 2020 are traditionally from the American Institute of Architecture, the Architecture Month, where they have events that are open to the public, so public relations. And if you can get the first slide up, this was a couple of years ago when John Lewis was the local AIA Honolulu president, had the genius idea to bring people outside of the AIA office into Fort Street Mall, and it was me and the merging talent, Jonathan Quatt, who were actually talking about the neighborhood we were sitting in, which is downtown, and we're talking about converting this very monofunctional, fossil, inclusive to working only into a very inclusive, post-facil, journalism environment. That was then and now now, because we got, again, April again in 2020, and if we could get the second slide up, because on invitation of the current 2020 AIA Honolulu president, Pernima McCutcheon, my co-host is Soto Brown, who is with us, Ida Soto. Hello, Martin. And myself, we have been invited to give a Pachacucha, so this is a, come from Japan, it's a 20 minutes, 20 slides, each 20 seconds presentation, and we're happy we have a little bit more time, but not much. And so we want to dive in, and which is the neighborhood we're sort of dealing with and talking about today, Soto? Well, we're talking about Kakaako, and we prepared this presentation for the AIA meeting, and of course it was canceled because of COVID-19. So we are putting it on ThinkTech instead of presenting it to the people who were going to be meeting at the IBM building right in the center of Kakaako. So I'm starting out with the history of the Kakaako area, and in the pictures that you see here, you can see the Kakaako originally was very watery. It had standing water, running water, and Hawaiians traditionally had used water for raising crops and raising aquaculture, and as Westerners began to come in, that was not as useful anymore, and wet areas became dry areas, but something else Kakaako was well known for in the picture of the upper right. Soft pan salt water was poured into shallow enclosures, and as it evaporated, you had salt crystals. And as I said, all of this came to an end in the 1920s and 30s, as you see in the photographs on the bottom right, when all of this watery area was filled in, was dredged from offshore and pumped ashore, and that turned this area into dry land, Kakaako, that we have today. Yeah, you see Diamondhead in the distance, until you're at the very coast, if you're in Kakaako, you can't see anymore, because after that, of course, Waikiki, as the other neighborhood, had been rising high, and so that blocks the view of... Oh, yes. Oh, yes, very good point. Okay, next we call this area, one of the important parts of this area is that it was once originally owned by the Ward family. There was a man in Curtis County, Southern United States, and he came to the Point Kingdom in the middle 1800s, and he ended up purchasing a huge piece of property that extended from King Street all the way down to the ocean, and house was located right on King Street, as you can see in these pictures, it was about old plantation, because that was in homage of him coming from the American South, a big brand building, and it was part of this, as I said, and that's why Ward Avenue is named that, goes through this area, and right around Ward Hall, where these big parks today, is the Blaisdell Center, which was purchased in 1958 by the city of County of Honolulu, and the Blaisdell Center was built in 1964. Yeah, as I analyzed these buildings, they still look... And you said from the south on the mainland, they have similar, I mean, not on similar climatic conditions and being very hot in the summer, right, actually all three around, so keeping yourself cool and, you know, having lanais wrapped all around, so this was very... It came from somewhere else, but it wasn't invasive. We like to call this exotic, right? Exactly, and that is the perfect description of the house. So let's go to the next slide. We see a picture of what the Cock-a-Cock area used to look like. It used to be residential, and there were lots of small wooden buildings, one and two stories, lots of houses, a very eclectic and inclusive neighborhood of many different races, and there were small businesses incorporated in there, but you can see that there were trees as well, the specters from 1946. There was a neighborhood school, there was a neighborhood movie theater, and so it was, again, residential. Very, very little of this architecture still remains. There's a handful. You wouldn't even know that it ever looked like this. It's changed so much, and it's changing a great deal for us. Absolutely, yeah. Next, let's go to number five, from the 1940s. And if you look in the upper left, you can see a large area of trees. That's the water state that the transplantation found. You can see Ward Avenue, vertically on the left, and on the very far right, you can see just the corner of the end of Oliver Park. But right in the center is Kewalo Basin. That was dredged in the 1930s, and it became where all of the fishing centers there. They had formerly docked in downtown, and they shifted to Kewalo Basin. And also in this area was where the tuna cannery was. So the fishing boats would come ashore, they'd come to the dock, and they'd unload their fish, and they would go directly to that cannery. And so this was a really important part of the Honkaka-Ako area, when it was still primarily residential. This connection to the ocean and harbor of Kewalo Basin. Kewalo Basin is still there, but it's no longer used as much. Now, your next slide, Sheddensburg, will light on that one. Oh, absolutely. So we go to the next slide. And you can really see that this is, again, where the coral tuna factory cannery was. This is the fishing boat harbor, right? This is also where the fishing boats were not only docking, but they were actually built there. There were companies that built these long sandpans that they were called. And this is also where they were launched. And most of them were owned by Japanese men. So the fishing fleet staffed by Japanese and the men who built Akko began to change. Particularly after World War II. And it began to shift into being late industrial. So in the upper picture, in the upper right corner, looking from the Alamoana building in 1963, you can see that most of those houses are now gone. It's not residential anymore. It's warehouses, it's car repair, it's all kinds of small manufacturing, all kinds of things like that. So it's become a commercial district more than residential. And, way to our next picture, one of the things that really made a difference was the automobile. And we know that from a lot of different situations. But Akko Akko became a place where cars were repaired, car bodies were fixed, cars were repainted. And also right along the lower part of Akko, right along Alamoana Boulevard in the 1950s and 60s into the 70s, there were very big used car lots. Something that very commonly occurred in places with big open and developed land, back at that time, big parking lot, essentially, for people who were selling used cars. And that's what we see in these pictures. That gas station was right where we're talking about right now, right across the street from what's now the Indian building. And that's actually, I think, the cars and the car repairs and everything around the car, it's about, you know, in pockets still remaining here and there, while through the redevelopment of residential high rises of more exclusive nature, of the recent days, all these sort of larger industrial usages are gone. There's still some of these repair shops, you know, and some of these back alley pockets existing about the only thing sort of left from that era. Yeah, and that's a really good point that people have mentioned this repeatedly over the past decade. If we get rid of all that late industrial, because you want to get your car repaired, where are you going to take it if Taka-Ako is no longer functioning? Well, they go to Cali, right? Well, they do. I'm a caring larious, but as they say also, that Cali is going to be the next Taka-Ako to be redeveloped, so we're keeping pushing further out and out, right? That's exactly right. I was just going to say exactly the same thing, to keep getting pushed away from the city center. Okay, next picture. As time passed in this industrial area began to change, something like that, some larger buildings were built too, and there was an area along all of the Boulevard that was redeveloped by the Warp estate, which gradually people on their land. For a corner, there's a picture of what was called a white top restaurant and drive-in, but one of the really big features of Taka-Ako on Ward Avenue was the gem discount department store built in the 1960s, and that building is still there today. It no longer looks like this, but it's where it's... Is that where sports authority... Oh, I was just going to say, I was curious. Thank you. Okay, this is the original use of the building where sports authority was, and as you can see, it had this wonderful 60s structure over the entryway, which, of course, is long gone, and it's been redone, but it's thought it's very different now. When did this estate take us down? Probably, certainly by the 1980s, that was on, but I can remember that, and Jim advertised a great deal, so it was always being advertised on radio and TV. What were they selling? Discount department store, so it was like a mark kind of. And the next picture actually began to redevelop its own property, and they very distinctively built the Ward Warehouse in the 1970s and then the Ward Center in the 1980s, and Ward Warehouse in particular was really 70s. It was made of wood, it had these distinctive painted super graphics on it, and it was a shopping center, and it obviously was more lucrative for them to redevelop from. And Ward Warehouse, unfortunately, now, we go to our next picture and we see a very important building of this area, the IDN building. That was the first high-rise, the first multi-story building, very tall, but it was the first big multi-story building built there. Early 1960s, very distinctive exterior designed by Vladimir Ossov, very important building. Exactly the house that I will be living in, that's my home, designed by him. And the IDN building was threatened to develop and got underway. People said, why don't you tear that down to build a big high-rise? The Eames Corporation chose to save it. They turned it into a control room and sales room. Next picture, we go to... Well, maybe if we sort of conclude, because this is where the historic kind of preview kind of concludes, but maybe summarizing or sort of just reflecting on, just the last two projects you showed, Ward Warehouse was really innovative, was solid timber, was very zeitgeisty at its time. And so the IDN building is a very innovative concrete building that we've been talking about ever. He was a structural engineer, together with Aussie Pops, and he did this really filigree, grease-to-lay. So there's innovation there, right? These are not things that were replicated from the mainland and sort of in an invasive way, just dunked on our island, as we are basically saying it happens to us. And there's a little picture on the Ward Warehouse, if you could go back to slide 10 for a second here, at the very top, while the Ward Warehouse side has been scraped, it was vacant for too long at a time and some project has been pulled, and recently they announced what they want to put there. And we were, to say the very least, very disappointed. Oh, yeah. Because no innovation anymore, a microwave glass box, which ticks you off, has no lanais. And Ward Warehouse was all about lanais, walkable pathways to the stores. And IDN building is a very biochromatic building that is to a large degree self-shading itself. So that being said, if I understood you correctly, Dr. Akal has always been a very sort of easy breezy, biochromatic, because there was no other choice back then, but also very inclusive neighborhood. Yes, exactly. And it has recently, unfortunately, turned into almost the opposite, into a high end residential, the majority of them are air conditioned. So while we don't want to dwell upon that, because we want to give a more than ever optimistic view and point out maybe a different way. I guess that's to the next slide, number 12. The largest land owners in Kakaako are very sort of legendary, famous people and, in fact, innovators. And the first one here is who? Well, that is Howard Hughes. He's a extremely wealthy industrialist, very pooky and breezy man. Actually became very breezy when he was elderly. One of his major innovations was the building of this immense airplane in the 1940s called, was made of wood, was made of sort of laminated wood. It was referred to as the spruce goose because it was made of wood. He actually developed this, he began developing this during World War II with our friend Henry J. Kaiser, who is a big, big guy here, too, in terms of technology. Howard Hughes Corporation today, which bears his name, is now the owner of what had been the board of state and it's the developer of Kakaako right now, which is what we're about to focus on. Yeah, and the top right picture is one of your presentations that you pointed out. There is a tradition of post-contact innovation on the Hawaiian islands that you see some glimpses of here. And so you put Howard Hughes in the role of these people. And so go to the next slide. The second largest landowner is also known as a very significant innovator on the Hawaiian islands and who was he or them? Because you say it actually has been two. So the other big landowner in the area is the Bishop of State, and that is the state most property owned by the Eastern Hawaiian Bishop. She was the granddaughter of King Kamehameha I. And you see him and Kamehameha I, very important in Hawaiian history because he was the chief or the king who united all of the Hawaiian islands into a single kingdom in the early 1800s and he did that innovatively using Western warfare, Western weapons to defeat his enemies, other Hawaiians. And we also see King Kauakaua in the 1880s and the 1870s and 80s who very innovatively traveled all the way around the world, first sitting monarch to do so, and who also loved modern inventions and he loved electricity and telephones and boats and all kinds of stuff like that. And he loved again to incorporate modern technology into Hawaiian culture. So again, innovativeness is a longstanding tradition with Hawaiians using things that came from elsewhere. Absolutely. So it doesn't matter if you're a Hawley or if you're local, if you came to Hawaii or if you stayed in Hawaii, you were doing cutting-edge things until very much, I mean, for sure, in the mid-century and, you know, lasting till the 70s and in the 80s, not just limited to, you know, Hawaii but anywhere in the world, as we like to say when basically, you know, Reagan was taking over and Jimmy Carter was made to step down and then when things got sort of down the hill and less innovative, but we should have gotten past that although we might have still terrible, you know, upper leadership, that shouldn't keep us away from remembering our roots and our traditions. And along these lines, let's go to the next slide because here are some suggestions how we think, given the innovative nature and character of these owners of the land, how they might wanna think about developing their buildings. So that's slide number 14 that we, let's go on now is suggesting not a formal approach. So how the buildings look like don't matter or they matter as a result from their inside out performance. So here are ideas about what our friend Ron Lindgren, hi Ron, he will join us soon again for more exciting shows that we're gonna do together with him. He likes to call it structural expressionism and in that tradition here, the emerging generation under our guidance is envisioning these things where you just basically build, which you can only do again, I'm speaking around the world from you in Germany where we can build that way. You can't express structure anymore because you always gotta wrap it in heavy insulation. So that's something that is, it is a unique position, a unique chance to build distinct and having a unique selling proposition that our exotic escapism expert, Zuzana has taught us. So let's go sort of back to that and dwell on that. Don't build generic invasive and unfortunately, Kakaako has become related in many parts, right? Yeah, and the thing that you just said is very crucial here too because basically what they're doing is building a lot of identical big glass boxes which they change the exterior of to make them look a little bit different. It's basically the same thing. Other buildings that we're talking about now, as you just said, the exterior is only a function of the interior's attribute of what we're trying to do with the inside out rather than just make a wavy pattern on the front and say, look how pretty it is. Exactly. And so number 15 is the perfect sort of embodiment of that because here is primitive of one how we call her and it's basically sort of these, you know, cylindrical staclon eyes as our friend Kurt Sandberg likes to call them and they're having to build environment as the heavy, you know, parts being integrated into the national environment. So they almost come across more as sort of, you know, architecture as we like to say versus architecture. And this is in fact here on the, just having been demolished, as you mentioned, work clouded by Steve Owl, which we haven't been informed what's going to be there. And so we're just saying, well, you know, you as a Bishop Museum historian, me as a founding board member of Dr. Momo, we love the old, but we are aware that, you know, you can't, you know, you can't stop times and you shouldn't, you should progress, but then it should be something better you've replaced it with than it already was. And these buildings are really, really good. So you got to do much better, right? Yes, yes. So number next slide, number 16 is how primitive one looks from the inside. And it's pretty much sort of using the methodology or the strategy of individual parts, we call these slices of paradise, which are very confined spaces in Corona times. We obviously start to rethink, you know, our practices. And so here again, the idea is to keep it very multifunctional. Now, as being stuck at home, if we don't have big spaces, but smaller ones, if we can keep them flexible and multifunctional, that might be a way to feel kind of less stuck, right? Yes, yes. So on the next slide, number 17 is a primitiva in the middle of Kakaako. This is blocked what Kamehameha School called Block C. And there's a part to be developed in front of that. And once again, we're proposing again, a building that is structurally innovative and that is also typologically innovative. Because again, we're talking housing and hosting the people in most need, which were the inhabitants of Kakaaka to begin with the working class people, right? Yes, yes, yes. So number next slide, number 18 is another approach of the next one, of the next primitiva, this is primitiva two. Again, inside out approach and everything is more conceived to be like a big cascading landscape where people can sort of, pop up their tent temporarily when they were there and when not they take it down. So way more efficient and effective way to deal with space. Once again, we might say, Corona, we can't do this anymore. Yes, we can. We just gotta keep the distance, right? Yeah. We were discussing that these might actually be way more suitable for actually addressing the current virus issue because by bringing nature in, you're actually sort of helping your immune system to be prepared for it rather than locking yourself down. And you have used another sort of, tragic events from the past with the Laguneas Tantai, that we call that, we spell it out in English. Legionnaires disease, which was read through buildings and still is spread through buildings by central air conditioning systems. Exactly. So if you go to the next slide, second to last number 19, this traces back to the very beginning where we're saying when we're more building more skinny buildings, more skinny towers and denser to each other, we might learn from how nature does it in the jungle or in the forest or in the bamboo grove. And you actually get a more pleasant, more urban, more experiential, urban fabric than how you described, being more sort of spread out and not really being connected. You call it like, autistic, self-referential, money-making machines, right? And don't really form a neighborhood. Right. And the high rise is being constructed and Kakaako now are so monolithic and have such big bases that what you find is these very widely spaced monolithic structures that don't really lend themselves to building a neighborhood or building any kind of street activity. But you point out, it's where you grew up in an urban area with a lot of urban activity that was walkable. Absolutely. And we're at the end of the show, we go to the last slide and we will say, well, we in Kakaako, we will keep watching the developments as these sort of quotes of previous shows demonstrates. We both will point out practices that we're critical about but we also obviously enjoy more to talk about promising attempts, which we see at the top left there, this Helena Hona. And on the top right is again sort of our sort of mentor, this is Richard Lowe, we actually worked with Victoria Ward, who you had mentioned. And we had mentioned Steve Owl, who had built the most innovative buildings and he was proposing the Skinny Towers here. And so Skinny Towers are obviously, again, part of a genetic code of the most innovative era so might want to be reconsidered. So with that, I hope you join us next week again for another exciting episode of Schumannia Main Architecture and until then, most importantly, hopefully you stay safe and sound. And healthy. See you next, exactly. So see you next time, I'm so looking forward to and everyone else. And until then, bye-bye. Aloha.