 back to human-humane architecture here from exotic Honolulu, Hawaii. And exotic is an external perception by nature. And so if we could get picture one, and we take a critical position here, and so we have to say that after we got contacted here, or annexed, or multiple other terms one can use, you would assume that to this most beautiful place on Earth, for sure in the United States, you would only bring the best things. But my very provocative manifesto here and today is that is sort of decreasingly the way. This is potentially true. There are always costs involved. So to discuss that, and having some specific case studies as food for thought, we bring in our favorite guests, and I should say a co-host. Yes, thank you. This is Soto. How do you do? Who is our world-famous expert in exoticism? Well, I won't say world-famous, but the best you got right now. But I did. Yeah, all right, all right. So we will start once again. So the pedagogy is we look back to see what we have done better than we're currently doing it, to learn from that and doing better again in the future. So let's go back to where it started. And this is actually reconnecting. Our last show was focusing on the darkest era, which was the war. And now we're looking at the uplifting era right after the war. And the post-war period, exactly. Well, what we're going to talk about today is two different men, Henry J. Kaiser and Buckminster Fuller. And those two men both had an impact, and they got together in different interesting ways as well. So let's look at our first picture here, which is about Henry J. Kaiser. And he was an industrialist, an American success story. During World War II, he had already become a very important man and was very powerful industrially. Tycoon, right. Yeah, he was a tycoon. But he built ships for the war effort during World War II at an astoundingly fast pace. And that really fast pace was something he continued to carry on. So this is a comic book that shows Shipbuilder number one, Henry J. Kaiser. And of course, he did a lot of different types of industrial things. He did all that to clarify on the mainland mainly, right? Correct, correct. So this is a certain point. Exactly. So let's go to our next picture. Henry J. Kaiser was fascinated by, he was an industrialist. And he wanted to build machines. And one of the things that he liked was cars. And of course, in the 20th century, the car industry was huge. And so he got into different types of car manufacturing. And we're going to talk about that when we do our next show on Henry J. Kaiser. But he did, in the 1950s, after he had moved here, he came up with aluminum car designs because he was one of his companies, was Kaiser Aluminum. Oh, he's crazy. And these crazy 50s cars, let's go to the next one. And as you can see, they've got Hawaiian names. So there's the Pele, the Menuhune, and the Waimea. This is because he was living here at the time. So he was doing this Hawaiian cultural thing. And as you can see, in the bottom corner there, there's a little picture that says Kaiser Aluminum with the Kaiser Aluminum logo for the very peculiar, all-aluminum Waimea car that doesn't look like it was all that reasonable to actually use in the real world. But OK, it's a concept car. And these all stayed concept cars versus some other cars that he built. And we're going to get to that later. We will talk about that. There was those little keynotes. It's Kaiser Fraser. It's actually Willie's Kaiser and lots more to come. So there were real Kaiser cars in addition to these fantasy cars we saw. But these got never built. Correct. And that gets us to the next important figure in history who also did a lot of crazy stuff. It's Buckminster Fuller. And there's Buckminster Fuller. And you can see that on this picture of him in the cover of Time magazine, his head has been turned into a dome because he was famous for creating and inventing the dome. And if you look in the lower corner of that picture, too, in the right, there's a little red car. And that was one of the things that he invented. And in fact, that was the Dimaxian car. And if we go to our next picture, there is the Dimaxian car constructed, I believe, 1934. And this is at a time period in which streamlining was the big thing. Every machine that had to move through air, you wanted to make it smooth, so it would move faster. Well, the Dimaxian car is kind of this teardrop that just would cut through the air. And they built at least one of them. But I think that's as far as it went. Or maybe there were, I think there was more than one. It never went into production. And this fascination, by the way, continues as one of the most prominent architects from my discipline in the world, Lord Norman Foster. And he is such a fan of Bucky and credits him for an inspiration for his own work. So he took on his own as a private person to build a rebuild or an interpretation of the Dimaxian car. My very best German friend and colleague, Stefan Kleinschmidt, is highly a fan and enthused by this era. So this has continued. Correct. It's not just old stuff that's dusty. Correct. This is still, if you Google for this stuff online, there's like tons. Really? So fascination to be continued. Well, OK. The thing about the Dimaxian car was the exterior was, of course, as you can see, as smooth and slippery as possible. And the inside, they tried to make it as comfortable and homey as possible. So one of the things they wanted to do was to get away from standard seat arrangement. And they wanted to make it so it was kind of like a little room so that you could rearrange furniture in a little room, which unfortunately does not work in the real world if you come to a sudden stop and all your furniture is thrown forward. And all his inventions. So he was an inventor, an engineer, an architect, kind of like a Michelangelo scope guy. And all these things are also highly ahead of their time in many ways. I mean, this is a seven-seater passenger car. So moving people, carpooling, the big thing. Here on H1, I always get applause like a minimum of two. That's all it takes to be called a carpool. I mean, this is a joke from my European point of view. You're right. You're right. You're right. You talked about Streamline. Streamline has a very functional reasoning, can have before it got fetishized as we talk. And this is energy efficient. This was a very, very energy efficient car. So it actually had everything. That's what we call ahead of its time. And that's ironically why sometimes in our modern times things don't fly, right? And Henry J. Kaiser, as we know, got one of the Dimaxian cars. He put a different engine in it because he wanted it to go faster. He got in it, tried to drive it, and flipped it over. Well, I only know this through you, so thanks for teaching me. OK, no, no. But this is an awesome connection, which I didn't. This is what the show is for. Correct. So the Dimaxian car didn't go anywhere. But something else at Buckminster Fuller Design was? The house. The Dimaxian house. And there's the interior of one of the Dimaxian house. Tell us about the house. You know more than I do. Because I'm the architect. You're the architect. You tell us. You tell us. So it was not that unsimilar to the car. And this is the interior. So a very wide open space. This has a central mast, then basically suspended pylons and cables. So you have a free-flowing room. And it's organized in this very free flow. You see this panoramic window, very romantic, the American landscape in the background. So this was like the innovation of the little house on the prairie in modern machine age, pre-manufactured, everything aluminum. If we go to the next picture, this is a great, compelling exon diagram that shows all the whistles and bells and all the features. So everything we talk about today off the grid, harvesting its own energy, naturally ventilated, resilience. So this is basically the next picture is going to be the prototype never got built. But then he tried one more time. And this one was built. And it was sort of dumbed down and value engineered. That's kind of dirty term. And this is called the Wichita House because it was built in Wichita. And Wichita, they have tornadoes. So this house has like a plant has a root. So there's a safe room in the basement. Once again, too good to be true. And America was the world was not ready for the thing. And he just never built it. Now, and the other thing too is that there was also a fad or a fascination at the time with prefabication because the idea was if you can build components and factories and then send them to the location, it will cut out all these extra expenses of building houses and building other buildings and so forth. So the Dimaxian House was supposed to be a prefab unit, if I remember correctly. And in its initial form in 1928, it was going to be airlifted to its location by a Zeppelin because it lifts things up and takes them around. This is again, fantasy world. And then it would be put down on the pylon, which would be there. And then you would just put it on it and there's your house. And then you drive to it and from it in your Dimaxian car. And maybe it sounds so accusational to say, the public just didn't want it. They weren't smart enough, stuff like that. But maybe that's the nature of innovation just being ahead. It reminds me of my oldest son who was just here visiting and is his master's of automotive engineering management. Hi, Joey. Hang in there. He entered with Audi. And Audi has put out what's, I think, a brilliant car and has never made it to the United States. It's the A2, and it's from the early 90s. And it's a whole aluminum car, so it could be in the tradition of Kaiser. And Audi put, and if you like the, what's I call that, where they track how much your half new car breaks down and stuff like that, there's so much stuff for that, has the best ratings. Even though it's like old car, but it was made to last, highly innovative. And they put so much research, funding, and resources in there that they never got it out of the car, but they used it for a future project. And that's the nature of research and development, R&D. One thing that has happened, however, though, with prefabrication is that it turns out frequently that prefabbing doesn't end up saving money. And that was what it comes down to. And there were other houses that, in the 1950s, in the post-war period, there was the Lustron All-Metal House. Again, sort of a similar thing, but much more of a traditional, normal-looking house by what we would standardize then. Also like Quanson-related a little bit, you know, which we talked about before. And it ended up not saving money. There was also Alcoa, which was a competitor of Kaiser Aluminum Company, created in the 50s something called the Alcoa Carefree Home. And they got people to build copies of it in different cities in the US and then sold those. And unfortunately, they turned out to be far more expensive than the average middle-class person could afford. And the Alcoa house was a little, a lot of stuff to say, less innovative than the Dimension House. But ironically, or maybe that's the way how dumb-down capitalism works, Alcoa is still around. And Kaiser, at least in this way, we should basically, by the way, mention to people who are not from the island, that most people these days know Kaiser through his health insurance. Exactly. As one of the many innovations that he's produced. Exactly. And Kaiser, and that's something we will get to when we do another show about Henry J. Kaiser, the reason we're talking about him here is because he ended up at the end of his life, after all these other business adventures, settling here. He came here in the middle 1950s and transplanted all of that energy to here. So he did a bunch of stuff here, as I mentioned earlier. That's why we have the Pele car. We're going to talk about that in another time. But again, for any industry and for any type of business, you want to build your business. So you want to tell people, hey, look at all these innovative things we're making that you want to go out and buy. And if it's aluminum foil, that is something that was successful for aluminum to sell. But the all aluminum cars and the Dimexian house, not so much. And talking financial success, there was one thing that actually Fuller became economically financially successful. That's we want to go to the next picture. OK, well let's go to our next picture and see there's Buckminster Fuller with a shining example of one of his domes. You want to take your head off now? No, we're not at that point yet. Well, OK, we're talking about domes. Look, everybody. We got three domes. Here's one dome. There's another dome. And behind us is a Buckminster Fuller dome. If you haven't recognized this, it's a joke of the day. It's the joke of the day. Wah, wah, wah. OK, anyway, back to Buckminster Fuller. This is probably his most famous dome, I would say. It was the American Pavilion at the Montreal World's Fair, which was called Expo 67. And it was where America showed off to the world various things, like the American movie industry and other things like that, within this dome. And unfortunately, it burned down. The plastic exterior burned at one point. But I'm not sure if it still is in existence or not. At this shocking moment, we take to this initiation to take a little break of one minute. That's right. And we'll be back with more dome activities right after this. Aloha. My name is Carl Campania, and I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Education Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. I invite you to come watch our show on thinktechhawaii.com. You can also see our shows on YouTube as well. If you can Google search those. I appreciate the time. I hope that you do join us as we learn about education, about the educational system here in Hawaii, what the challenges are, what the benefits are, and how much our kids are learning. So thank you. Hope you join us. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii, where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Hey, has your signal just been taken over, or am I supposed to be here? This is Andrew, the security guy, your co-host on Hibachi Talk. Please join us every Friday on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back to Kaiser's Apongard Exotic Hawaii with Mr. Exotic the Soda Brown. So next picture, number 15. Again, he was thinking big. So the dome wasn't necessarily a concrete application. There was a bigger vision about it. I mean, this one was about covering an entire part of Manhattan. Yeah, and there were other kooky ideas like this at the time of controlling environment. In other words, building a huge dome that covered not just an individual house, but a whole city. And then you had a whole climate-controlled interior, and you probably could protect against atomic blasts and things like that, based on 50s activities or thinking. But the one built was the one in 67, and there's another picture, number 16. And there's the dome. And once again, always making promotion for my own previous shows. There's one from the old urban transcendence days that I was shooting in the outskirts of Dresden with my dear mentor, Larry Medlin, hi, Larry, who actually was a personal friend of Conrad Waxman, talking about prefabrication. But it was also part of the team for the 67 Pavilion. So he's another eyewitness, as you were. Exactly. He shared. Don't hide. I got to go inside that Buckminster Fuller Dome at Expo 67, and I got to go into the Kaiser Aluminum Dome, which is right behind me here that I'm touching. So there's no way. So we had one in Honolulu. So we had a dome in Honolulu. And in fact, that's the juxtaposition of Buckminster Fuller and Henry J. Kaiser. Because in 1957, this kooky dome was built at the Hawaiian Village Hotel, which was started by Henry J. Kaiser several years earlier. And it was in Waikiki. The dome used to be located right at the intersection of Kalia Road and Alamoana. And it used to be visible up until the 1990s. It's not there anymore. But in keeping with what we've just been discussing, the dome was created, one, as a promotion for Kaiser Aluminum as a modern building material, as we've just been discussing. You want to build interest in your product. And two, it was a way to get attention for building something that was prefab and that they could advertise, look, we can build this in just a matter of hours. And you tell your anecdote about that. So the next picture is illustrating that. Is that when we categorize the dome, which everyone knows by now I like to do, everything that comes, I test if it is. Not from here, it's imported. But then it could be invasive or it could be exotic. We started talking and saying the dome might look invasive because it's not an organic material, it's aluminum, it's shipped in. But if we look closer, we both got closer to the point to say maybe it's exotic for some reason we will talk about. And one is that picture number 17, that nature is the best solar generator, the best solar plant. And it can sort of duplicate itself and grow. And so the dome did. The dome was prefabricated in Oakland, California where at Kaiser's plant. And then it was shipped over here and put together. And Kaiser, of course, as being the client, wanted to see it coming up, he did not. He missed the entire construction because he missed his plane. And the dome took only 20 to hours to go up. I mean, that's innovation, right? I mean, look at the towers here, all the buildings, they take a year or two years. Oh yes, of course. This took not even a day. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like the Dimaxian we were talking about because it was a central mast. And then the pieces were assembled around it and gradually sort of winched up to where it got up to its proper height. And of course, they had already built a cement slab for it to rest upon. And then as you said, you bolt them together, you lift them up, and you've got a building. And another criteria, check for exotic, if we bring up number 18 now, the dome was certainly sort of a reflective surface so it was probably radiating. And its mitigational capacities wouldn't the greatest, but different to the other arenas built, like the stand sheriff or the blazer, which is a good building, so don't get me wrong, guys. But they're all enclosed, they're hermetic, they're AC. This is an easy-reasy dome, right? So the ground floor was open for the breeze. And it was a little bit weird because having gone into it, the bottom of the dome was jagged. It was a zigzagged bottom. Well, it came out of the nature, of those things. But at the same time, that strange open space at the bottom, while it did let in bugs and it did let in rain and wind and noise, at the same time, it kept things naturally air conditioned, if you will, because this is in a location where the trade winds are blowing most of the time. So it's not as you don't have to heat it, you don't have to cool it. It can sort of do those things on its own. So more and more, it gets more and more exotic. And when we go to the next picture, it also had a property. I'm also teaching systems in school. So we go through the different systems. One of the systems has to do with the ear. So what was one of the performance criteria that was superb? It had good acoustics. And that was something that was unsure before it was opened. There were people saying it's such a loud, metal surface, is that really gonna work? Well, it was used for many years as a performance venue for a lot of different things. It was used initially for different individual events, but it also then eventually got used as a staging venue for regular shows, like for example, Don Ho appeared in the dome for many years. But it also is, we're talking about this as Spacey Exotica. So the spaciness of this is clearly evident. It's a modern, space-age, funny-looking building like the Jetsons would live in. But it also was, the Hawaiian Village Hotel was the venue at which a type of music was invented in first perform, which is now called Exotica. And it was, and so, yes, and so here's Hawaii Ago-Go. Yeah, that's my, you know, you have no idea how appropriate Hawaii Ago-Go is to me. But in any case- We do a show about it, then we have a better idea. Okay, well in any case, this is a record by Martin Denney and Martin Denney was the leader of a group that perfected and first performed what was called Exotica. And that was a melding of traditional indigenous instruments from many different cultures with American jazz. And it was tremendously successful and it was originated at the Hawaiian Village Hotel. They performed inside that dome. And they were on TV, they released many different records. The group split up fairly soon afterwards and Arthur Lyman, who had been one of the members, went off and became a percussionist on his own. And there was Dennis Baxter as the third runner. So there were these three people who were crucial in that Ago-Colon was also one of the original members too. So, but in any case, they performed inside the dome. So you had, again, Exotica, which is a melding of Eastern and Western different cultures using traditional older stuff, but put together in a modern space age, 1950s way. And the dome was a perfect venue for that. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And Hawaii Ago-Go, I'll tell ya. There you go. You told me actually the dome was actually, it's also a biochlametic smartness. They weren't using it when it was the hottest during the day that much. They were basically evening events. Correct, correct. And when you said the acoustics were good or so I think some people online that I found when I was Googling, they would argue with you and say it was perfect, it was the best. I mean, there's an enthusiasm ongoing which we talked about today. Correct, correct. There's a whole community out there who dig out the old vinyl, it's with you have some. And basically said, look at the crispness of the acoustics, you can't beat that. So once again, I mean, this was like, the best was almost not good enough for Hawaii. So Kaiser was so stunned by this island that he left all his other stuff behind and basically, this is where I wanna be. Correct. And if I'm here, I certainly wanna bring only the best of the best in any ways. And that's absolutely true. And he had the money and he had the power and he had the drive to get these things done. So these things happen really fast. The dome is no longer with us, unfortunately. Okay, let's take out the tissues, go to the next page here. And the next picture, here's what it got replaced by was the Kalia Tower. And that had the misfortune of opening right before September 11th, 2001 when tourism took a terrible dive. And it also had a terrible misfortune of, unlike the dome that it replaced, being an entirely hermetically sealed system. And this led to mold growth. And the entire building had to be shut down. All the new, I mean, again, this is a new building with new furnishings, all the furnishings, all the carpeting, all the curtains, everything had to be stripped out, destroyed, and they had to start again from scratch after disinfecting it. And we pulled this from the web. So this is basically the lawyers that were ever who were listing and diagramming all the dysfunctionality. So it's ironic, as you said, there is the most exotic piece on the island, probably, has been replaced by the most invasive. I mean, how can this be? And I like to run out of time and then not getting to the last, I wanna say this now. And this is sort of, once again, sort of a silk promotion. Number 23 is us, currently, my emerging architectural generations. My mentees are currently working on this project here, which we had started last semester, which just doesn't wanna agree that we can't be innovative anymore because Hawaii is still the most awesome and beautiful place. So nothing has changed, except we have changed. And we should reconnect to these roots. And that's why history is not a dead animal, not a dead body. It's a very alive organism that we can pull from and analyze and reference and be critical about what hasn't worked or what has worked. And the name we give this building here is the last picture here. This is a tribute to Martin Denny. The exotic sounds of Martin Denny. Again, a mixture of the primitive, the modern, and the natural, and the man-made all melded together in a wonderful time period that you were just saying was an optimistic time period, a time of technological innovation, a time when people had faith that technology was not going to destroy us, but in fact was gonna save us. And that was different than what we think now. And in tribute to that, we call this project, which tries to be a proletarian people power tower because we have to say we have different issues then. Entertainment works out great on the island, but how we all, other people who live here, the locals and especially the ones on the lower end of the foot chain can survive. That's the big issue. So we were dedicating the project to that. We're getting close to the end of the show only to advertise the next show because the next show will show sort of the other side or another side of Kaiser. Henry J. Kaiser. Just briefly say which one that is as an appetizer. Well, it's more the everyday Henry Kaiser. It's not the Exotica Spacey one, but it's sort of the down to earth, Henry J. Kaiser as the industrialist and the man who was a successful builder and a successful developer. And as you mentioned earlier, was so diverse that he even created the Kaiser Health Plan. All right, so we will call that Kaiser's Mainstream Exotic Hawaii. Mainstream Exotic Hawaii. And we look forward to that. Thank you so much for having me. You're very welcome. Thanks.