good case study one could look into and learn something from, right? Phasing out second to last picture, now next picture. This is something that probably we won't get back ever. But we used to have an Hawaii and you still remember that, right? Yeah. So back in the days before when I was a kid, there weren't any jetways at the Honolulu Airport till 1969, 1970. So when you got on or off an airplane, you walked across the pavement and you walked up a stairway and vice versa when you got off. So you just took a picture of the airport at Madeira, which the same thing happens, although they do have a covered walkway now to go up to the airplane. I do have to say, however, that the Keahole Airport on Hawaii Island is still like that. They still do have open entry and exit from airplanes without jetways there. Yeah. And going to the last slide here, we now have gotten you a taste of that indeed, one could call Madeira Hawaii of Europe. And we want to thank this lady here. That's an article we found on Flux Magazine that we're very found off. We refer to that show that we did with Timothy Schuler, who by now has written many fantastic articles, not just in Flux Magazine. This one was about tropical brutalism. And again, thanks, Shannon, to pointing out this initially to us and having been using your article as sort of a thread through our investigations and optimizations. And so obviously, there is lots of similarities. There's also differences, obviously, when we talked about our urban fabric, as we point out on the top right, we're talking about journalism and primitivas. This is something that is unique to Hawaii and needs sort of significantly different treatment. But again, there's lots more to discover. So as we already said, there's some fantastic sort of heyday days, hospitality developments, hotels from the beginning of the 20th century, and then two from the mid century. And these are some we're going to look further into next time when we continue that. And in between, hopefully we have Ron back from his internal flooding in his house to squeeze in another comparison of automobiles and architecture. And by the way, Lenny and I went to a great exhibit to that regard, and that will report to you guys first and then in the shows about that. Okay, I'm going to be interested in that too. Alrighty, I know. Okay, thank you. Thanks. Thanks, everyone. See you next week. Bye-bye.