 Welcome to our exotic Honolulu, Hawaii. And we're actually going to go when Hawaii was the most exotic, which was actually mid-century. And today we're going to talk particularly about the 50s and the 60s. And a couple shows ago, actually pretty much at the beginning of this show, as we see in the first picture, that was a show with Bill Chapman. And he insisted that I had a courtesy and copyright for the title of the show, which was called Howly Hawaii. And that's fine. I'm happy to take the blame. I'm used to that. So here you can see three people from left to right. You see Pete Wimberley. And excuse me, you see Alfred Price. And then you see Pete Wimberley. And then at the bottom, you can see Vladimir Asipov. And these are considered to be the prime modern architects on the island. But in fact, there was a fourth wheel on that wagon about an architect that we're going to talk about today. And for that, we brought in our guest, who is John Williams. And John, you're here in many capacities as an architect, first and foremost, having practiced the discipline for your life. You're also a fellow Doko Momo member and very involved in historic Hawaii. So thank you for being here today. So who is that sort of mysterious man we're going to talk about today? That mysterious man is Edwin Bauer. He was born in San Francisco in 1905. And we don't know much about his early years, but he went to the University of Southern California, got his degree in 1928. I'm sure he was ready to jump into a career in architecture, but merely months later, he was confronted with the fact that the stock market crashed, the Great Depression, and there was probably no work for architects. We then know that he showed up in Honolulu at Pearl Harbor in the 1940s, working with a lot of other architects designing buildings for the military. But in 1945, as soon as the war was over, he started his own firm, Edwin L. Bauer Architect. Are you going to share with us now one of his early works here, which is the next picture? This is St. Elizabeth's Episcopal Church. It's on North King Street, and he finished this building in 1952. One of the reasons I like this building especially is because it's a very traditional form of a church, and yet he brought a very modern aesthetic into the details. And we see it a lot in the spire, but it just is a very interesting attempt to bring a typical church form into mid-century modern. And you like the project so much that you provided another picture, and why we bring this up, which is the next picture. It reminded me of many of the modernists who started out rather traditional or classical in the 20s and the 30s. Mies van der Rohe, for example, did these classes, says Bilas, before he broke free from history and historicism and started to really be a high modern guy. So it seems a similar thing with his here, but rather surprising. As you captioned this in 1952, and only two years later, the next picture shows us a drastic shift towards what, John? This is the Breaker's Hotel. It's on a beach walk, and it's only two stories in a configuration that surrounds a pool and a very lushly planted landscape garden. And it was just very in keeping with what people were thinking of Hawaii at that time, but it was a very, very different atmosphere with that courtyard. And he also brought in one of his lifelong interests, and then I think the next picture will show us the detailing, although the first picture was when it opened. This is a current picture. You start seeing the screens, the Japanese screens, and the louvered panels on the first floor rooms, and creating this very exotic open to the garden atmosphere, very different for hotels in that period. And very interesting, whereas the first project could be called sort of more not invasive because it's still, you know, it keeps the opening small, so it stays cool, but it's certainly an imported style, whereas this one here seems more, as you called it, already exotic, and sort of is also informed, I think, by a lot of these sort of masters started out working for Dickey. Dickey the roof, if we can go back one more time to that previous picture here, is pretty much we call that roof basically the Dickey roof, right? Right, right, with the two. So these low profile and the, you know, the hip roof and the shingles, so everything sort of very sort of a tropical, a hat, pretty much, right, to shed off the harsh sun and the rain, as we had that marvelous thunderstorm, I don't know where you were yesterday, but it was quite spectacular. Watching the lightning, it was incredible. Yeah, wow, wow. So it's a very sort of appropriate architecture for our climate here, and so it gets us to the picture number five, which is, as you told me, a project that you almost confused with the previous one, and that's only one year later, right? One year later, it's the Hwayana Hotel, and it's exactly next door to the previous hotel, a motel. And this one, he is exploring the same use of the rock walls, built around a pool, and really lushly landscaped garden setting, and it's still pretty much intact as it was designed, and I think it's an example that we'll see all through Bauer's career that he would start with an idea, and then he would adapt it and push it and modify it as he developed other buildings with a similar solution, so I think it speaks well for his creativity. And one interesting sort of similarity is that both he and you are coming from California originally. I know, I wish I knew more about that early history of his. Yeah, I'm sure you won't give up in finding out, which is great. And sort of it reminds me of that this typology maybe isn't sort of exclusive to our islands, it actually sort of comes from the West Coast, from California, this sort of very sort of ranch, sort of a west cozy interpretation of the ranch house. Eichler comes to my mind, and maybe this particular one reminds me of that one by John Lautner that he did in Desert Hot Springs that has a similar sort of gesture of these kind of bones, the sort of canopy there, but then again he took that from an already pretty similar climate, but then sort of customized it more with a very local lava rock and wood jealousies, which by the way is a wonderful fenestration system that the jealousies we need to get back to begin with, and then the wood jealousies I find one of the most remarkable, amazing products for tropical fenestration. Yeah, it provides privacy and air circulation at the same time, it's really pretty amazing. We're going to do a show with David Rockwood about sort of evolving that tradition, couple shows ahead of us, and you have one more picture of this project in the next. Yeah, the first picture was when it first opened, but this is pretty much how it looks right now, and again you can see all of the elements are still there. It's really remarkable that these two that are 60 years old, more than 60 years old, are both in such original shape. And one can say 50 years young in that case. Yes, they still look really great. Yeah, absolutely awesome, but then now the same year something significantly different. Next picture. This is the Continental Hawaii building. It's on the corner of South King and Kalakaua, and this is the building that first caught my attention that Bauer had designed, and I hadn't paid attention to it until I really paid attention to it, and the program for the building was the Continental Insurance Company wanted an office building that they would rent out, but the first floor would be their local office, so they created this arrangement of a first floor that's very transparent, the rock walls bring in that local interpretation, the three floors of offices, and then on the top was a board room for the use of the Continental Insurance. But not only is it a very classic stacking of architectural elements, but then because it's on a corner, he used the vertical axis as a way of transitioning on the corner. Behind the Continental sign, that's where the elevator to are. That's amazing. I have to show you a building in my hometown that sits on a similar corner and has so much in common with this one. This is Metsensche in Germany, half around the world, and when you guys see that little subtitle of the show, I lot myself to the little eye-winking, say, Bauta is German and means building, so I'm talking howlies, he must have come, his ancestor is somewhere where I come from, and so this international profile is sort of probably genetically ingrained, and this is probably the most, and we call this the international style, this is something you found popping up all over the world, sort of these elements of streamline and horizontal windows and basically these sort of cubic compositions, but as you pointed out, he didn't just basically invade and came, okay, I do this, and I plop it here, but with these elements of materiality and lava stone and the celebration of that staircase, which in a temperate climate, it would have had to be totally enclosed, and so here sort of celebrating the openness of it is certainly once again sort of tropicalizing the international style. And both on the landings of the stair, the narrow windows on the far left, and the windows that the glass area on the landings at the elevator, parts of the glass are openable windows so that the breeze would always be flowing through even though it's protected from the rain. Absolutely, I mean this is the pre-fossil era and air conditioning hadn't been embraced, the architect was basically designing with natural systems, which the mission of our show is to say, let's do this again, and so the next picture gets us into another building type that is a multi-story residential building here that was built in 57, so two years later. Two years later. And that's one of your favorite ones of his, right, explain to us why. Elevation, this is the side of the building that provide the walkways to all of the apartments in the building, and I love it because it's an expression of architecture as sculpture. You have these strong horizontal bands of white and black or solid and transparent, and I think it's something that is, we know that he was playing with this because even that previous building, the continental building, the back side of the building looks just like this, it has these strong bands which are the walkways to all the offices, but he plays with it even to the extent of the ends of those cantilevered walkways are open, it's just a railing so that you know that he's playing with it, he's not just turning the solid around the corner and expressing the stair on the outside of the building like that. I agree, but I would also add it is not a self-referential sculpture because that's what many architects, many star architects these days do as Frank Gehry and they're pretty much formalists for the sake of formalism before their style or for their brand, and they're not necessarily interested in planet-friendliness, whereas this we were doing research and saying he said this is most likely the East facade, so we know the early morning sun might hit the actual thermal threshold that separates the units from the hallway, but then once the sun comes around and becomes really a problem like 11 a.m., these actually start to shade, so it's a performative sculpture. Yeah, and this is an excellent time of day to show the building because you see how deep of a shadow it is. Absolutely. And this is one of three buildings that I know including the Continental, but another large building in Waikiki, he worked with this form on all three of those buildings all within a few years of each other. And let's go to the next picture, the same typology, but getting further towards Diamondhead and actually at the foothills of Diamondhead we see this one. I picked this building out for attention because not just because of its overall shape, it's four identical apartments on each floor, it's a big square box, but this is something you see in this building that Bauer did in other buildings where he needed two stair towers and an elevator shaft and he enclosed two of them on the right and left the stair on the left open, but it made an asymmetrical elevation. It brought a creativity to the elevation that otherwise could have been just a simple big box and I think it's one of those trademarks of Bauer. Absolutely. And this just for the record is the Tahitian from 1958, right? Yes. And he didn't just stay as many of his colleagues and you just checked it out recently with Dokomo, which we'll get to in the next couple projects, but he also worked on other islands so we're going to go to Kauai with the next picture. And this one, this is a church that Bauer designed in collaboration with John McAuliffe and it's a octagon shape, which is kind of surprising, the altar, the Catholic Church, the altar in the center, and this shape is supported by these eight really massive poles that come up and create that line. By the way, the artwork on that is, those are Jean Chalot. So it's really, really beautifully maintained and the next photograph will show the detail of how those poles come down and the very modernist interpretation of the pews. I think it's just a beautiful building. At the same time, I don't know how much was Bauer's contribution and how much was his collaborating architect, but he, Bauer's in there somewhere and I think it shows. And the next project also on the same island, next picture is actually, now we make a big jump from the mid 50s to the mid 60s, right? Everything else was that we've shown up to now is in the 1950s. Now we're into 1965 and this is the first Hawaiian bank, obviously, and behind it you see to the right is an office building that we'll also cover in just a minute. But he, Bauer, by the time he got to the 1960s, he had two partners, Arthur Moray and Benjamin Lum. And so the firm was Bauer, Moray and Lum. And I don't know how much again, but there's so much of this as the, just concede the Bauer influence in that, that extended EVE line that has no purpose other than to have these cutouts, these sort of tender cutouts that put remarkable shadows on the, on the face of the building. And I think it's just a wonderful. Yeah. And just in transitioning to the, to the next picture, it reminds me of a project on Kauai that unfortunately isn't anymore as it used to be, but it's been remodeled and we actually dedicated a show to it to Soda and I a while ago that is the Cocoa Palm Resort by very famous. And he has done a similar thing where basically the top beams project out and, and then also sort of form these sort of shadow canopies, cantilever. So sort of a similar theme. And, and this here also gives us a chance to refer to a very recent show here. We, we had our Doko Momo, you know, team here and Don representing us and, and promoting our walking tour that we had in Kauai. So maybe along the lines, maybe you could do a little synopsis of the event. We, we put together a walking tour. It was about an hour and covered buildings in Lihue. And it just a range of remarkable buildings that were done in that period of the 1950s and 60s. And they had some remarkable talent that were brought over to design these buildings. And I think even for the people that live in Kauai that were part of the tour, they came away with a new appreciation for what was right, right in their, their own community. And here again, the theme you were talking about, it's got the eve because, you know, we got to protect from the, as our hat has to have an edge and that protects us from the rain and the sun. But then he allowed himself this luxury to, to slice it open and to give sort of a view and a feel, you know, to the skies, which are so special here and, and rain can come through. But just, just a little bit that it doesn't matter. And also these sort of little slices of light come through. So you can see once again, I mean, it's, it's, it is an, an aesthetical element that basically adds to the beauty of the building, but it is also performative. So it's not just for the looks. It's not just the buildings we see these days, which has hideous crowns or chevrons or these things that don't do anything, but try to look pretty. But, but these architects were, were performative architects. So everything they did, they did for multiple reasons. He was, he was a sculpture, an architectural sculpture. He was creating forms that, that brought interest. And I think the, the next building that we're going to show, the La Rue Plantation office building is again, it has that same soffit, but it's a large rectangular building and two-story office building, but he didn't just do that in the simplest way possible. He articulated the bays, he, the rock wall that you see there is actually asymmetrical again in the elevation. Brought a lot of that same sensitivity into the, what would otherwise, could have been just a drive-by office building. Yeah. And after that little inter-island trip here to Kauai, we get back to our island of Oahu here. We're the next project that probably many of you know. So next picture. Oh, I think we have a detail. So yeah. And again, this, I, I couldn't resist wanting to see this in there because it just shows the impact and because those cutouts are all the way around the building. Yeah. It, you, no matter what time of day, it's somewhere on the building, you're seeing those, those shadows. And because of its iconic nature, it even made it as a prime photograph into the brochure around to the documentation because. Okay. So now back, back to. So now we're going back to, wow, we even go back to our hood because we're both Waikiki Indians. And interesting, we, we share, you know, we're rather new to the island. We came the same year, only a few months apart. We came here. So we're pretty sort of new observers to what we're seeing here as opposed to our fellow board members who've been here for a long time. So for us, it's new. And maybe share with the audience your little sort of, sort of getting to know bar, not in person, but. No. And it was, I was telling Martin that before I actually moved five years ago, I came over here and spent time and part of that was just to try to see, would this work? And I looked up an apartment building that it filled to me and it was affordable. And it just convinced me, yes, I could make this work. And the building was not one of our, ours buildings, but it was very similar in concept. Two-story, round a courtyard, lush planting, the rock walls, the openness. And so I thought originally that I had fallen in love with the Bauer building from the beginning and it turns out, well, no, it wasn't. But it may have turned out that one of the partners on that building that I did see that first time was one of the later partners in Bauer's firm. Yeah. And then in the hood is either Waikiki Business Plaza from 1965. And yeah, we should already show this next year. This is something I just wanted to point out. It's the revolving restaurant. You still can go and have dinner there. And it's not the first revolving restaurant, the Space Needle in Seattle and the Alamo in an office tower. We both had those before this. But it was important enough to Edwin Bauer, as you see in the lower right. He got a patent for the mechanism. This is one of a set of drawings. And he identifies himself as Edwin L. Bauer Inventor. Well, this is interesting. This is the architect as inventor. This reminds me of our traffic hearing fellow, David Rockwood, who also just got a patent for a seamless bicycle transmission. So it's about creating. It's not taking things off the shelf and jamming them together. It's really about creating architecture. And I have to say, if we go back to the previous picture one more second here, it's like, of course, it looks very international style and very rationalist. But on the other hand, if you attract the sun, the windows are rather small. They're pushed back. So probably if you ecotech that, you get a certain amount of self shading. So it's not that sort of inappropriate for the climate. And that ground floor, I mean, that plaza with that very sort of almost Edwin Durrell stone kind of concave corner gesture, which is now unfortunately in H&M, which people are crazy about. And I said, well, we had H&M in Germany forever. And I'm really not excited to get an H. But I know the grass is green on the other side. And we lost a wonderful mural there in the corner in the process. Murl, that was beautiful. Yeah. Anyway, getting close to the end of the show. So we want to show the second to last picture is the number 19 here, which is actually I can make two references to previous show, both with the Soto. One is the Kaiser mainstream exotic Hawaii. And the other one was a reason one that we call architecture because the leguta, which that is has for us the number one exciting balconies on the island. And you labeled him sort of also in this phase, we previously said we architect as the inventor, but you said he was also architect as a developer at some point. Yes. At some point, he was doing these larger buildings. And I don't know if that was true for this one, but he was becoming a developer owner and that apparently involved a lot of his attention. But I think even the architecture that's building with the way that it's the top of its handle and the arrangement, I think it's power manipulating the elements of architecture that you could work with. No, it is very nicely delicately exotic building. So at the end of the show, we conclude, I would have, you know, tweaked history and made this the conclusion, but thanks to you, we don't do it the sentimental way, but actually the chronological way. And this is a building in 1967. And it's a condominium building and pretty straightforward, except it again, you can see even on that solid wall on the left that it's got an angle on it too, on the left side of it and the roof line that's formed as it comes up and folds over the building and stops short of the other. And there's again, it's still playing with it the sculpture of architecture, even though it's a very large, large building. So in summary, he is the fourth wheel on the wagon that should not be forgotten. And he's maybe not the most exotic of the four, but truly a best example of a very good tropical modernism. And with that, I want to thank you, John, introducing him to us. My pleasure. And I'm sure he'll stay on track with that. And I already apologize. I'm going to say publicly here that I want to encourage you to work with Don Hibbert, who is working with Jack Gilmer on the prize book, that you guys maybe work on a borrow book, because it seems we really deserve a publication. Okay. Stay tuned. We'll keep you posted. So with that, I hope you enjoyed the show. And please turn back on next week with the Soto again. And we're going to basically talk about sun slated Hawaii. And if you want to know what that is, you have to tune in. Until then, please stay happy and healthy and keep up a Hawaii that Edwin Bauer was bowing. Bye-bye.