 Hello everybody and welcome to Think Tech Hawai'i's human humane architecture show. I am this program's co-host, the Soto Brown from Bishop Museum here in Honolulu. And joining us from Germany, his native homeland is this program's actual host, Martin Despang. Martin, are you there? There he is. I am. Bright and early. Bright and early your time. Hello. Afternoon for us. And today we're going to be talking about horizontal high rises. What are those? Let's jump into the first picture here and see. And see. Okay. Well if you look down that street. So let's stroll a little bit by. Mm-hmm. I was going to say. That's Bethel Street right? That's Bethel Street. If you look down Bethel Street you think that it's just a normal downtown street but as you pointed out, next picture. There's something weird in the distance here on next picture. There it is. Wow. A little blurry, I presume, but it's a big thing. So let's go to the next slide already. So here it is. There's the city and then there's the ship. That's right. And don't be scared. It's not like in Speed 2 with Sandra Bullock which we reference at the top where a cruise ship runs into the city. Here it's sort of a friendly and peaceful coexistence between architecture and cruise industry. And there's a whole tradition about that that we want to start out with. Let's go to the next slide. And this is our tropical tourism expert, Suzanne, when she was on the island first which is almost two decades ago, almost exactly two decades ago and we were just cleaning out her basement and found this postcard here which dates back to 1999. And here you can see the downtown skyline pretty much the way it is today. And we see something in the foreground to the left which is one of these cruise ships. But they don't look quite the way they look these days, so to right. You're pointing this out. No, they do not. They look quite different. So let's go to the next slide. Yeah. And again, you open your treasure box to your archive for these beautiful impressions from the past. And here we can already see revealing that there is a company met who was basically starting this business amongst other competitors, as you said, but they were the main ones and the most successful ones. And here you can see how they're like portraying this sort of mode of transportation as being very flamboyant, very exclusive, we were seeing before the show we were preparing, right? Because this wasn't for everyone. This was for very few people, privileged people, not only money-wise, but also time-wise, right? Yes, exactly. Because it took four days to get here and then it took four days to get back to the West Coast. You had eight to ten days just of transit time before you spent any time here in the Hawaiian Islands. And that meant that the only people who could take a ship vacation had a lot of free time. Well, I look curious. Let's jump to the next image here. And this is, you know, on a little on both day, and you told me that this was a big thing both day way back, not so much these days anymore. These big, big things come in and out and, you know, people don't really recognize or pay any attention that way back. And we can also see something sticking out. And since the show is called, Haudenosaunee's Horizontal Eye Rise is here, we can see a vertical eye rise. And let's go to the next page, please, here. Next slide. Referencing to a show you did not that long ago. You pointed out that Aloha Taua was, in fact, the first eye rise on the island. Absolutely. That's right. And it was the tallest building in the Hawaiian Islands for quite some years from the time it opened in 1926 up until the middle 1950s. At 10 stories, it was the biggest building there was. And then in contradiction, it's sort of vertical version of that, sorry, horizontal version of that we can see at the bottom right where the big cruise ships were docking at the pier that they built next to it. And let's move on to the next picture where, again, we see the these ships coming in and we see that beside the Aloha Taua, downtown Honolulu is pretty horizontal, is pretty like two, three story buildings the most. So these ships were really, really, you know, dominant and dominating the skyline, right? Absolutely. And I think one of the things that wasn't really a skyline yet, yeah, it wasn't a skyline. But I think something that we're going to come up to again is how many people were on these ships. There were more people on these ships than there were in most of those downtown buildings because the ship carried more people than were in the office buildings at the time. Well, that's a fascinating point. Next picture here. And again, the sort of fascination or obsession or fetishization with this sort of new means of transportation then also led to these very intriguing artist renderings here all hand drawn at that time because computer wasn't around yet. That's right, yeah. So they were sort of, they were, we were saying they were romanticizing this sort of new technology of boats not running on wind anymore. The term trade winds comes from the sort of the more pre-contact or, you know, early post-contact trades when they were setting sails at the Pacific Northwest and because of the wind direction coming from the northeast, we're able to sail straight down, right? That's right. And these are two pieces of music. These are songs that have to do all the way, of course, associated with ships leaving. And then this other one is just using this wonderful vision of downtown Honolulu and Alloa Tower with the ship steaming towards right towards where we're talking about. And let's move on because you have more in your treasure box from these beautiful renderings portraying this sort of exotic obsession with this very tropical island, which you can access with this sort of modern technology at that time. Absolutely, with Alloa Tower, again, reappearing. Next slide. There's another great one we thought because it's sort of juxtaposing, you know, new technology, you know, being big with sort of pre-contact, being small and the canoe and, you know, being wind-powered as we talked before, while the steam ship is obviously running with flexible fuel, which way back one was very more excited about than these days because in the meanwhile, we've found out that it's not, you know, as beautiful as you might think in the long run about what it caused us to the planet. Move on to the next slide. Again, from your archive, these postcards where Manson was celebrating, again, what they had, and you pointed out that especially the one on the left and probably the previous picture as well, they're really sort of super imposed and they're sort of meant to look bigger than they actually already were, right? Correct, and this is something that... You were making a reference to my culture, right? In the past. Yes, I was, because this type of depiction of ships, passenger ships, is looking huge and heroic and beautiful as these modern technological marvels is something that appeared in a lot of advertising during the pre-war period, especially, and that's true not only of the United States and coming to the Hawaiian Islands but in Europe as well and Germany was a major builder of ships and had a number of major shipping companies and so travel posters from Germany used the same type of idiom of this magnificent ship coming towards the viewer to emphasize its speed, its size, and its technological advancement. Yeah, and certainly not so beautiful as the part of my culture in the past. You know, the Third Reich and Hitler was war into very monumental, you know, super big, megalomania, you know, the bigger the better and the super dolmen Berlin that he proposed with his architect Albert Speer. So again, that was the German, you know, the crazy German wave and yes, as you said, all over the world where the 30s were very heroic, there was a lot of pathos in there, you know, a lot of pride, a lot of nationalists, you know, feelings and so again, America was showing off its power and as you said, you know, they were quite, you told me I didn't know that they were actually faster than the military ships. Yes, they were, yes they were. So during World War II, all of the mats and ships in the Pacific got taken over by the US Navy and they traveled all around the world for the military and those passenger ships, the mats and ships were so much faster than any of the military ships, they never could travel with any other military ships trying to protect them during the war because they'd go faster. So they really were technological marvels which nobody at the time had thought about as being useful for war purposes, but in fact, that's what ended up happening. Very interesting, so next picture and again, the reference at the top right is that at that time it didn't take much longer for the aviation industry to basically take over and that's what we have today. So the cruise ship industry is sort of marginalized and rather small compared to airplanes and big jumbos and airplanes bringing most people to our Hawaiian islands these days. While way back it was in fact, these sort of cruise ships. Absolutely. And as they were portraying here, Hawaii too, from Los Angeles and again, you said, you know, it took quite a while, but way back that was the fastest way to get there. That was, that was right. So four days, four days, five days, that's what it took to get here as opposed to one plane trip that takes part of a day. Yeah, next slide. Again, let's go back to our days here and contemplate a little bit sort of what relevance these things have in our sort of contemporary Honolulu and project maybe that could be useful in some way, a different way for the future, for the problems and challenges we have on our islands these days. So this is just us, you know, on a routine daily day in Honolulu when you get off one of the side streets that are, you know, approaching them at highway here and you see them. And again, they're now almost like two or three times as tall as they were way back because we see the shipping terminal, which we talked about in a minute here, in the foreground, in the background, you see that monster, you know, with stacked floors and housing tons of people which we're going to quantify in a little bit. So let's go to the next slide. And we're going to talk about the issues with these things and we were saying, you know, it sort of, you live very contained for quite a while. So this is a screenshotting CNN report not that long ago about an epidemic breaking out on one of these ships. And as you said, you know, there's a certain virus that just spreads and people can't get off, can, you know, get away from each other. So basically pretty much everyone gets sick. That happens every now and then. Yeah, it does. And next picture, other things happen. And obviously, you know, talking big and megalomonia and suprasizing, the Titanic was obviously, is the epitome of that. And it took a tragic sort of end, as we know. You would think people would then learn from that and maybe stay smaller, but suprasizing keeps on going. Currently, the biggest cruise ship has this German article at the top right. And this is your weekly German lesson. Was that article say to Soto? Well, I figured out it says the biggest cruise ship in the world. And then I believe you told me it's being built in that place in Germany, whatever place that is. Yeah, that's in Wismar. That's a coastal town here. And they say in the article that as of now, the largest one is the harmony of the sea. And that's a proud American ship. And it houses six and a half thousand people. Now that the next superpower might be someone else, so China is catching up. And so they have commissioned the next largest ship that houses almost 10,000 people, nine and a half thousand guests on it. And it's in fact being built by Germans in this sort of traditional shipmaking place close to the North Sea, which is part of the Atlantic, which is where the Titanic sank, right? And you have some family relationship to that tragic accident, right? My grandmother's uncle and cousin, first cousin were both killed on the ground on the Titanic because they were both men. And so they gave up their seats in the lifeboat to women and then they went down with the ship. Gentleman. Gentleman. Gentleman they were. Self-sacrificing. Remembering for that, always and forever. Yeah, thank you for sharing. So next slide. And to these days, things like that, this is again Tropical Tourist expert Suzanne in her native Bavaria here. This is our most prominent newspaper that you can buy nationally, the Southern German magazine here and the title story not that long ago was this sort of Norwegian cruise ship that got into trouble because there was a big storm and you remember the engines basically were out and so they were just like floating there amongst the full forces of nature. Right. Yes, that's right. It's not always fun on a cruise ship. No. And next picture. There's tragedies on different levels. I mean, the previous one were on big scale epidemic and getting into problems with storms. But also, there's an un-proportional high number of personal tragedies on cruise ships. And I was throwing in this here as a reference or a contribution from my culture and you being the good investigator, you looked this up and what did you find? Well, I discovered that this man who disappeared from the ship was a singer who became popular in a German TV show that's kind of like, you know, they come a star type of thing. America's super star. Yeah, exactly. And ironically enough that this ship that has this great big happy smiling red lips on the front of it, he jumped off of it and the ship was off the coast of Canada and the ocean was too cold for him to have survived even if he wanted to. So as you said, here's a personal single tragedy as opposed to a mass tragedy. That's right. And then switching subject back to architecture to the red on the white body of the ship reminded you of something that we go to the next slide here that while cruise ships are for the very obvious reasons of speed, streamline, architecture in the same era of the 1930s and then later 40s and 50s with these glorious industrial designers like Norman Belgett is or Raymond Lowey basically started the streamline buildings as well. So the building at the top you contributed, you know, the Coca-Cola building has these attributes of obviously white and then horizontal lines and then the typical for ships round windows in it. But also we, I always when I drive by I find a very streamlined which is the building at the bottom which is the Department of Transportation and the Harvard Division and that's basically the front end of that cruise ship terminal that we were talking about before. And you reminded us with impressions from your archive how that looked previous to this condition that we still have and let's bring the next slide up and tell us a little about it. Well, originally the docks that were at the base of Aloha Tower were here's eight, nine, 10 and 11 and they were all built in the middle 1920s and originally Pier 11 extended all the way up to Queen Street and that's what you see in the picture in the upper left. Then in 1952 Nimitz Highway was constructed and they actually went through that part of that part of the terminal of Pier 11 so they actually cut it off so that's what you can see in those two aerial photographs that part of the building being cut off and then the streamlined part being built in 1952 and in the top picture there's an inset to the right of it that you can see there's the maths and smokestack peeking over the top of the pier and you can compare that for the ships of that time period to what the ships look like today in the pictures you've just seen and how much bigger they are. Exactly and that makes us jump to the next picture here and sort of slowly but surely phasing up and concluding in the show with some polemic propositions here and returning to Tropical Tourist expert Suzanne here who's always interested in the sort of exotic erotic aspect of what draws people to Hawaii and what the tourist industry does to sort of foster and fuel that sort of dream and telling these dreams and here is obviously the exotic is the local girls that, you know, tan skin and it surfers and it's palm trees and it lays and all of that and more and this is what Mets was dwelling upon quite heavily in the past. Yes, it was. So next slide. And these days unfortunately there is not so much left of that I really love that postcard on the left talking Art Deco and Streamline, the typeface and everything is sort of portraying that but when you go through our contemporary downtown Honolulu and Oahu and the White Islands in general not much of that is left nor look the cruise ships elegant anymore but again, where there's a correlation between architecture and the cruise ships the cruise ships were elegant way back and architecture wasn't a century which we always point out also in the parallel Doka-Momo shows but buildings, high rises or nor cruise ships don't look that elegant anymore these days and I get sent to Mendel often so there's this catamaran here in the front on the right picture that I was mistaking for Henry J, one of Henry J Kaiser's catamaran and you and Don Avery taught me it's not this is in fact from the 70s but at least it has a tiki statue there that actually we're gonna do another show about this tiki we call it tiki toke and so you guys be excited about that one so next slide here there is, you know these days you can't get around looking at the environmental impact of things in architecture we make this a driving force in the project that we're proposing that we call Primitivas and in one of the previous slides we forgot to point out that when it comes to emissions cruise ships are actually worse than airplanes that we know are already bad so here we took this picture with a ship sort of neatly nestling in nature but in fact when it comes to its carbon footprint it's quite the opposite so let's go to the next slide and this is all permanent background that we choose that so romantically almost in a silly naive way portrays how these ships come in and the locals and the water but again in fact when we go to the next slide reality is different I used to have a place here at the North Sea at this is at the city of Cooke's Hoffman which is sort of the entry of the river Elby leading to the large harbor hundreds of city of Hamburg and they were rebooting the basically the Queen Mary so which is like the modern version of the Titanic and that one is coming in from New York over the Atlantic Ocean heading to Hamburg here and I did in the previous show days of urban transcendence I had Annette Kröhe walk us through a new neighborhood that we compared to Pacaaco we call the show Hamburg's Harbor City Germany's Pacaaco and so we're pointing out similarities between the two so if you go to the next slide we pointed out a project where architecture sort of took advantage of the large carbon footprint of these cruise ships because the Queen Mary because of the Queen Mary there's the project left of the ship at the bottom and that's called the Marco Polo Tower and the Unilever building by Danish architect and they propose a double facade to basically get the fresh air from a duct that's underground and it takes it in from further away the clean air so the people who work in the offices can actually open the window and breathe fresh air which they couldn't if they would be sort of unprotected they'd be exposed to the smokestack of the Queen Mary that's quite scary, right? So next picture so if we think what that means for our paradise and sort of there's hope here where the industry, the ship industry is looking into a sort of innovating the tradition of wind powered and we assume here it's not direct as in the old days with a wind blowing into the sail but it's wind turbines that run the generator and create the electricity or the power to run the ship so there's some hope on that on that end we were pointing out in the ABA we should show that algae might be a fuel for airplanes so we could grow that thanks to our climate on Hawaii and basically fuel our own airplanes hopefully in the future next slide and again two of your beautiful postcards again romantic, romantic, the cruise ships and how can we bring back romanticism but maybe not in a sentimental way next picture because our problems on the island are different these days and I want to share here a recent trip I did to the most exotic island in Europe that's as far south as you can get at the island of Malta and you pointed out that the skyline looks quite like the one that we had in these pioneering days in way back but not like the ones that we have today and in fact next slide the combination of pictures here I was there with my son and daughter-in-law who are venturing out for a cosmopolitan culinary adventure there on the island of Malta and on the airplane I found this magazine that was telling that there are 30 towers on the on the Maltese islands and this is historic towers and what you see here in the pictures on the left as desperately as we're trying in Honolulu we're trying to make vertical housing but not always do we do a good job architecturally in Honolulu these days we did meet sensory which we point out and celebrate but not so much these days anymore and not so much in Malta unfortunately these days next picture and this is me flying to Malta and you see the whole island it's a little bit sort of reverse where the urban part is in the north of the city of Malta and to the south is basically where the industrial and the harbor area is and where this sort of cartoon basically shows the cruise ship here docking and go to the next slide and here this is their place very gritty nice Mediterranean scenery and from the rooftops which they by the way are heavily sort of inhabiting the people there you can see the cruise scenario and the cruise panoramic being quite there and quite in front of your face next picture which you might think is a bad thing but this one here is an urban piazza here where you can see it sort of neatly fits in and doesn't look like something like an eyesore that usually you want to sort of keep away from tourists but here it seems to be a good symbiosis between urban life and this sort of technology that we seem to need to live and survive comfortable on remote islands so we conclude with a polemic proposition now with our concluding slide here next one and last one where we're saying we've been looking into not just cruise ships but also cargo ships quite a bit and we've been proposing to do housing out of them and not just on land but here we're referring to again a previous show from Urban Transcendent with Hans Lave who many consider to be the pope of shipping container architecture and he in fact grows with his students in the very first textbook about it and he also built which you can see in the centerpiece here for the International Building Exhibition in Hamburg he built this sort of floating pontong in the water with shipping containers so we're saying with the dramatic shortage of affordable housing we have on the islands and that we're struggling to build on the islands and if we're not doing it the best way maybe then another way would be to build another city in front of the city and be used I mean cruise ships are pretty much floating hotels or floating apartments to begin with right but they seem to need to go away and come back while containers often are out commissioned and put out of service so maybe you keep them on out commissioned ships and you build sort of a neighborhood you space model a little bit more and people can live and floating around St. Island That's right So that's just another weird idea that we have to use this sort of typology to maybe help our urgent pressing needs on the island which is first and foremost again housing for the many who can't really afford it anymore Well that brings us to the end of the program today and hope you enjoyed Honolulu's horizontal high rises floating horizontal high rises Martin will be back in the near future I'll be back in the near future for more Think Tech shows and until then everybody thank you for watching Aloha Bye bye