 224th episode of ThinkPick Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture and for our volume 6 on our Happenings for Reasons. We have our panel back with you DeSoto in your Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. Hi DeSoto. And we have you Ron back in your Long Beach, California. Hi Ron. Okay, so let's go to the first slide because we almost transitioned, wanted to transition. We thought we had a good cut at the last time where we're going from what was at that point concluding as Killingsworth, Lindgren, Stricker and Wilson and go to the revisit Happenings in the Lindgren mansion. But then you provided us these goodies and we just can't hide these from you guys. So we wanted to throw them in. And it's also related to an early Christmas gift of you, Ron, to you DeSoto, tell us about. Ron can tell everybody what I'm going to get. Okay, I'm just the middleman to send off a DVD that Mr. Ray Shageta has provided. He was the senior project engineer while the Haleiklani was being built. He was one of those individuals who deserves credit for the end result, which was a very fine piece of construction and still is. But he put together a DVD of some length of the whole construction process at the Haleiklani. And he wants to make sure that gets to DeSoto and the Bishop Museum gets transferred into some sort of digital format. And rightly so, as he thinks, I believe that that bit of history is something worthwhile to store at the museum and is worthwhile in that manner. And I agree. And we see glimpses of that already here to the left, the construction or at least the tiling of the pool that you, Ron, told us and back in the show that that was a special project within the project. And you obviously see on the right side the construction. And you see that it is a very modern building, right? This is on-site, cast in place, concrete construction. And the company you had on your side to work with, that you have very fond memories, Ron, probably gets us to the second slide where we see two of the... Before we do that, before we do that, can we go back? I want to just say one historical thing about this picture. And, Ron, you may have already mentioned this, but on the far right, you see the original Haleikulani building, which was left intact in place as the other buildings were built around it. And that is significant for what happened yesterday. Yesterday was December 7th. It was the 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack and my mother and her brother and her father and mother were staying at the Haleikulani on December 7th, 1941. And my grandparents were in the room on the top floor of that building, in the second floor of that building, 80 years ago. And so that's a historical nod to the commemoration, commemoration of what happened yesterday. And thank you for letting me interrupt this program. Oh, no, thanks for bringing that up. This is a little very appropriate. Thanks much. Okay, second slide. So Hawaiian dredging is the keyword, Ron. Yeah. And this is a photograph that was taken at a topping off ceremony that was sponsored by Hawaiian dredging. And on the left, you're seeing an ad between two very tall people, although almost everyone in the world was at least that much taller than Ed Killingsworth. But to the left is the then president of Hawaiian dredging, Paul Banks. And to the right is Paul's son, Paul Banks Jr. Ed was asked to give a little bit of a speech. This was a party that's typically given by construction companies. And certainly it was the legacy of Hawaiian dredging. When finally all of the dangerous construction work is done. In other words, the work that brings the employees, the construction people, furthest away from the safety of the ground, they're working up on roofs, they're making the last concrete pours, 22 stories in the air, that kind of thing. It's all done. No one's been killed, no one's been injured on a very complicated project. A large American flag is hung, and a party is given really as a celebration for the people who built the hotel and to manage that construction. They apparently did feel, and that's not always the case, that the other have the owner's rep and the architect's there. And so Ed was asked to give a few words, and he gave something very short and sweet, I'm sure, I don't remember it from all those years ago. But then when that was done in a sort of formal way, the party can suddenly become the informal fun party with some drinking, and also very typical of a topping off party topless dancers. I don't think you'd have that happen today. No, although you had this happen back in the days talking pre-contact all the time, right? And while you said Ron, some might have been surprised or offended, I'm saying way back people would have been offended if people would have been overdressed, right? So it's all relevant. That would have been hundreds of years ago though. That's what I'm now trying to talk about. Stay on that topic a little bit, because we've been using and we continue to use automobiles as vehicles for thought. And also we're onto clothing as a clue for the keys for architecture. And one of our longest shows in the making of Soto, and maybe one of our most relevance to come if it will ever be completed, will be a working title, address code, address code. And look at the people here at Killingsworth is not wearing an aloha Hawaiian shirt. And all the audience might be excited in saying you the Soto look appropriately addressed today, because this is a Hawaiian shirt, but that hula girl looks a little different there on your shirt, right? Yeah, well, I don't have any hula girls on this particular shirt today. I am wearing a limited edition Renspooner shirt, which is an homage to Godzilla. So it has pictures of Godzilla on it and it has pictures of Godzilla and Mothra together, the two original, not the two, but two of the original Japanese Toho film company, giant monsters who are famous throughout the world. And this is this genre is referred to as Kaiju, which is the Japanese term. And there are Kaiju fans all over the world. So I'm very proud to show off my limited edition shirt. And after I was fortunate enough to get it, they sold out very quickly. So they're no longer available. But I want to show mine off because I was lucky enough to get one. Yeah. And it's also, you know, commercially appropriate because it's a I would say a post contact connotation. Because the last movie that Godzilla made was with his love and hate relationship to King Kong to Kong. And that movie was filmed largely in Hawaii. And we watched it recently as we've been covering on in a drive in movie theater here near Munich, Germany. Isn't that a small world, right? So I just want to make the point, Ron, and you help me out with this as if I'm on the on the right track. While architects often, especially these days, we're in a lower shirt as to come across, oh, I'm culturally and climatically appropriate. Obviously, you guys didn't need that, right? You will find us saying, well, we're howlies and we come to Hawaii and we're blessed and honored to work here. But we're not pretending anything else, but we're hanging loose and we're wearing our shirts, you know, you know, rather tropical, exotical, because he wasn't tied up and uptight, literally and figuratively speaking, right? He was rather comfortable. But you know, just the man he was and didn't needed to pretend to be somewhere else when he worked and was in Hawaii. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I'd say that all through our work in Hawaii over decades, we never pretended or aspired to become Aina. We knew we were from we were outsiders, but that we did have a long history with Hawaii, including even Ed's partner, Jules Brady, being a city planner for the city of Honolulu, both before and during the attack on Pearl Harbor. There you go. Another thing that's new to us, you give us all the Christmas goodies here. And when you said you, Ron, let's get to the next page and illustrate who that all was for your Halekalani project. Yeah, as I said, the Hawaiian Georgia was very kind in inviting us to what is meant to be when it gets near its end, whatever time in the early morning that might be, is fairly raucous and certainly celebratory. And we're dealing with, there's myself, wide-eyed and impossibly young at the far right, on directly opposite to me sort of, I'm not looking too closely, and Killingsworth is there, Shuhei Okuda and his lovely Japanese wife, he was the head of the Halekalani Corporation at the time, Ken Mizuno, who was the go-between, between Shuhei Okuda and the contractor and the architect is there, and at the very far left is someone I've never mentioned before, Glenn Fukuda, who again with Ken Mizuno provided that contact between everyone and helped to smooth out the frictions that sometimes happen, probably always happen in major construction projects, so that things move along and things get built and everyone's happy to have been involved with the final product. He unfortunately passed away in a heart surgery attempt somewhere in Hawaii, much too young, and I owe him, together with Ken Mizuno, a great deal in the sense that this project as complicated as it was and very large compared to things that I had done before went so well. A lot of that is to their dealing with me, dealing with the contractor, and dealing with their own Halekalani bosses in the most fair-minded and knowledgeable way. Thanks for remembering and sharing that, Ron. So the next slide is, I'm picking up on your term of apples and oranges and comparing, and we just want to revisit what used to be your Waikiki Park Hotel, which was positioned as more budget, and now we said it's pretty obvious that the merging and the pairing even in the naming of its rebranding as the Halepuna and the Halekalani is an attempt to tie them more together, and then our fishing in the web on booking.com with a steel of 343, what's crossed out is 589. Put that in perspective with the kind of the fishing and the promo of the Halekalani from booking.com in the past shows from I think 775, then the undiscounted rate might be 900. So they're all going up, and there's still a difference, but it's cutting closer. So that being said, transitioning back to the Lindgren residence because there is already a show about it, so it's no surprise, even if we wouldn't comment any further on it. When you watch that show, it's obvious that you guys didn't use your fees to make yourself rich and build yourself mar halagos, which style-wise you wouldn't have done to begin with, although you're a classicist as well, but a cultivated classicist versus the uncultivated we see there. But we already saw, so you basically didn't use your practices as to make yourself richer, not as a commercial enterprise, but as a cultural enterprise. And so you are fine with a rather humble home that regardless has a lot of cultivation and has a lot of quality. And again, if you need to know more about it to begin with, you can go back and watch that show. But going to the next slide, we want to now hear from you what you're happening and what was eating up most of the last, I think, was three months of your time in your home, Ron. Yes, I'm quickly going to describe a day that started out as one of my finest. I invited some friends to sit with me to watch a group of out-of-work symphony musicians. There were about 35 or 40 of them who appeared directly across the street in a little park from my house. And we were enjoying this wonderful music. These people in the pandemic had lost their symphonic jobs and had joined together to go out and play very fine symphonic music for, in this case myself, my friends and my neighbors. I decided to get up and get a cold drink out of the refrigerator in the house. I stepped in the house to six inches of water. The end wall of my living room up on the second floor is open to the second-story living room. From it, a solid sheet of water, a 13-foot-wide waterfall, was crashing from one floor to the next. I was frozen in place for, I'll bet, a solid minute with my job. But I then dashed upstairs and found out that a pipe had broken in a water supply pipe in a second-story bathroom. By the time I managed to get the city water cut off to the house, so that the waterfall would stop, God knows, and only He knows or she, how many hundreds or thousands of gallons of water had poured into the house. Very quickly, I could see that everything was soaked, furniture, floors, walls, carpets. In fact, I got on the phone immediately with a company that specializes in cleanup after water damage or fire damage. Anyone who experiences that, and I hope no one of our viewers do, be advised that if you have that problem, call those pros right away and get them started on the long process of regaining your own home back. At the bottom right, you can see a photo on the day on which I suffered this water. I was actually in bed. The bed was on the wet carpet on the second floor, and I wanted to see what my face looked like. So I took a selfie, and there I am, still in shock. The fact was I lived almost 40 years there, and over time had gathered furniture bit by bit, architect design furniture, very expensive furniture that I love and still love, I'm happy to say. Home furnishings, memorabilia from trips as an architect, and a 3000 book architecture design library. I was in a house without any of that. It had all been pulled away, wrapped up, and sent away to remote storage. So all the things that I was comfortable with and felt was part of my home sanctuary was gone, and everything was stopping wet, and I'll have to, I think as a public service, talk a little bit about what the process is really like to restore someone's home after that damage. Of course, a good friend, when they found that it happened, reminded me, and I'm not sure I needed that reminder, but at the same time I was having my dampness, shall we say. There were incredibly bad floods in all parts of the world happening in early July. Germany and Belgium, especially in Europe, had horrendous floods with many deaths, and houses swept away, an entire neighborhood swept away. Central China was hit with a flood that they had never experienced before. Southwest America was hit with flash flooding that also caused a number of deaths. So in comparison, it's not as if I was lucky, but I had, I wasn't suffering anything like the loss that so many people at the very same time that I was having my mini loss sustained. Very fair of you to say thank you Ron, and as we see on the picture that Michael has kindly zoomed on to the left one, the big one, we see you up there literally and figuratively speaking, because also your facial expression just shows your spirit is more up, and that also had to do with the coincidence that your insurance being a good team worker had the good intuition to reconnect you back to work from you several decades ago, and that gets us to the next slide, right? Yeah, thank God for insurance, and my heart goes out to those who might have to face fire, water damage without that protection. I could not have afforded the amount of money that had to be spent for the construction and renovation crews that were involved in my home. I don't know what I would have done, but for the first few days of shock, and I stayed at a hotel, which in fact I had designed in Long Beach. It was a very modest businessman's hotel that's shown in that slide called the Marriott Airport Hotel, and 300 rooms with very reasonable rates for businessmen and businesswomen, and in some respects, seeing that perspective drawing reminded me of this apples and oranges thing, because this was such a modest hotel that at that time, one year after the opening of the Hale Klane, this particular hotel cost, in terms of total cost per guest room, about $90,000. Now in comparison, the year before, the Hale Klane, a luxury hotel, in terms of total cost per room, cost $250,000, a quarter of a million dollars a room, which it was unheard of at the time, but wait. Today, and very recently, someone bought a new, well actually it was resold, they bought a new spa type hotel of only 88 rooms in New Hampshire, and they paid one and a half million dollars per room just to buy the existing hotel. So everything's relative, money doesn't have a lot of value like it did in the past, and we might go to the next slide, please. Yeah, and we might need other fruits or vegetables to compare. I think apples and oranges doesn't cut it, right? We need one of the most expensive mushrooms on one end, and then maybe apples can stay. Yeah, this site plan was of a business park where we were invited in to design the hotel itself, and that really completed a multi-building business park on the Ayrton Airport runway. And again, seeing this reminded me of this apples and oranges thing again. Whether we were dealing with a luxury hotel or a rather modest businessmen's hotel, Ed Kellersworth's philosophy, which he certainly imbued us with, was that you gave the same level of service and design energy in meeting the dreams of whoever your client is, no matter how much money they're spending. As long as they're spending enough to get it built, then we're their man. And we could go to the next slide, I think too. Yeah, and that being said, Ron, I want to say you prove to be inclusive and to be proletarian for the hard working class people as much as for the more upscale people. And with that, this slide is showing that you also get honored and recognized for that. And today is also another anniversary, you guys, for that about exactly a year ago. The three of us have gotten been recognized for human-humane architecture, and we won the show of the year award with obviously a same approach. So everyone watching us, please watch this year's ceremony, which is starting at 5 p.m. today, it's been a couple of hours on Think Tech Hawaii. So share with us how your very sort of proletarian inclusive approach got recognized in the world of movies. Yeah, I might say that we had $90,000 a room, but we did two things that we'll see in some other photographs that are coming up soon. One was to make sure the sense of arrival was heightened, and it was by a very expansive, and I think quite handsome, Port Cocher. And secondly, once you walked into the lobby on access from the Port Cocher, you looked over a lobby and through large glass windows out to a swimming pool garden of a very semi-tropical nature. We'll see that soon. But one thing that completely surprised me about this hotel was that a friend said that, hey, your hotel showed up in a movie, and it was a Hollywood film. It was called Freedom Riders, starring Hillary Swing. It was a story about a Long Beach teacher, a real teacher who was still teaching, by the way, who had such a great writing program that she managed to imbue the love of reading and writing and self-expression among some really tough kids in one of the worst sections in Long Beach. Certainly probably the most impoverished section of Long Beach. But her second job was to work at the front desk of this hotel, the Airport Marriott Hotel. At one time, to give her students a treat, she saved up enough money to bring the kids to the school and have lunch there. And so the movie spends not long, but a little over of a minute showing her behind the counter and also the kids walking into the hotel and liking what they saw when they looked through the glass out to the garden. Larry Sturker had the same surprise when Blue Crush opened up, starring Kate Bosk with Fine Actress and Fine Surfer, which is also a terrific movie that everyone should see. I'd recommend the 2007 Freedom Riders as well. What a happy surprise to find ourselves for a short time in the movies. Absolutely. And a couple minutes left, let's share these details that you've been talking about and we get a glimpse of it at the bottom right picture, the Portcore Share and go to the next slide and look at that closer. This is a photo taken rather recently by myself. In fact, there are two reasons I didn't stay in the hotel very long. In fact, I could have stayed there the whole time that the house was being renovated. But I wanted to be at the house to be able to answer questions about the renovation so that, you know, things weren't torn out that needed to be saved and so forth. And I wanted to see what was happening. But for example, here's a very large Portcore Share, three lanes, quite muscular, quite architectural, very expressionistic of the structure, but it's painted the inside of a baby's diaper color. And the reason I say that is at first it was a very sparkling white structure, which is what I intended. And then all throughout the hotel after, you know, 30 years or so since it had been built, there were the compromises and the changes that do happen to hotels as they're renovated. And they had me so nervous and upset that I left the hotel and went home and slept on the floor in a sleeping bag for three months. But the Portcore Share did provide the sense that you were coming to a place important. And the fact that businessmen, their business could be enhanced by a good stay at a good hotel, that was as important to us as the fact that people could have a good recreation of themselves at a hotel on vacation. Those were both equal goals for us to work towards. And the next slide shows my attempt to be semi-tropical in Long Beach, California. And as you walked into the lobby, the lobby was completely glazed to the south. And of course, we had an aircraft runway right outside. So I developed a garden, a swimming pool garden. In fact, there was an indoor pool and an outdoor pool all surrounded by a greenery, stepped platforms with some lush planting, much more lush than what's showing there in this recent photo. And finally, it all built up to a wall all around the garden. So that most of the noise of aircraft landing and taking off was, it was ameliorated. It wasn't a matter of having to hold your ears as you lounge around the pool. And of course, as the trees and the palm trees grew up, it became more and more a sanctuary where only the sounds of the planes landing gave you any idea that you were even right next to an airport. All right. Well, well done. And thanks, Ron. We're at the end of some other exciting 28 minutes. So don't worry, Ron. Things can be repainted back. So to the signature style, we had that show quote in the recent picture at the top right of Larry's Ilani that you mentioned where they're still white. And if anything, the three of us, the three from the gas station, become the three from the painting station and go there in one night and paint it over. So don't worry about that one. Okay, so we're going to next week, we're going to do a show that concludes the year. It's going to be a little different. It's about hung carts. So we thought in a way we want to remember all the things we've been going through, which you've been sharing, Ron, a lot and everyone else in the world. And then we're going to reconvene with this panel here for a volume seven of Happenings for Reason. And we open up the new year with that one. And until that one, everyone stay happy and healthy and stay as tropically, exotically, holy Hawaiian as you are.