 Enjoy and join us, the Soda Brown and Martin de Spang again, on our search for humanity and humility on our Hawaiian islands, especially the one of Oahu, which is our modern, mid-century, modern metropolis, here in the middle of nowhere because we're the most remote from all landmass, but also we can proudly say in the middle of everywhere, especially when it comes to mid-century architecture because we've just been honored by the national symposium of Doco Momo, that movement and initiative that documents and conserves the modern movement. But how do you find this place and how do you find out about this place? And can we bring the first picture up here? This is my personal access to the place because my family business had been published for some very profane, proletarian projects here in both the Wallpaper magazine and the Faden Atlas, both from the UK. And they teamed up, next picture please, to make a travel guide. And as you can see down there in the bottom right, whatever city in the world they think is worth it, they make one. And guess what? We got one. So we were considered to be worth while it. So next picture is a project that is in there. And there's actually a project within that project. And without that project, I wouldn't sit here because that's the place where I first met we amongst the architectural community know as Mr. Easy Breezy. And within Think Tech Hawaii, we know him as the host of one of the longest standing shows, Cold Green. And that's Howard Wick. And our today's guest, Dennis Soioka, thank you Dennis for being here. You will tell us actually about the project within the project, which is your place. So welcome, first of all, to the show. Thank you. And tell us a little bit what that place is. Well, I started the coffee shop in November of 1993. I used to work at a coffee shop in Boyard Warehouse called Coffee Tior back in the 70s. I always wanted to have a coffee shop ever since then. And I first proposed putting a coffee shop in this building when it was a YWCA in 1980. But I didn't get any traction with the YWCA. But ironically, the YWCA invited me back in 1993 to take it over as a turnkey operation. So all the money that I didn't save between my first desire to open a coffee shop and then I didn't really need because it was a turnkey operation. I just had to buy the espresso machine and my coffee machines and my grinders. So I just took it over from 1993 and changed the menu. It was previously vegetarian or vegan on the look of war. I mean, these are all things that I still do. I opened it up to be omnivore and at 27 years in business, that's 27 times longer than anyone's ever managed to keep the coffee line open. And the picture you see up here is actually how you would approach the project. And besides that lady there who might be actually these days, you made a funny comment about how we are more disoriented using these devices in our hands here than the hell. But some people don't quite even know because you talked about the right color competitors in the market where their big signs tell you exactly where the front door is. But in your case, you've got to be a little bit explorative. I don't see bright yellows or reds or orange at my shop. In fact, some people, I get a lot of nice reviews from Google and Yelp. But you'll find the average review of one star. I think they're basically complaining that I'm not a McDonald's. And I'm glad that they don't like me because I don't want to see them again. But the people who do get what I'm doing really appreciate what I do. And they happen to be some of the smartest people at the University of Hawaii. Yeah. And let's go to the next slide. If you come from the right side here, you try to get in from this end, which doesn't really work that well. But the next picture is when you come in from the other side. And you might run into Dennis here, which I did last week, and see you watering your plants there. Yeah. This is the back entry. It's between my building and the pink building, the pink Adirton White. They call it A House for Adirton House. My building is called the Mary Adirton Richard House. And my building was originally a YWCA, but the YMCA bought it in 1995. Yeah. And by the way, preparing for when the show is over, please don't turn off before you saw all the underwriters being mentioned. The Adirton Family Foundation was actually the first one mentioned in that one. So that's a proud supporter of the program. And it's also a proud history of your building here in Ryan. Because there were the clients. Yeah. And your building has a very subtle frontage because it's gray and it's got a lot of plants around it. So it doesn't really, like you said, doesn't have red and yellow and orange to catch your attention. But that's the way you want it. Well, I'm limited because when the building was bought by the YMCA before, in the process of the changeover, all the people from the Department of Planning and Permitting came. And I could tell who they were because they all came up to my counter and they had the same question. And they goes, oh, you have a restaurant over here. And then before they left, they all dropped a bow on me. They said that you can't have a restaurant over here. It's not zone food commercial. And I said, well, if you guys were doing your job, you probably would have known about that. But I think I pissed them off. Yeah, very good. So the YMCA got me a variance to continue to operate my restaurant. But they said, you operate your restaurant, but you can't have a sign and you can't advertise. There is a sign here on the door. But there's a sign. It's a very subtle sign. Yeah. It's more a word of mouth, too. Yeah, the only sign you can see are the directional signs that tell you that there's an entrance here. And in the best tradition of modern buildings, which in contrast to the Victorian ones, which are like you have the big front, which tries to impress you. Once you get through that, you're rather disappointed. Here, I mean, for architectural experts, I mean, the previous slide where they sort of extruded ground reminds of very much of the Alfred Price entrance of the zoo, which has that as well. I think the IWIL building on Atkinson has that same thing. That's a very prominent and it's very hard to do. There's almost no one who can do that anymore these days. And that would work. Try to tell a maze and to do that with luck. But I mean, for the general public, who needs to unfortunately be more than ever educated about what these buildings really are, but once you go through this door, a next picture, please, you are wowed because that's the core, that's the heart of your place. Then it's fine. Yeah, I used to have a lot of plants inside, but all those plants got so big, I had to take them outside. But fortunately during that period, the neighbors palm trees had dropped so many seeds that there were some volunteer palm trees that grow in between their properties. So now it's, I've got more space because I took out all the plants that were occupying the floor space, but I still have the same effect of these plants in between. And this is really indoor-outdoor because you've got an open wall, but you've got walls on the other three sides, as well as a roof. And that's what we call easy breezy. That's what we call easy breezy. When you say most of your customers, guests or fellow Europeans, I mean, that's how we want to live if we come here. If we want to all be hermetic, we can stay home where we come from. It's a nice environment. If people want to listen to music, the foyer, which is just beyond this in this picture, it's got a nice acoustics. And I know how to lay out the speakers so they don't cross each other. So you have a really nice sound in there. Yeah, that would be slide 18 if we can bring this up pretty quick here. Yeah, and there's a ceiling fan up there. So if you go to the next slide, number nine here, we can see this is a superb, prudent place, concrete ceiling, which, you know, trying to do this these days. I mean, Bundet and Janis did it with their recent Moloely lofts. And, you know, you can only do this prefab these days. And then the very nice, you know, wooden framework underneath and the most biochromatic device to get the heat out in this very tall ceiling space, right? I mean, this is like environmental systems, 101 demonstrator. Right. Just move it with a fan. Yeah, Hardwick told me that these are the most efficient ways to circulate air because he said that I think they only consume about 10 watts of energy. Oh yeah, it's composed of a whole built-in system. Or even just a floor fan. Oh yeah, really? Those consume a lot of energy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. But besides that, slide number 11, a highlight, if you get one, the next slide after this one here, Wednesday nights are really special at your place. Oh yeah, we have a lamb dinner at the shop every Wednesday night at 7.30. And it actually turns into a salon. This last week we had an actor, two architects, a building superintendent. What else was there? Howard was there. Yeah, Howard was there. Howard was there. Were you there? Yeah, he was there too. Well, he was there. Yeah, there, there's one of the two architects. But it turns into a salon actually. And there's a guy that comes frequently calling more. He always jokes that the kind of gatherings that I have are what a lot of expensive restaurants are trying to do. But we just do it naturally over here. For a lot of things just happen naturally over here. Yeah, well this whole place is grown naturally too. That's one thing we were talking about beforehand. Yeah, and to pour some little bit of water into that wine that we're like to drink there, go to the next slide. There's actually other rooms in the building that are unfortunately not in use anymore, Brian. The YMC is the only other tenant in the building right now. The university bought the building and took over, took possession of the building in August of 2017. However, they didn't get around to telling me who to pay my rent to until about six months ago. And walk us upstairs, Dennis, please. Next slide here. Again, this reminds us to sort of off when we did the U8 shows about these really nice pristine car rails, plain and simple, but perfectly crafted. Couldn't do it these days anymore. The craft is gone. It's also expensive, right? So really you have this. Fine inexpensive building, you wouldn't do it. Absolutely, yeah. So let's walk next slide here. See some very nice detailing here. Simple, but elegant. Let's do this a screen at the top of the stairs. Yeah. And then the next slide is the sort of as Ronald Lindgren calls it, the structural expressionism, right? So there's no ornation, but the structure itself, right? So these nicely tailored concrete beams there. Again, try to do it these days. You can't do it the way this was done. Port in place concrete. There's no way you can pay for that. You got to go prefab out there. And this is a 1959 building. Exactly. So it's a 60-year-old building at this point. Exactly. And go to the next slide, which is also a space you loved and said you wish it would be more in use, right? Yeah, I think this would be a great space for yoga, yoga studio. I mean, I've seen documentaries about yoga in India, and they've had studios like this where you can hear all, I mean, there's a lot of street noise in this space, but it reminds me of the spaces I've seen in documentaries about yoga in India. Because not to misread what might look like windows, there is actually openings with just bug screens in there. Yeah. And you've been telling, everyone talks about resilience and stuff like that, and this building has been riding out several storms. Oh, yeah. Yeah, since the building was built, there's been several hurricanes getting close to the islands, and never has this place ever been flooded. Never in my experience have I seen this place flooded or that dying area that you showed previously. So our feeling is next slide, although there are some indications here where there's a tree growing out of this Paris that's just outside of this space here, where we can say it seems like a demolition by neglection, how you call that. You just let the building, you know, you stop repairing it, and that way at some point you can say, oh, well, you know, it's in such a bad shape, but this one has concrete bones, right? And you don't get these to be rotting away or so, right? So the substance of this building is really solid. And if you would want to, you could touch it up, you know, with relatively little effort. So I think what we hear, unfortunately, just last week that the university plans to basically bulldoze this building, the next one basically reminds me of my dental experiences with when you have a bad tooth and they try to save it and do a root canal and carve out the core of it and infill it with some stuff. They want to keep the facade and basically, what's the other hall? We say Gartley Hall, right? They did that with Gartley Hall, right? And that's part of the original plot. Which makes our historic colleagues of Don Hibbert and Bill Chapman say, oh my God, you did this in post-modernism. Please don't do it these days, right? So we actually say this building is absolutely a keeper because it's a prime example of tropical modernism, but not as sort of a dead body. But let's go to the next picture. And again, it's alive and kept alive for you. This is, by the way, the space you were talking about before, right? Where you can have good acoustics, right? You can study really well. You said many people have written their dissertations in there. Yeah, there have been books written there and dissertations. And I've been acknowledged in the preface of many of these writings also. There you go for providing the tranquil space, right? And one of the things that we just saw is, unfortunately, it's underutilized. This building is not utilized to the extent that it could be and it deserves to be. It's designed, the current design is a community center. So that's how I mowed my business. I have the only current bolt-in board that you can learn about events around town. There's pencil sharpeners and pens and clocks everywhere because for some reason faculty and students don't seem to carry pencils or pens or clock. So people that get the architecture use it for what it's supposed to be used for. It's basically office space. Dean Sakhamoil, before he moved back from Yale, he was basically using my space as his office space. Yeah, absolutely. Live work, how we call it. Yeah, that's right. Let's go to the next slide and that gets us to the heart of your establishment where the things happen. And this lady here happened to be there and told us this interesting story that, as it's often on the island, that you've got to get off island to really re-appreciate what you had. So she said she grew up in this area, re-closed, but the place wasn't on her radar. It took her to go to Seattle, become a fan of these kind of owner-owned operated coffee shops to come back and say, wow, I actually always had one. And here it is. And now she is a customer, right? I mean, that shows how nondescript, right? That happens a lot. A lot of times people are brought here on the last day of school. They've matriculated and moving on, they threw a little party for them. And they bring them to their coffee line. And they say, well, I never knew about this place. And I don't want to tell them that maybe they didn't want to be here because they didn't want to see you here. But for a party, it's a good place. But it's also been, I've also met some famous people here. I met, they brought Stokely Carmichael here to show them that we have a Berkeley S-type coffee shop at the University of Hawaii. And he was impressed with it. And I've also met the Carl Baryshakoff because when the YWCA owned it, they used to have a sprung floor in that multi-purpose room. And that's where he rehearsed before his performance. Oh, very cool. And peeking a little bit closer into your wizard chamber here next slide here, we can see what else delicious you serve. Yeah, that's some chili that I made for the graduate students that, I guess to sober up the graduate students after the TGs that occurs every Friday in front of Marine Science. And I figured that they get so intoxicated, that maybe it's hard for them to find dinner. So I started providing dinner for them after I reopened the shop at seven o'clock so that these people can straggle in and have a real meal. I'm the only place that's open on weekends and at night. On holidays and on Wednesday night, I'm the only place that's open in the area within walking distance of the University of Hawaii. And we have to mention at this point, you're running this pretty much as a non-profit pro bono business, pretty much getting by but not being able to be profitable, right? So when we discussed that you might be pushed out, you always surprised me in that case with saying, well, as sad as it might be, maybe it's good because maybe I finally start all over and make money, right? Yeah, I just do it because I like it. Yeah. And it pays expenses. And it's been some of my retirement plans since I was 35. So I've been basically doing this because I enjoy it. And I considered myself retired after I stopped working for other people. So you think of yourself as retired now, even though you're really not? Yeah, because I can't imagine not working or not doing something. We can't imagine that either, but I'm thinking about how one would translocate, I guess it's a term, if you would move this over to another place. And next slide, myself having had a chance to design with my family business coffee shops, it makes me aware if you couldn't do that with your place because the design, the gestalt is organic. And next slide, we had an interesting discussion because you said to me that people kind of over romanticize or kind of make this sort of nostalgia that each object is scripted and is there for. People adopt me and then they kind of come up with their own narrative of some of the things that I have, of the setting. And a lot of it is fiction, but it's okay. And this one I asked you, and he told me what the author meant with this one, but it also, you told me what it meant for you is keeping the kitchen cool because this is where the sun comes in in the afternoon and you just block the sun with it. The artist is a guy named Bill Feene and he since moved to North Carolina. But I met him one day when I was, I used to meet my girlfriend every Monday in Guamernalo. And he used to live on one of the right of ways to Guamernalo Beach. And that's the first time I met him. And then I met him again when he was selling his Greenbrier which is basically a valiant that's been converted into a van. A van, yeah. Yeah, it's had the same type of motor, similar to a Volkswagen motor. Like it was a copy of the Volkswagen van. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we became pretty good friends and he had done several shows at my place and this is a picture of his ex-wife before, his ex-wife when she was pregnant with their first child who miscarried. But between the time that the show went up and the time that the show went down, his wife had run off with his kid because they were estranged. And he found himself a girlfriend and there was a retaliation for it. So I said, you probably don't want to take this back with you. Can you please give it to me and put it up here? So to keep the son out of my kitchen. Exactly. And next slide here, awesome story. What's, why were you insisting of having a picture taken of this? Well, the free store is Gay Chan at the art department. That's her idea. But she once told me that I was her, what do you call it? Muse? Yeah, muse. And I don't know if she was referring to the free store idea because my shop is basically furnished with castoffs that I find on the street. And being in the university area, there's a lot of people that move into apartments and houses in the neighborhood and then they leave things when they don't need them anymore. Yeah. And talking off the street, maybe we can get the next slide up here because even in the university area, even as famous people as Bruno Mars, who was living in abandoned homes with his dad, way back there in Manoa, right? And we still have these sort of urban slash suburban nomads here as there's one. And you running a very inclusive management can get the next slide up here. Tell us how you basically constructed your front yard in regard to that. Well, the building has all these possibilities for people to congregate. And what's fun about being practically the sole occupant of the building is that if no one's going to use the space, then I'll take some of the castoffs that I find and create little spaces. The coffee shop is actually the biggest coffee shop you'll find in Honolulu. It has a front. This is a picture of the front entrance. And I put some, you know, cast away, cast off chairs out there and create a nice little seating area. And it's nice to sit there in the evening and in the evenings. And it's nice to sit there after the sun gets a little higher in the morning. But I don't see very many people taking advantage of that space. So I like to sit there. And do it here that you offer and provide. I like to try to create all these little niches of little spaces that people can occupy. And this is one that's definitely underutilized. I'll have to go sit there. Yeah, you have to go sit there. Okay, I will spot you there. Okay. So let's go to the next slide and we're getting to the end of the show. But we want to make a pitch here. This is us coming Saturday, starting at two o'clock. There is what's a national initiative of Doko Momo. It's called Walking Tourist. So every chapter has that in the United States. Everyone is walking along with Mitzutri Modern Marbles. And we started, which is a sad start because just like we were doing it with the Wart Plaza way back, which soon after that was demolished. And that's maybe why you're hiding this time in your office and not joining. No, you have a better reason. No, I can't come by. I would like to come, but I can't. But we have to, I have to on our behalf talk about the Varsity Building, which is also doomed for demolition. But we don't give up. We walk up the hill and we end pretty much. This is the busher. This is online. It shows only three buildings out of eight or so and yours is part of it. So once again, it's up to this day, a very prominent building. And next slide, this is a little composition, a little potpourri of other pieces of work of the architects who were called Johnson and Perkins. There is this beautiful decade of design publication from the heydays of tropical modernism here from the 60s published by the AIA. You see a bunch of single family residences. Above you see a very recent one that has been gentrified and remodeled and goes for several millions. And very interesting on the very bottom right is actually a very affordable unit's tower that they designed very early in the 60s. And that gets us to the next slide. These are folks from, you see from the license plate, your license plate collector. So is this a Hawaiian? Is the H for Hawaiian? No, it is not the H. This is a German license plate on the motorcycle on the left and the H stands for Hanover, which is your hometown. That's it. So these, this couple here, Kristin and Stefan Klein-Schmidt, with their Americano, that's why they have Harleys. They have actually turned out to be a blue book, not a yellow book, but this is the original. On the Lulu City Guide. So people like them, culturally interested tourists, have these and they come with the expectation that this very special place is around and stays around. So last slide here. I think if we would get rid of this place, it would make us look, us as UH, which I'm an employee of, would make us look very bad. And we've been talking a lot about if we want to resist progression, you know, and we can't win, right? No, no, no, you can't. There is obviously a demand for other things like student housing, but we have solutions for that, right? Well, the other possibility is too. This is what's come up in the classes that you teach at UH, the Primitivist Projects, which are just theoretical now, but they can be built. They're tall, skinny columns and they're cylindrical. They have a lot of interesting aspects to them. And you're saying, wait a minute, why don't we leave this 1959 building and put in some Primitiva structure there instead of wiping everything out? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there is one on campus. There is a round dormitory. Yeah, there are. Oh, absolutely, yeah. They're like the ancestors of that. They are the evolution of that. So we, why don't you, at the end, please share with the audience what the wallpaper paid and was classified. What the book actually says, I'm going to read to you and you can see the picture in the lower left. Coffee line, the mix of office furniture, saggy 1960s chairs, formica top tables, musical instruments, kitchen appliances, and house plants. A Dennis Sueyoka snack bar is part shabby flat, part campus cool. Think of it more as an extrusion of Sueyoka's mind, the cafe equivalent of the film Being John Malkovich. In addition to excellent coffee, Sueyoka serves up a range of hardy, no-friil sandwiches and vegetarian dishes for which you may have to wait. A fascinating selection of reading material and an interesting crowd will make you want to linger. There we are. That being said, we're at the show with that. We expect the effort and why to be around and coffee line for much longer because it is a prime institution. It is. So thank you, Dennis, for having been here and encouraged us for that. And thank you to Soto. It's just very coincidental. They just had that faculty sit-out meeting last week. Exactly. Discussing plans for the movie. So that being said, thank you for watching and look forward to seeing you again for one of our next shows. And until then, please stay very tropical mid-century and also beginning of the next century modern. Bye-bye.