 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Human Humane Architecture. I'm the co-host of this program, DeSoto Brown, the Vision Museum Historian, and joining us by audio only from Germany is our host, Martin de Spang. Hello, Martin, are you there? I'm there. There we are. Right in early, but that's usually the case, because I'm half around the world. Yes, you are. To the 11 hours apart. Yes, you are. Let's go to the first slide real quick here, which reminds us of how we ended last time, where at the top left, you were so excited about the pokey store in Munich here in Germany, and then you let me go skiing with my son, who you see at the very bottom left with my daughter in law, and you were most excited about another food item, which is the brand that's shown on the Sundeck Lounge Shares, and that's undutla, and I'm not asking you to repeat that. No, I'm not going to do a good job of repeating that. And that's an Austrian herb lemonade that I grew up on because I'm half Austrian, because my mother is Austrian, high mom. So, but obviously, these guys are not wearing appropriate attire for the cold, usually they wear the traditional multi-layered wool stuff, and here they're just almost naked, you know, they're like have the later holding on and no shirt and bikini. So I think they want to be in the tropics. Of course they do. And so my son and my daughter in law want to be in the warmth, and they go to their next step island, which is the island of Malta, to export their aloha-shaped eyes business there. So good luck guys on that one. So everyone wants to be back in paradise, so we go back. So let's go to the second page here, please, where we see this is our Champs-Élysées, this is Calacaua Avenue, that a whole Waikiki used to be palm groves, and which you see at the very top left on that historic book here cover where they were cutting through the almost like talking, you know, Paris houseman was cutting through the boulevards. So they cut Calacaua through the palm groves, and then through mid-century, the architects were really keen to keep that sort of character. And unfortunately today, most of that is gone fairly recently at the top right, we referenced a show we did about that we lost international marketplace, it was replaced with something pretty corporate American, not what it used to be. So here we're looking at what we were thinking might be the last piece of tropical, exotic readiness, sort of mysterious, you see this little merchandise hut, you see a tree, you see this sort of signage that's the carved wooden thing, and it points out a place that we want to go to. And if we go over to the next slide, this is us turning around and going into it. And the bottom we're quoting activist journalist, Kurt Sandburn, who was saying, this might be the last bit of gracious green ground levels in Waikiki. And if we go to the next picture, we see what we have to expect there, which is some nice refreshments here. This is a bar, obviously, or a restaurant, and it uses sort of typeface that reminds me of your Tiki Oasis keynote speeches that we're talking about. This is probably not original, but it's themed after that. But it makes us curious, where are we going to slash? Right. So we go to the next slide, and we see something very iconic for mid-century, which is an oval pool, a big oval pool. If we move on to the next slide, in fact, what actually dominates this space is the absence of architecture, that's the presence of nature. Here, a little bit of nature under dictatorship, because that's what a pool is, that's this natural element. But it's fronted and framed by, in the background, you see architecture. And the next page is something we're zooming on, and it's something that's a little odd to put next to people in their vacation. It's actually where you leave your car, and it's a parking garage. And we were pointing out that we referenced at the very bottom right, we did a show that's rather provocative, because it's picking up on my folks here saying, hey, you're such a small island, we're in the world, are you driving? So we're polemically proposing bumper public transportation, walk a lot more, and you free up a lot of space for basically hosting the homeless, and they can all move into the easy breezy and shaded parking garages. But that aside, look at the, look at the detailing here, even though it's modern technology is cast in place, but there's some delicacy, there's some love, there's some dedication, they're cast in these sort of patterns that are not nostalgic, they're not, you know, Chevron or palm leaves, what they do these days, they're abstract, they're soft-etched geometry, very nicely done, very delicately. And if you move on to the next picture, only if you then look up, if your eyes get drawn up, you see an artificial mountain, a chunk of architecture buildings. At top left, we referenced, you see something, we did a show about, which we call the architecture, which is all these tons of pedals, which you taught me the term, they're licked and stick to the buildings and allow you to enjoy the outdoors all at night. Next picture here shows us that the complex has another wing. And this is fronting the street that's named after the person, the princess, who, yeah, gave the name to the hotel. Correct, princess got a new one. Exactly, move on to the next picture, there's what's really typical, we were talking about the show that's a very sort of efficient and effective construction and in concrete, that's very sort of international style, but they gave it some softening touch, which are these meandering and avoiding yet to say wavy, but that's what people would see these days, lanai, the lanai form. So they went through the effort not to make them rectilinear as everything else, but to give them that sort of sexy curviness. Correct. And we go to the next slide, that sexy curviness, our tropical tourism expert, Suzanne, was experiencing some years ago in another project that implies and applies that as well, that scene that is the Calhalla Hilton hotel where the guardrail is also bowed out. And we were saying, you know, this isn't just these days, everything we're seeing is still stuck in postmodernism. This isn't just to look wavy because there's water around. This gives you the very sort of utilitarian functional advantage that at the middle of the lanai, you can reach out the most and almost in your flying while when you go further to the side ends of your lanai, you're more sheltered from the presence of your neighbor. And once again, look at that division wall, it's got the same sort of intricacy of phone work that we were talking about earlier there. Correct. Right. Talking tropical tourism experts, Suzanne, we should go to the next slide in her show about tropical tourism. She was pointing out that all these hotel rooms these days look more or less generic. Well, you told me and we're still have to provide some images and some of the future show is that through the years from the heydays of this era when these hotels were built up to the 70s, even more, they're rather crazy in their interior decor, right? Absolutely. They were not restrained with plain white covers on the bed, but in fact, lots of pinks and purples and greens and oranges got inserted into these hotel rooms in the 1970s in particular, because they were really showing off that you were in a tropical place. You weren't at home, but it was supposed to be exotic and tropical. And today we have shifted away to this very bland color palette, as we see in the pictures here, which are from some of the rooms in the Princess Cut You Lanai Hotel. Uh-huh. Okay, we please move on to the next slide, but not without asking the audience, everyone to be seated because there's going to be some shocking news here that we have to share unfortunately. And this one is taking it slow because this was shocking about almost a decade ago. I think this article was from 2010 where there was the owners of these hotels here, which is pretty much a bunch of people like Kyoya and Starwood and people like that who own these properties, they wanted to redevelop. And they wanted to redevelop the mid-century wing of the Moana Cirque Rider. And our activist journalist, Kurt Sandburne, was lobbying against that and preventing it. Thank you, Kurt, because this is a very sweet, delicate piece that is very much alike the different parts of the building of the property that sort of Maoka, which is the Princess Carlani site. And here as well, they wanted to basically tear down the lowest story parts, keep the tower and basically build another tower. And while we were talking maybe urbanistically, we were saying these towers are basically in direction Maoka Makai, so they allow to keep the airflow on a macro scale. But if we look at the renderings at the bottom right, architecturally we weren't so sure if they would be of benefit and an improvement for the fabric of the Waikiki. And now people also see that we go to the next page because this popped up and you have to shock me around the world and say, Martin, look at this. So here there are again trying to do the same thing, but even more extreme, because they basically want to raise, as the article even is bluntly honest to say that, the entire site, the entire property and replace it with this. And let's look into this closer to the next slide. We're looking at the bottom part and we can only imagine this is going to be tons of parking. This is going to be tons of retail that you lick and stick and ribbon decorate with some crazy stuff that we talked about. These are the references at the top of the page that these days, the most of the dedication of architectural passion goes into decorating parking garages, which is typologically a little ironically, and also architecturally will ironically. We see that tons of in Kakaako, which is the one on the left, and we see it also in Waikiki on another hospitality type project, which is the Ritz-Caulton that Kurt was very critical about. And let's move to the next slide here because we're now we're looking at the upper part of the development, which is another tower. And it reminds us of what we show at the top of the page of the Ritz-Caulton. And then the Lanayze or the balcony seems sort of staggered and saw two lined up, and that reminds us we almost don't want to say the name of the owner of the hotel at the Trump Tower. So, you know, you would expect to be something of novelty, I mean, on such a property, and you pretty much find a mix of things that have been done anyways, very generic, very corporate. To me has nothing to do with tropical, exotic, erotic. I don't know what you think, what we can see on this picture here. Yeah, I think yeah, I just was going to say, too, that you're absolutely right that we see a lot of generic buildings in Waikiki. And the whole point of Waikiki, as you have been pointing out, is the mystique it has as the tropical destination in paradise. So, are we really fulfilling architecturally what we could be doing in this iconic location? Yeah, and we also want to, at the bottom, we basically quote from the news that this new development will have a little over a thousand rooms. So, a thousand and nine rooms. So, keep that in mind because we'll revisit that. Yes. Okay, but now I need a little bit of a therapeutic time. So, let's go back to the previous date, to the good old date, to the heyday of the property. Let's go to the next slide and talking erotic, tropical, exotic. This is it for me, right? I mean, this is where I want to be. This is what I expect when I want to travel half around the world. Right. And, you know, I want palm trees. I want sort of these hot, a dicky roof architecture. I want a lot of sun. I want water. I want sky. It has it all. Correct. And the way it provided that is rather interesting because, of course, it's an urban setting. This is across this very sort of landscaping and almost suburban or somewhere in nature. But if we move on to the next picture, you tell me how this is sort of framed from the outside. Right. And this is, this was actually a meeting room facility that was built in 1958. But it looks just like or very similar to the buildings fronting the Princess Coyolani on Kawakawa Avenue, which are retail buildings. And they have a very distinctive, low-key, but very attractive appearance to them with textured concrete block walls and then this angular sort of thrusting roof that does have some kind of Polynesian influences. So, it is modern. It's mid-century, but it also isn't just generically like everything else. And it does have a very beautiful appeal. This building that we're looking at right now is gone. It was replaced in part of the redevelopment of this entire property with a building that we're going to be seeing very soon. Yeah. And it also reminds me, and I forgot to put a reference picture into a previous show about the Makaha Resort, which was also sitting on this horizontal concrete plinth. And then the more pagoda-like Polynesian buildings were sitting on that one. Correct. So, let's move on to the next slide here, which is a very cute and nice little illustration of the property. So, how they imagined it to be. And it shows all these aspects. And we put in a little reference to a previous show with Will Bruder, which where he walked us through what he really liked in this area. And this is the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. And the architects of this project, too, were Gartner Daily architects. And they were also commissioned to actually redo the interior mid-century of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Right. So, if we move on to the next picture here, we put in the date of the year of build, which is 1955. And if you go to some nice historic Hawaii documentations, I found that the same year dates the Sinclair Library that we were talking about a couple of times. And now that gets redeveloped, that we're basically very worried about, because they don't seem to keep the integrity of the original building. So, one of us, either us or Doko Momo, us have to probably shed a light on that one as well. So, let's move on to the next picture. I put in the the Biltmore at the very top right. And you tell us what's the relationship between the Biltmore and this first wing of the Princess Hotel. Well, both of the Biltmore and the Princess Cut You Lonnie Hotels opened in 1955. They were both about the same height, about 10 stories. And they both changed Waikiki quite dramatically to both appear at the same time. At the time, they looked huge and dramatic. Of course, today they would be dwarfed by everything else. The Biltmore Hotel was demolished in 1974 by being blown up by dynamite. That was the first building implosion in Honolulu, a bit of a big scale. And so, we'll see what's going to happen with the Princess Cut You Lonnie, if it's going to be a similar fate. Yeah, yeah. But let's first revisit what happened to it five years after 1955. And that's the next slide. You can see that in fact, that we're adding another wing. That's the one faces the Princess Street here. And that's only one story shorter than the original one. That's 10 story. And then move on to the next slide in 1970. So, one and a half decades later, they were building what's most iconic now, the 29 story tower. And we put in at the very bottom how many rooms this all together had and still has. And that's 1,142. So, if you compare it to 1,009 of the new, simple people like us start to wonder, okay, why do you go through what she pointed out? Because you witnessed several demolitions. For example, we will get to in one of the next shows because the hospital, which wasn't Waikiki, that they basically blew up. And if you want to blow something up in a sort of functioning and, you know, in service, a tourist industry, how do you want to do that? And why do you want to do that? If you don't provide, I mean, usually you redevelop because you want to make more money, right? So you want to be higher, you want to build higher. I think currently in the political realm, they're discussing to basically allowed to go higher with tall buildings, right? So you would think that's your motivation. So we're curious about exactly why do you want to redevelop. And from here, it's hard. I think we probably, if this would be a Doka Momo show, which you're doing one next week, we would have to stop. But since we're human human architecture, we don't. We keep on going. So let's go to the next page in 24. Here we're stepping above and beyond because we're thinking, you as a historian, you know, because you're going to be around in the next 50 years. We'll see. We'll see. I count you on that. All right, all right. And so you want to have something that you want to preserve in 50 years. We got to basically continue, which you pointed out in your last show in human human architecture, which was about the tradition of the evolution of innovation on the island. So you want to, you have to continue to create innovation, right? So on this page here, we did this polemic collage of one of the very sexy pictures of the princess and little references to a previous show where we were shedding a light on one of the new timeshare towers of the Hilton wine village, which is a rather hideous building that our tropical tropical here, David Rock was basically at the end. He said, what are you going to put on top of it? They put some hideous crowns. Maybe they want to be a queen. And we found out by thinking about it, maybe it's not the queen because they're homeless people on the beach. And the queens and the princesses always took care of their people. So they wouldn't have done that. That's right. So we're just looking at, you know, the similarity. And we want to do a show about a dress code and the dressing code. He told me that the queen, you know, was was raised and spent a lot of time in England. So she was very cosmopolitan. Yes. So she was, you know, she represented the best of both worlds, worlds, right? Western world and the Hawaiian world. And so I think the building does, you know, the building is a truly American high rise, but it's considered of, you know, orientation, the airflow, it's shading itself. It's pretty much, it's very tropical exotic, yet it's very modern, right? Right. And I think, too, we also were pointing out that the similarity, each of those wings has got the same lanai pattern, which I admired that they over this period of 15 years, they chose to keep that as a unifying factor of the three disparate buildings. And that's something that you rarely see happen. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And especially again, tropical tourist experts was then tells us there's like, you know, every 15 years or something, you got, you got to totally redo things so that they were thinking to their sort of genetic code. Yeah. I think that's very, very remarkable. Absolutely. That's admirable. They were saying, this is our signature style. They want to stick to that. And they wanted to resist that sort of temptation of novelty that we have sort of these days, you always got to be the best, you always got to be in a center, you know, you always got to be American superstar, you know, up to the highest level of government. We have that, you know, maybe not that qualified, want to be the best and the star. Well, anyways, let's move on to the next slide here, which is tropical tourism. Suzanne again, when she was in Brazil, the other tropics, she was hugging that palm tree on that little picture here. And I put that into the picture that you provided here, which I find, I mean, talking erotic, tropical exoticness, this is it pretty much. I mean, this is why you go to the tropics. You want to be in love. You want to, you know, that's what you want to have in the jungle. And even though it's an urban setting, the composition, that's the success of the development provided that, you know, what people want it. That's right. Coming from the cold. That's right. Where I'm sitting here shivering. Yes. Where I'm in the warmth. So let's, let's, you know, sort of wrap up here and conclude with our polemic propositions. Move on to the next slide. Here's tropical tourism expert, Suzanne and activist journalist Kurt endorsing a project that we've been doing with the emerging generation, which is called jungleism. And we're thinking about, again, to, to continue to write this story of the tradition of innovation on the island. And sometimes you got to go full circle because, and Suzanne, Suzanne taught me the term USP, unique selling proposition. And one of them is our mild tropical climate versus some other subtropical climate where it can't be as worse because it's always 100% saturated humidity. But here we got the trade wind. So maybe we want to rediscover the trade wind as a USP and work with that. So this one on a macro scale was proposing to strip the building naked, take off their curtain walls, let the breeze go through and then use nature to basically reinvigorate that kind of fabric. That was the goal of that kind of project. And then, you know, when you build something new, and let's move on to the next slide, and you're by now way better to describe these projects that we've been doing than I am, which I'm very happy about. But we want to make sure to say it's not about these projects in specific, they're just placeholders. Right. For medieval one. And we want to say is basically, at the beginning of the 21st century, if you pick up that huge amount of money to destroy that gem from its century, which you shouldn't, let's be clear about that, we would be more than happy to stay with our role and capacity of DOKA mobile members and showmasters. Please keep it, please keep it. But if for some reason you can, then please build something today, which is at least as good as the stuff that was built in the century. And that was damn good stuff. Right. So that pushes the bar really, really high. Right. So what could that be? I think, and this is what tropical tourism, Suzanne teaches me that she basically says tourism is changing to, and I hate the term sustainable, but that's just the technical term in that realm. They call it sustainable tourism, is that the tourist is not someone that comes and trashes the complete resources. Right. Someone who becomes a short-term resident. Right. And basically engages both socially and culturally and economically and ecologically. Yes. So I think this is what a new hotel wants to be, to take this all into consideration. And primitiva could be what comes out of it, but it could be also something different. But along these lines, right? Yeah. Right. Exactly. And I think that, primitiva is one, two, et cetera. The projects that you've done in your teaching, again, are sometimes somewhat fantasy. But the point also is that innovation is part of this. And if we're going to demolish old stuff, let's look at what we can do better. Let's look at what we can do differently. Let's look at how we can evolve and grow rather than just repeat. Exactly. And then go to the next slide. This is primitiva, too, what we're talking about. And yes, they are visionary. But so were the hotels and the princess hotel we're talking about today was very visionary in this century. I mean, this was like building on an island with no construction industry, building something like that was absolutely visionary. That wasn't like copycatting something that has been done for centuries. But that's what they're proposing right now. I mean, that's really what we see on this rendering. And we let ourselves be surprised with more details. But as of now, we just have to say it ticks us off because it doesn't look like I want to create something that is unique at the beginning of the 21st century for our most unique island, right? Correct. That's right. So I kind of lost track of time, which I always do. But this time in particular, because we have some technical issues, VMIX gave up on us and Zoom gave up on us. And I guess Skype, so we're sort of like we're in limbo. But how much do we have left? We've got one minute left. So let's keep going. Let's go to our next slide. So these are from your archive. Isn't this beautiful? And they even say here, you know, soft tropical breezes waft through the lobby. So this is it. And if the hotel has that, just keep it. And the next one I love, this is from your poster collection. Isn't that beautiful? How they captured with this drawing, the aspect of an oval pool, the huts, the palm trees, the blue sky, and then the kind of soft as etched tropicalized, rational, international stuff. That's right. That's right. That's right. We just say keep that, keep it, keep it, keep it. But you know, if not, which is to be expected next slide, I think we got to continue to rebel sort of and be the public's conscious and also do a show about a couple of other projects that might be threatened as well. And this might be one, let's do a show about that one. This is part of the Outreger development from the past. This is just a cross. Let's do a show about that one. But more urgently, let's go to the last slide here is a project that the announcement of the redevelopment of the Princess property was pointing out. And I think they were a little screwed up with that mask because they said it's going to be the first new only hotel tower in 40 years. But then they reference the Waikiki Park Hotel, which is part of the Hale Kalani that was in 87. So they're not quite sure. But this project, the Waikiki Park Hotel is actually under development. And when I left, I took this picture here. So why don't we do the next show about that one? Because it seems really urgent to raise awareness about, you know, what people have. And we feel they don't even appreciate what they have. That's very true. Well, I think that brings us to the end of this week's show for human humane architecture. Thank you, Martin, for joining us. Thank you all of you for joining us. I will be back next week with a Dokomomo show about something from the mid-century. But till then, thanks for watching and aloha.