 Good to see you all back for another episode of Think Pickerwise Human-Humane Architecture, and it happens to be the 211th one. And we're broadcasting in the midst of ongoing COVID and climate crisis. Some are saying we hopefully hit the peak of the Delta variant as it has at other places, but we don't know. And also we have not had a hurricane that was promised to come here and also a hurricane Ida, although there was a casualty or a few, not as many as Katrina. But I think we all know it's only a question of when this happens and not if. So we want to throw out that we should reconsider the way we live and operate on the islands and we run on tourism as we know. So we want to basically learn from the best practices of the past for the even better ones for the future. And we're have our panel back today with the two most utmost hospitality experts, tropical, exotical experts that is Ron Lindgren in Long Beach, California, Iran. Hello. And De Soto in his home house where he grew up, designed by Ostepov. De Soto, good to have you back. How do you do? Good morning. Hello. Whatever. Good. And this is also still part of looking above and beyond our horizons, which we urgently finally need to. We are aware finally that there might be other paradises out there that are competitive to us. So we're well advised to look at them. So this is also part of a series to look, compare the European, which is Madera, and our Polynesian paradise, which is Hawaii. So we've been allocating maybe the prime project that is symbolizing the best of tourism manifestation as architecture. And that's the Manakea Beach Hotel. And let's bring up the first slide to share that further with you. This one is thanks to Don Hibbard from his great book, Designing Paradise, where he was digging out a picture from the project under construction. And you guys who have actually seen it, and shame on me, I need to do this show to get a taste of it. This is very remote out there. So they had to truck all this material out there. And we want to classify this as being tropical brutalism. And to that reason, it's primary stereotomic. So it's port in place concrete. And just imagine all the scaffolding and all the cement trucks out there to build this, right guys? Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, they had to build the road to it. They had to extend the existing government road to be able to accommodate this because there was no vehicle access to the site. Certainly not on a paved road when they got started. That's changed tremendously since this hotel was built. But at the time, it was very remote. Yeah. And let's go to the second slide. Ron, you were saying you and your great library, which was luckily, at least it's content, not damaged by internal flooding, hurricanes. And just in case you hear some knocking here and there, both at this studio and yours, your home studios, there's construction going on, but probably for this show being about architecture that's more appropriate than for any of the other shows. And so you've been digging out, you have many SOS books, you said. And one of them, you found these four principles that SOM had in general, but also applied very strictly specifically to this project. And please share them with us. Yes, my design library wouldn't be complete if I didn't have some books on Skidmore, O'Rourke and Merrill for their many, many years of practice. But in each of the books, I found the same sort of design precepts mentioned as something very paramount to their practice and the success of their practice. And the reason I wanted to mention them is that we're going to find all four of them very much illustrated in the built design of the Mauna Kea. First of all, strong massing. And of course, we see that here in a very thoroughly modern architecture. Then the harmonious fit to the site. We'll be talking about its relationship to the bay and the ocean and the beach shortly. A very rich elaboration of form. In this case, SOM took structure and made it art by putting an incredible corduroy texture all over the exposed columns of beams, which we'll also see later. And so structure has become sculpture there. And finally, speaking of sculpture, very carefully crafted sculptural spatial experiences. And one of the wonderful things, one of the many wonderful things of the hotel is how you're led down out and through the hotel until finally you find yourself drawn to the beach, the bay and the view of the open ocean off in the distance. Yeah. And you also have a floor plan in there. That's also from one of the books you have, Ron. And we sort of label this slide here as saying, well, it is stear atomic. So it's solid massed and it's even one of their agendas. But it's perforated and hollowed out because we're here in the tropics. And we say this one here with the plan really reminds us that this has this vertical punching throughs, these cutouts, these courtyards that really help to keep it cool. Because otherwise, I tell the emerging generation, thermal mass is a no go in the tropics because it just overheats and radiates. So you need to flush that with cool air all the time with the trade winds, which they did. And let's go to the next slide, which we subtitled horizontal perforations because it shows all the lanais, the guest rooms. But it also shows how the whole thing is basically floating and elevated above the ground by this sort of forest of columns, right? And I also did our mandatory biochlametic check. This is at the bottom right. This is from Google Maps, which you can all do. And this is set in a way that North is up. So what is sort of interesting about the orientation guys that we see there? Well, normally, one of the things that we always talk about is where the sun comes, where the sun hits a building and how much shading there is and how much exposure there is. And in one sense, the building is not optimally cited because it does get the strong afternoon sun. But more importantly, the siting in the bay setting is so important because of the views that you get. As Ron was saying, it could have been positioned in another place where you just looked out on the ocean. But that's far less interesting for anybody inside the building. What you have here is not only a view of the ocean, but a view of the topography of the bay and the beach and the people in the ocean and the surf that's in the bay, et cetera. So you're situated up on a hill looking down over this vista. And at the same time, however, there are structural things of the hotel that help shade those individual line eyes and the facade on that side of the building. So it isn't, even though, again, it may be getting that afternoon sun, it deals with it. And it also has the vista that you couldn't get otherwise. And even though the four points that you quoted Ron from SOAM's agenda, they could have been misunderstood by postmodernist because it talks about form, form, form. But go to the next slide. We wouldn't have picked this project and we wouldn't admire it so much if it would have actually been designed the other way around from inside out rather than outside in. And here you see what we always talk about is the ultimate of tropical exotic, this is being outside. This is a huge lanai, it's very deep. So that being the case, and we're facing now basically here, at least on, this might actually be the Malka view that we see here. So if we imagine this to be the other side, which would be the ocean, we're facing southwest. So by the time the sun comes around and gets lower and lower and more and more problematic because it shoots so deeply into the space, that sort of separating wall that separates the unit from the other one is actually providing that necessary shade. So you're getting this significant sort of triangular shade space on your lanai that you can basically retract to and stay cool behind while at the same time the horizontal porosity is flushing the concrete with cool air, with cool trade width. So you don't get what I always tell the students, which is the Alamona parking garage, Alamona shopping mall parking garage effect, which it feels so hot in there. And that is for various reasons, one of them that all these combustion heater engines store there heat in there. But the other thing is that it's blocked in the middle with all the service core, so it can't get cooled by the air. And this is why it feels so hot and muggy there, not the case here. So very cleverly, biochlametically designed, and not postmodernly, because postmodernism luckily hadn't been around. This is mid-60s. This is the height of multi-purpose, multi-meaning, very clever modernism. And I also want to say in this picture, you can see overhead that there's this wooden lattice. And not only is that providing shade, but the direction that the slats are oriented means that the lanais that are above yours, that blocks the view of anybody on that lanai looking down at yours. So it does shading, and it also provides privacy. And then if you look at that horizontal beam that goes across this lanai in the open side, there is the texture that Ron was describing earlier. And we'll see other examples of that. This kind of, as Ron says, it's almost like corduroy because it's got these grooves in it that are parallel to each other. And that's part of the way the hotel was constructed, the forms that the concrete was poured into had that design. And Ron, you have a client perfectionist story about that corduroy? Well, the people in charge of the contracting company had reason to fear when Rockefeller himself showed up at the site more than once. And he saw some of the concrete corduroy aspect looking maybe a little wonky in his eyes. So he had them chip it back several inches away and then reformed again so that those very straight lines would be straight. And when they ran up a column, they'd also run up along the underside of the beam and everything would be perfectly aligned. This was a client who wanted perfection and he got 99.9 percent of it. It's one of the finest concrete pours I've ever seen. And we might add to that that it was and probably continued to be the most expensive hotel at that point. And so probably then he was rightly so requesting the finest quality for the most money he spent. The next slide. And being a Rockefeller from an incredibly wealthy family, he was able to require that to be done. And it wasn't a matter of putting it up as cheaply as possible as quickly as possible. It was there was Rockefeller money behind it. There you go. Go to the next slide that we see the outside in expression of that, which again, we're seeing the sort of not just stacked but also tapered and staggered and eyes there. And then as you guys pointed out before that as it's always been the case in greatest modernism, the multi-dutyness of elements, these wooden shading elements basically provide shade. As you can tell here, this is probably like the midday or a situation where the sun came more from the south than the late day. And you can see how very effectively that line gets shaded. And at the same time, it provides the privacy so that you don't see your guest here above you or vice versa. So very, very cleverly designed. So while again, the little slice picture on the right, it looks rather solidified and as a chunky form. But actually, when you look at it in its detail and its refinement, it's not brutal, right? Some people might still, and these days where there's this kind of trauma with brutalism looking back. And by the way, the youngest generation, just in studio, I had a couple of guys who said, oh yeah, brutalism is really cool. And I said, I'm happy, we're happy you think so. So there's a re-appreciation there. But the generation that had been deeply into brutalism and just like with any style, once the minions and the mediocre followers basically try to mimic a style and mass build it, then it's when really sort of creates these kind of bad memories retrospectively. So some people might say, what's beautiful about that? It's really a big chunk of a building, but it's not. It's very filigree and fine-grained and then again aerated, as we said. So go to the next slide and I'll let you guys talk about that. Well, two things. First of all, this really clearly shows how the interior of this building is open and also how the different levels and the different floors are visible as you walk around, which is very intriguing visually and you want to walk over and look at them. But this hotel is also a show place, kind of like a museum of an amazing collection of art that comes not only from different parts of the Pacific, but from Asia as well. And again, the Rockefellers were wealthy enough that they were able to collect this material and also civic-minded enough, if you will, to put it on public display where a whole bunch of people could see it. Even if you didn't pay admission, you could come into the hotel and look at all these beautiful pieces. And as Ron said, there are guides. They actually provide guides to walk around and look at the art, which is a major part of the entire hotel experience. And the Soto made a strong point that the building itself is unencumbered with ornamentation or any particular detail. And as a result, you can really focus on the art, because there isn't something as a distracting background. And that's a particularly handsome example of a very ancient Buddha in a 1960s building coexisting quite handsomely. Yeah, I might sort of ask the question to you, Soto, while in these days, the hospitality industry likes to defer back to kind of pre-contact decoration rights to lure the people. This year wasn't the case. And in what you had just described, that it was so sort of functional and spot-on. From my understanding, you tell me, because it's your culture, the Hawaiian culture different than other Polynesian cultures were actually less ornated. And it wasn't all very performative. And so to that degree, even though this doesn't look Hawaiian, but it is actually more in the tradition of Hawaii than the ones they pretend more these days. Is that fair to say? Yeah. And I think what this hotel really did was to highlight actual pieces from not only Hawaiian culture, but the other cultures in a setting that's almost like a museum. So the pieces and the objects speak for themselves, rather than little details being taken from them and then slapped up on the wall as people might do today. Here it's the real thing in its own exhibit and you can look at it and make up your own mind about it rather than somebody reinterpreting it. Yeah. And I threw in that little show quote at the top right, which is the building that has impacted me the most as a young student on a president's scholarship in Nebraska. This is I am Pays NBC Bank at that time, still a national bank of commerce in Nebraska. And that was built about a decade later. And that was at the height of brutalism, because we usually associate brutalism more with the 70s than with the 60s. So the monarchy is an early one. And in the last show, I was sharing my conspiracy theory that SOM was basically bringing the Misi an item to the masses. And so did basically I am pay with a one of Louis Khan. But then in there in their work, you can see that sort of almost being like a fusion almost being blended. And I was asking you the question, if you guys remember from when you were there, if because we are chaired in that show, that moment when I was as a as someone who banks in the in that bank, and I was in the in the lobby, and they had been done some test painting on this very nicely buff color pigmented concrete that that had been so lucky to never have been painted, which you guys said almost happens to any building. And then I was, you know, expressing my, my outrage so vividly that person walked by and basically listened to me and she must have had some influence and the next time they started to clean and take the grease out and clean it with soap and that basically did the job. And we said that we don't quite remember. I mean, we can be pretty sure that the concrete was not painted originally, even though you guys run in and even and killings were with Brady at the beginning and then at the and its conclusion with you guys as as Lindgren, you know, stricker and Wilson, you had for very good reasons because we were working more skeletal, more more tectonic, and to highlight this sort of immateriality of these materials. And as you said, you know, just like the basically in that great Julius Schulman moonlight picture basically to disintegrate the building away into the into into the night, right, so two different different approaches. We're just wondering and I was just throwing in, you know, the sentimental idea if it ever had been painted. By the way, dear, you know, hotel owners in management, there's a way to very carefully sandblast and get that nasty paint off and bring it back to the original. Just an idea. All right, get to the next slide. And you guys take it from there because here's your corduroy, you know, finesse again, and a space that you guys remain remember very vividly, haven't been dining there. Well, there's the first of all, in the big picture, the black and white picture, again, you see those vertical groups accented with two with small circles at intervals as well, that's part of the entire thing. And you also see the basic form of how the column meets the roofline. But this open space, which we will see later is one of the places in which you dined, you had breakfast and lunch in that space. And then on the right is the dining room pavilion, which was the dinner site. So it has, it also has columns as you see, but they're treated a little bit differently because it's a totally different freestanding structure. But it does have, again, the similar mass and the concrete forms. And it is very brutalist and a very attractive brutalism, I might say. But both cases, you've got a very high ceiling, which also makes for a very interesting and pleasant dining experience. That is, the next slide shows that you'll see that what is my favorite space in the whole hotel. So next slide, please. And here is a two-story space, a beautiful wood coffered ceiling overhead. These cruciform columns and the double beams that slide through them show a real expressionism, but they are all covered with this corduary texture. And when I spent a day there once, I didn't get the opportunity to spend an evening. But I got there early in the morning and stayed until after sunset to experience this hotel because I'd seen pictures and was so impressed with it. And as people sat and ate in this two-story space, they were to reach out and touch the corduary, I think, just to see if it was real. What's really a nice contrast is that to the right of where those people are sitting is the buffet and a bar and some shops. And they're tucked into the hillside almost like caves, a nice contrast. To the left, they'd be looking out through a framed opening to the bay. And again, as DeSoto said earlier, Esawan could have swung the hotel around, faced it out to the open ocean, but instead they very cleverly recognized that the action is the waves and the sense of enclosure in this most one of the most beautiful bays in all of Hawaii. And as far as the cruciform columns, can we go back to the previous slide one more time because there's a show quote at the top right, which is Mies van der Rohe's latest project, the National Gallery in Berlin that has just been remodeled after what, like, six years in a big budget by David Chippafield. And they were both from the same time. That was mid-60s, mid to late-60s Mies' last project before he died. And it's basically just space holed up by these gigantic columns, which are out of steel in that case, as he did for most of his career in America. Just at the beginning he did the pormontary apartments in Chicago, which was concrete, but after then he did steel, nothing but steel. But they're both cruciform and they really sort of dematerialize the massiveness of the column, which it needs to hold up the weight above it. But if you imagine this to be just a square or, you know, in plain column, it would look way more chunky. And let's go back to the slide to the next slide that we have been before, because you just sort of have been preparing a nice dinner for me, just for me. Thank you. No, not just for you actually. There's a menu in the upper right corner, and that's from my personal collection. And the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel did a schedule where every night they had a featured sort of cultural dinner from different parts of the world. This is the Eidelberg dinner, which you could have had at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in the 60s or 70s. And it's all in German. And I can't even read what all those kooky things are. Of course they are, there's a translation underneath it. But still, that's another sign of how multicultural the entire experience was when you went to the Mauna Kea. And you still have a certain certainly a sense of that today. Yeah, Holstein, Schnitzel, Bratka, Toffel, Erbsen, I leave it with that. And we go to the next slide, which is most likely our last one for this volume here, to have you guys expand on that multicultural aspect of the hotel. Yeah, I would like to go ahead. When I intended to spend the day, you know, looking at the architecture and rubbing my hands over the corduroy and whatever, and enjoying the beach experience, I got caught up in the fact that there are over 1000 items of folk and museum quality art displayed throughout the hotel. The Rockefellers were such art patrons. But what an idea to provide this cultural experience of southeast Asian nations plus pan oceanic Pacific cultures, all gathered and very artfully arranged. And I spent four hours seeing every one of the 1000 objects. I was just mesmerized. And every guest room was provided with a guidebook so you could plan your trip around the hotel and not miss anything. And then in the gift shop in the upper right hand corner, you could also buy a very handsome book, which I did as a reminder of what was there. At the bottom right is probably the most important and oldest piece of art on display, which happens to be a seventh century Buddha. And to the left, you're seeing an art form that actually was introduced to Hawaii back in 1820. Before that time Hawaiian women didn't really use needles and threads, but a missionary brig called the Thaddeus arrived on the Kohala coast of the Big Island. And they immediately asked some of the royalty who lived there, the royal ladies, to join these Englishmen and women for a quilting bee. It was the first quilting bee on the island. In time the Hawaiians took the art for themselves and turned it into an incredible craft. And now at the hotel, there are 30 examples of these exquisite Hawaiian quilts, each one with at least two million stitches and at least a thousand hours to complete. And the Soto and the Bishop Museum have been involved in conserving these beautiful things. And being at the end of the show, we want to close with one of our most loyal viewers who is your young mother, the Soto. And you have a memory to share as far as the quilts in this hotel. Well, when it was first publicized that these quilts were being commissioned for the hotel, my mother had a moment of fear and annoyance because she thought that they were actually going to be placed on beds like bedspreads. And she said they would be treated disrespectfully by people like tourists lying down on them wearing their shoes. And she was very offended and upset that they would be treated like that because they are pieces of art. And fortunately, it turned out that they were going to be hung on the walls in frames displayed as art and nobody ever put their shoes on them. So it ended up okay. All right. So more of that next week, we're going to continue have our volume four of the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. And then until then, obviously stay first and foremost healthy and happy and in a potentially tropical, brutalist way. Bye bye.