 Think, Tech, Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to our celebrated tropical, exotic islands of Hawaii here, that the Soda Brown and myself are looking into if the built environment could be as human and humane as possible. And humility and humanity, all these things. So we look into that. And so we're going to break the record because we stumbled upon something literally and figuratively and we're going to break the record with the most images. So let's go and run. We've got a lot to do. And we're talking about stairways and that's why there's a stairway behind us. And when we get started we say that first of all there are various stone structures that are part of ancient Hawaiian culture but they never built stairways. They did not have that technology or they just didn't think about it and they didn't need things like that for the buildings that they had. We only see these large stone structures for Heiao or other important religious structures but people didn't live in houses that need stairways. Until when? Well, until in our next photograph we see that Westerners brought in bigger buildings and they brought in stairways and for these buildings, which were all built in the early 1900s, we can see that stairways are a featured part. The buildings are up on a plinth as you said and the front stairways become an important aspect of how you approach and see the building in addition to how you get up to the first floor. And that's that. But it didn't really take off until when? Well, after statehood when we start to see a lot more growth happen in Honolulu and other islands to a lesser degree, we start to see a lot of these small walk up apartments. Very basic concrete buildings and they've got exterior stairways like the two that you see here. So we're talking about how stairways are a feature of buildings and some of the details, for example, that you can do to make stairways more interesting. And next picture, as all the pictures are just exemplary, we just want to encourage you guys to go out there and you see tons of them. You do. This is just next to the project we've been shedding a critical eye on, the new student housing on King University and in front of that are these two three-story walk-ups. And there you go. You've got two different iterations of the same theme, staircases, one which we've done show about volcanic veneer and one with wood slated version. But these are just exemplary for many others. So let's look at some of the others. So let's go to the next picture. And we're sticking with this time period. We're talking about the 50s and 60s. And we've got a 1960s car in the lower left corner to show you those clean 1960s lines. You also can see how the stairways in many cases are really stripped down to just the basic element. But they've also got, as you pointed out, an interesting little twist in which the riser is not at a 90-degree angle, but it's tilted a little bit. And so that adds a little dynamic and a little sense of motion, makes you want to go upstairs. Just like the cars had these lines that were distinct, but also looked very sort of moving, right? You wanted to move in those cars. So next picture is introducing also different sort of, well, this is another example that only doesn't do the riser on the on the foot side, but also does the parallel one on the backside, which makes it even twice as fast looking, right? This is Criken doll hall on UH. And it also introduces a structural system where there is actually beams underneath, right? The steps are basically resting on that. Right. And if you look from the side, it looks like a letter Z. Absolutely. That's what you pointed out. And there it is. It's like Z for Zorro, us old people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And another example here is something you captured. Next picture here. Yeah, this is a small commercial building, which is on University Avenue. And then in the background, you see that new Mahana Ali housing that's going up. And this is, again, a really sculptural element of the building. And it isn't just the steps. It isn't just the supports, but the railing has an element of that too, which makes it really unique. It's kind of floating in the air. It is. And maybe the most, I mean, we made it the top number one of this little subfamily here of the Meandering one. That's the next picture. That's why we made it the permanent background picture as well. But it's not coming yet. So this is the third one. This is on Kapahulu in Mayhut, close to the fire station on Hawaii on the Diamond Headside, a little shopping center. That's sort of a late entry to our tropical brutalism. Absolutely. And once again, it has a sort of celebrated staircase that's in the center of it that goes around, winds around, and circles around, and celebrates once again. Correct. And it's got this one dynamic central core that makes it stand up. And then the two parts stick off of it at angles. Exactly. So it isn't just straight, but it's meandering, as you said. It's a little different. And so now our best one of this little subfamily here comes now. This is one that's very close to you because you're very familiar and close to the architect to design this. And this is sort of down the hill from where you live. Exactly. This is Vladimir Asipov's stairway in the Outrigger Canoe Club. Again, a free-floating kind of skeletal thing that was very commonplace in this time period because technology allowed you to build a stairway that just was the basic elements. And it again has this wonderful sculptural artistic look that turns the stairway, which is just a necessity, into kind of a feature. Just like the little other one, the spiral staircase. Also very sort of exotic, very fun to go up and down. Makes you just feel nature in the environment. Yeah, right. Right, right, right. Because it's surrounded by palms, too. It is, it is. It's just like in the jungle, just like the monkeys climbing up the trees. There you go. That's right. So next picture, you also go to the jungle. Speaking of jungle, you come to the jungle of Waikiki and you go into some side streets off the beaten path. And here on Koa Street, with a building of the same name here, we snapped this picture here online. And so we went there, both, and took this picture here. So it's luckily still around. So our point is keep it, keep it, keep it. And if you want to change the color, we always like the color themes from way back because there was so subtle pastel. And the tropical sun sort of nicely brings it out. But it's not overpowering. So I'm sort of a little critical about the purple and the deep piece. Purple and orange is a little bit. But never mind, you can just repaint it. But it's pretty much still in the original condition. And it's a keeper. So guys, please keep it. Next picture is going, continuing in the jungle here. There's the Alihi. Again, little, you know, fourth story walk up here. And once again, very jungly the staircases when they put the light on there. You really want to go there. And again, this is sort of an express structure. You see these sort of tapering beams coming out and holding it. So once again, celebrating circulation as today's. And the fact that it is not enclosed means that when you're walking up and down, you are amidst those palm trees. And you are in nature. And you're feeling the air movement, which is something that we are grateful that we are able to do in this nice tropical climate, as opposed to New York City for today. And as introduced here in a little bit, but next picture here, or the next three here shows another theme where architects were sort of, we've said camouflage at a better term. Veil. We're kind of veiling it. They're not totally obscuring the thing. I mean, because a lot of buildings today, the stairways are entirely enclosed in walls. This is turning it into a facade that's kind of covering it up, but camouflaging it, but letting you see some of it as well. And this is sort of a little bit corduroy version. Corduroy, absolutely. You've got this vertical thin lines of different widths. And this is very elegant, you know? Very nice sort of louvering over it. So it's sort of blending it away. Gives it a little bit the notion of privacy, but it's still visible. So it's a very elegant, very elegant way. And so is the next picture something we showed when we were focusing on these themes. We already showed this here. We just didn't point out there was a staircase behind it. Correct. Right. And you can still see through, and you still have air movement. And you're not totally enclosed, but there is a little level of camouflaging and veiling. And the most extreme of that sort of subcategory comes next, which we also showed in that show in the back, which is that hospital here where they're pretty 50-50 porosity louvered. So you're very, very camouflaging it. But you're still seeing through. And so air and light is going through, but it's be filtered. And this is what the tropics are about. Absolutely. Next picture, another element that's already taken care of in the previous one, because the guardrail is sort of built into the project. That's sort of an effect on the side. But usually they're separate. And this is referring to a show with it a while ago here. And this is another way, structurally, they're basically coming on cantilevering out of a wall. This is also a very ambitious and very effective. Yeah. And I think that what's interesting there is that those are intrinsically, as you said, part of the structure. This is probably as basic as you can possibly make a stairway. Each step is a separate unit sticking out of the wall. And you couldn't strip it down any further than that, except to put all you got to do is add the railing. And then again, here, look at these sort of refinement of mid-century detail that they're thicker. They're exactly following the gravity and sort of structural necessity. They're thicker where they get into the wall, and then they get thinner. So this is perfectly showing the line. And they are not just a concrete block, this rectangular. Exactly. And then you need guardrails, so you don't fall off as we show one here. And next picture is going to show sort of a little cut barrier of guardrails. Just, again, you can get crazy. We can write books about it. And we should point out cold as a potential sort of enemy of freedom of expression, because there is the head of a child is sort of the thing. Absolutely. It's like four and a little bit inches. And into current cold, you can't be wider than that. So these were way more experimental, way more open, way more liberal. And these things, again, as you just said, you see a lot of very interesting variations of these type of sort of wrought iron railings that were locally produced, 1940s, 1950s. A lot of these little buildings have unique to them railing structures. They didn't just go buy them. They have them commissioned and made. Yeah. And the permeability, maybe the most charming we show next. And shame on me, I was still not knowing where it is until yesterday. I drove by and didn't look to the left. We did a show about the Wall Street, but I looked to the right. And here they are. Now I know. Right. And as you just pointed out, today this would be illegal, because there's too much open space there for where our child's head or another body part could get pulled through to detriment of everybody. But isn't it beautiful? The question is, how many kids get hurt? Probably not so many. So once again, codes are well intended, but sometimes sort of shoot back, because they limit our expression of freedom and what you do. And that's a particularly cute one. That was cute. And that was mid-century. And there was more like 50s, more sort of Googie style. And then came the 70s. Next picture is a brutalism era here. This is unfortunately, now it's already boarded up. And they're taking it apart, which is very, very sad. This is Ward Plaza by Steve Owl. And again, he did some masterful staircases here of different types. The next picture is his project that is unfortunately down Ward Warehouse. And once again, here is sort of brutalist way hippie, the hippie way of the opposite to the mid-century, to the 50s, where they were dematerialized in the garden. Here they're a little overemphasized. Exactly. And the thing about this is that it's a concrete structure that's surrounded by a natural wood structure. So it's a contrast. And it's kind of, as you said, a little bit kooky, because the rest of it is natural hippie. But then we've got this big concrete curved thing in there. But it's all gone. And also so overemphasizing. Or celebrating next picture is also we did shows and also wanted to do a walking tour with Doko Moe that way to cancel, because of that crazy rain. And so we're going to move it to another time. But here again, the vertical thing that's sort of the iconographic thing is the staircase tower. And if you want to know more details, watch the show. Yeah. We already talked about it. Another show that you also then got to watch here is Hilton Hawaiian Village. And once again, this iconic staircase celebrated as the exotic thing. People coming from other parts in the country where you just can't do it like that, because due to the international building codes on the mainland, they have to be enclosed. So if there is a fire in your building and you live in New York, and you need to get the hell out of the building, you don't slip on the over-ized staircase and you break your neck. So that makes sense. But that ice thing, do we have that here? No, we do not have frozen ice on our stairways. And I'm very happy about that. All right. Very good. And we've talked more about that in a second. But let's remember another show that we did next one. So in many ways, this is sort of a reviewing of shows we did before, because they all have staircases by nature, if they're tall buildings. And here, another open staircase with a dorms, gateway dorms at UH. And young people, for sure, are the most able to climb stairs. They are the most ambulatory, the most healthy. They are the ones who should and can use stairs the most. They always go to the gym, sometimes indoor gyms, both on campus and off campus. Why don't you do the stairs? That's right. And save you money to go to the gym or time. That's right. Just use the stairs. And next picture, if you live in Waikiki, which we did a show here about Lanai's on balcony, there's also external staircases in these mid-century ones. And you go up like 20 stories, 20 floors. Why not? Keeps you in shape. That's right. Cardio for you. That's right. So do it while your knees still work. Let me tell you. There you go. We get to that in a bit here. So similar next picture referring to the show about Makaha. So the residential towers have the same thing. These very patriotic towers, staircase towers. And you basically climb the mountains in front of the mountains. And you're building, being an artificial mountain. And you climb it for the device of descending and descending in a natural way. Pretty cool, literally, and figuratively speaking. Next picture is also a show with John Williams here at Windbauer. Did it as well. Just in two buildings, one in the Gold Coast and the other one here is more in Waikiki here. Once again, really. As you said before, using it as a proud architectural element, like special. It's showing it off. Right. And you're making it, again, part of the element. It's a necessity. It isn't an adornment. It isn't an artificial type of a chevron. Exactly. Exactly. It is necessary for the building. And you turn it into something that looks good as well. Absolutely. And it's also looking good. Most people find Waikiki most compelling when the sun sets and it gets night. So the next picture, also, we want to encourage you guys to look at them when it gets dark. And this is just me here. It's one of my neighbors on the left side, which, if you pay attention, then here the breeze block has been used as to camouflage it. And the breeze block at night gets lit up by the cold illumination that's necessary so they don't step and break the neck. So it's mandated to have these safety lights. Lights at all times. The safety lights, they turn into this illumination. And I took this off the Ilikai the other day when we did the show about it. And once again, isn't this kind of really tropical with the palm leaves and accentuating the geometry? The folding of the stairs has a lot like the leaves of a plant. Yes, they are. They are. There are similarities. So next one is, basically, so whenever you have a building that, and this is Kamehameha School in Kakaako at the Salt area. And we were wondering if these, and this is a renovated building. And so we're wondering, are these original or not? I just ran into one of our emerging talents who lives in there. And he is of the opinion that they are original. They are original. And they look like that. I know they do look like it. And they are super interesting because they are a totally freestanding structure at the back of this building, which is 650 Olimwana. And I think it's very interesting how the railing doesn't remain upright, but tilts at the same angle as the stairway does. But it's a really interesting structure. And it's attention grabbing and attractive. Absolutely. And I was about to, I pulled these pictures from the website here from Kamehameha School, sort of branding it and creating these sort of logos with a screwdriver going up the stair, kind of funny. But I was originally looking for another one that I think Hank Rogers and his Green Building Foundation, they made some advertisement. I think it was on Ward Center at a door that goes into the parking. And it basically reminded you of how much more calories you burn when you walk the stairs versus doing the elevator. So use the stairs for your health. Exactly. And next picture, again, we keep returning to our invasive monster of Makaha student housing on Korean University, because most tragically, the building, the project that was there before is the picture on the right that a few story walk-ups. And it had one of these nice, and look how thin it was cast. And it's tapering. And what a shame. So once again, before you guys come up with new stuff, check if it will be as cool as the previous one and not make it. And if you can't do it, then just leave it the way it is. That's unfortunately what we have to say. And next picture. And then be critical about things. And so there's other ways to get up in the building. And they're also driven by code. Correct. And one is the American Disability Act, the ADA. So it says you have to take care of people who can't walk the stairs. So either handicapped or they're too old, or for whatever reason, they can't do it. But this is our friend Don Hibbard here, who on a tour through Chinatown showed us this building. It's on Nuala Street between Bishop and Holtail Street. And it's an historic building, turn of the century. Not this just past century, but the other one before. Correct. And this is a wooden pulley elevator. How cool is that? And so somebody actually stood there and pulled ropes to make it do that? Exactly. OK. And isn't that like a very sort of solidarity act? If you think about people, you have to have some bodies and saying, hey, I need to get up there. Yeah, so pull the rope for me, right? What else? And that can carry people? It can carry people, and it carried goods. And it's very low techie, right? Yeah. Well, so it's little. We just got a new elevator at school at U-Age. And I don't want to know how many $100,000 of dollars that cost. And then it was just installed and then broke down. And it was out of commission for a couple of months. And then we got it fixed. And then some people got stuck in there. That certainly doesn't happen here. It's like the old cars. We use cars as vehicle for the old crank window. You can fix and it lasts forever. And once the electric window breaks, it's broken. Exactly. So maybe you guys go back and revisit this sort of archaic, historic things and thinking about innovating or reinterpreting these systems. And another one that I remember, the next picture, is a crazy one from the Netherlands where they had the warehouses and from whatever trade they were doing, coffee and stuff like that. They had this wooden hamster wheel on the roof. And that was basically powering a crane. And so it took like, there's two guys in there for the fun, but it just needed one person to basically be in there. And there's the picture. I put the picture I found online there. Oh, they take the stairs, yes. And use the hamster wheel to bring things up. So all of a sudden, turn the fossil that makes you lazy, what the elevator is right now, for many. I mean, the few ones who need it, that's another story. But most people, let's just be honest, are just doing it because they're lazy. Oh, of course. So it makes you fat, obese, you get diabetes. So maybe you do these things. Maybe you stand in the hamster wheel and make the wheels of commerce turn. And we always speak from experience. And next picture is me going back to my childhood. And so I lived in this five-story walk-up, no elevator, 96 steps. And you knew there were 96. Yeah, and the lady who was sort of the caretaker of the building, she just turned 100. And not unlikely because she did these stairs until very recently. So that's a proof of evidence. It's good for you. Yes, it is good for you. And the next picture is how this sort of subject informs us in our work here. This is a school for disabled children we did a while ago. And then we had to do two stories in parts because the site wasn't large enough to do one story. But then the question was in discussion with the building authorities and the fire department. Well, in case of a fire, how do you get wheelchair kids mentally and physically disabled down? There's just no way. And so we invented basically slides that are parallel to the stairs. And now they train it all the time with the kids. And the kids think it's fun. So in case of a fire, you just don't panic them and say there's a fire. You just say, oh, it's slide time again. They love it. And they evacuate like with no effort. And we also camouflage and louver that. So that's a common thing. And that reminded you of another way how you can get in and out of a building. Exactly, and ramps are another big weight. And ramps can work in places that you wouldn't even think ramps could work. But they have the advantage of not being steps. They have the advantage of being accessible to wheeled vehicles. And they have the advantage of being at an angle that you don't feel as arduous. It's not as tough to go up that ramp. And there is a building on Catalina Island off Los Angeles, which has a building called. I mean, it's on Catalina Islands. It's building called a casino. Does not have a gambling joint in it. But it had a ballroom on the top floor. And all the access was up ramps. And by doing so, they could handle really large groups of people walking up and down. And also a very celebrated way of sort of seamlessly ascending and descending. Another way to get up, it's another lazy one next. Picture our escalators, which are where the stair moves. And we were interpreting that here and making a canopy over access to the subway station once again, sort of celebrating the enclosure or the semi enclosure here. So then going back to our home here. Next picture is me doing it in Waikiki Grant that we did a show about. And I have an internal staircases that I hardly ever do. And I have this external one that I do every day as part of my workout. And it's fun. So yeah. And you just walk or run. I just run it. I run it. You run it. And that's your exercise. That's part of my exercise. There you go. It's my cardio. And that's why he's so healthy. And that's why he's so slim. Try my best. There you go. Run, run, run. You always run up diamond head. That's why I'm so slim. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't. So next picture is our hero. That's Howard Wiig, host of Gold Green, and working for the state. And having reintroduced the Easy Breezy Staircases to the local building cult, which, as we said before, this is New York City here. And it snows, but we don't have that snow. And so we don't do what we saw down there as in Kakaako, a Stanford car development that I don't even know where the stairs are and has elevators and this introverted corridors. So Howard is our hero because he brings us back the chance to actually do the Easy Breezy Staircases in Bravo. And the next picture is then developers already do it. On the left, and there is one example here in Kakaako, that Howard used affordable what they're doing, but they're basically just licking and sticking a steel staircase to a building. So they're doing it to save money because they don't have to enclose it any more. But they don't take advantage of it poetically anymore. Right, and they don't make it sculptural because it's just sort of a prefab thing that's on there, as opposed to what we've already seen, sticking things out and making them more interesting. And this probably, we decide we want to do a show, maybe the next show, which we call basically Paradisal Pyramids. There are certain buildings that do something interesting. This particular one here basically exhibits almost like in an exhibitionist way the staircases as the front, as the address of the building here in the Gold Coast. So let's run through a couple of sort of suggestions for the future. Next picture, this is Ted Paul's studio, Bundit and Janice here, my heroes, who have done apartment building. Again, few stories walk up again in Moliili, and they're celebrating the staircases. They're louving them, they're doing right. They're just connecting to that awesome tradition. Next picture, what is that, DeSoto? Well, that's Primitiva, that's Primitiva One. No, excuse me, no, no, no, we're talking about this is the container. This is our container development, and it's got walkways, it's got stairways connecting all those stacked up containers to each other. Exactly, and what you were just saying comes next. So there she is here. And there's Primitiva, there's Primitiva One. And as you pointed out, there's one section of this circular cylindrical building which is left open for the stairway, and that is on the east or the west side, which gets the most sun. So instead of making that residential, you leave it open, and it's the stairway area which you use, not that frequently, but just partially, and you're always in motion. So the heat of the sun doesn't really matter, plus we've got these open areas that we've already talked about as to where things are also going on where the stairs are feeding into. Absolutely. But we wanna do better, so that's why Primitiva Two is under development, and the next picture is one of the inspirations. We're always having Don Hibbert's flash drive with things for Peter's Shea on them, I think. I also found these here where he's climbing the mountains here in a pretty crazy way, and that's probably the original way. I mean, Suzanne and I were just doing almost by accident, Malka to Makai, and that's the original way. People were going over the mountains, and that was the natural way. On foot, that's the only way you could do it, and without the benefit of stairs, nowadays we have stairs, and the Haiku stairs are the stairway to heaven, is was built purely for utilitarian purposes, but it became a thing that people hiked on just because it was so beautiful. And talking going over the mountains, next picture we also went to Bellows Beach, and Bellows Beach has this amazing tower to the left, which is almost like the sort of most archaic way you can make a stair. It's out of scaffolding members, very skinny, and then you have these cables that tie it down so it doesn't fall over, so you can't make a stair more minimal. And then David Rockwood reminded us of Super Studio, who were these provocateurs, these rebels, from the 60s here with their polemic photo collages, here one of them where you have escalators that just go to the sky. So all these things. There's no particular reason. So these things highly inspire us too. Let's look at the last picture here. And so this is Prima Tiva 2 under development right now, and you see in the upper left-hand corner, there's a central core, and from that these floors are sort of cantilevered off, and it's like the building that we talked about earlier, the Waikiki Belle View. In that central core, it does contain the stairway. You've also got a picture of sort of temporary types of structures for the nomads to live in, as you like to say. And so this is, again, creative thinking by architectural students. It is, and I want to particularly thank Qua, who had pulled in all nighter to create the picture at the bottom left, which is telling us about what you just said, the urban nomadic lifestyle, it's just providing stacked banias as Kurt Sandberg calls it, and then not stuff them and clock them with things, but basically have the most minimal lifestyle. Whenever you need privacy, you come up with more clever devices as these cocoons. To shade yourself, or to disguise yourself, or shield yourself, right? And you're in this bubble for as long as you need to be private, and if you're not, you're out and about. It's basically cascading down landscapes, and this is why we have split level here. You can see the floors are attached to the core. They're offset half a floor, so you don't have that feeling that you have to go a whole story up or down. It's only half story, and that's what split level is, and this makes it almost be like a cascading landscape. Absolutely, and in addition to just the way, to the idea of it, it looks interesting to visually. That staggered look is kind of cool. And as you always say, it's not an add-on, it's integral to the idea, it doesn't cost more, so it's a positive side effect. So do it. So with that was a good run up and down together. Yeah, we did it, we ran. We did it, and so see you back in about two weeks, where we're gonna, as we already said, we're gonna look at the Paradissel Pyramids. Pyramids, it's gonna be our pyramid show. Interesting phenomenon, because you would think that belongs to Egypt, but we have some here. No, no, no, we have some here. That's right. And also Tune in next week, we're gonna have the Desert Red Will Brooder, who's gonna come here, and he said, he doesn't wanna talk about his desert stuff, he wants to come here. Don Hibbert and I are gonna drive around with him, and then he's gonna sort through, and he's gonna share two handfuls of the best stuff that impressed him the most, and two handfuls of the stuff that impressed him the least. And we said, that's exactly how we do it, right? There we go. That's along our lines. I'm gonna watch that, that's gonna be cool. These you all do. And until then, keep celebrating our exotic tropics, and see you then, bye-bye.