 We, the Soto Ground and Martin de Spang, welcome you back to our relentless search of humanity and humility in the built environment. And this is our Veterans Week show, acknowledging yesterday's holiday. We're going to look both into a piece of veteran architecture and have someone else with us, who you see in the middle here already. And that's a veteran in a more, on top of that, in a human way. And that's Mr. Ronald Lindgren. Hi, Ron. Hello, how are you? Thanks for the kind words. Well, and thank you again for having served and helped us out. You know, also as Germans, you know, getting us back on our feet after we screwed up and all of that and more. And you've been, you've been a Vietnam veteran and you are a Vietnam veteran, right? Yes, indeed. So thank you for that much. Appreciate it. And today, we're actually going to another island and talking where we are from, the Soto Year Hawaiian. So please go to the next slide and tell us where we go today. All right. Well, we're going from the island of Oahu to the island of Maui and we are going to Kapalua, which as you can see in the upper left-hand corner, there's the Hawaiian Islands. There's a little tiny red dot that shows you where Kapalua is. And Kapalua is a development that occurred starting after agriculture began to wind down in the Hawaiian Islands and we began to shift to a more of a tourist economy. And so places that have been agriculture began to have these substantial developments built and hotels and resorts. And that's where we're going right now to one of those resorts. Well, me coming from practice as well, I would have a hard time how to even build on this site because it's the most prestigious part of the Hawaiian Islands, right? So next slide, Ron, share with us how you approach that tricky, you know, challenge. All right. Well, you're seeing a rendering of what many people, and I still believe in my heart, was the most memorable hotel lobby in all of Hawaii, drawn by the very famous West Coast architectural delineator Carlos Denise. And he was one person we always used on every project whenever possible if the client had deep pockets. And a little sight on it. Here you see him next to you. And on top of that, we actually see a project which is next door, which is the financial puzzle of the Pacific, which has been built a little early in the late 60s. But that is masterplanned by Victor Grun, and he worked for Victor Grun and had, you know, met many young upcoming architects and discovered his sort of talent in suggestive illustrations. What I thought remarkable here is actually Ron, and this speaks to your design that is actually, you see actually more sort of the natural environment and humans interacting and actually very little architecture, right? Correct, right. If I can just say too, we've got these very slim pillars. The openings towards the ocean were 20 feet wide and 55 feet tall and all just open to the elements and the beautiful tropical breezes and of course the view of Molokai and Lanai with the sun setting between them each and every night on a good day. Wonderful. Right, and the pillars are so thin and so elegant that they don't get in the way of the view. They've actually got even better. And usually the renderings are better than the building. But not in this case. They're kind of eye candy and in this case the opposite. But let's move on because of course the project had to take on form, but primarily it was designed from inside out, which we see here. But the next picture here is an architectural model of it. And at that time I think Ron was the firm already called Killingsworth, Lincoln, Wilson and Partners. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. And tell us who did the models in the office. All of our in-house models were done by a design partner named Larry Stricker. We thought for the design of several other Hawaiian resorts that I think you will be covering in future programs. We will do and we look much forward and hi to Larry. Look forward to see you and Larry is actually on the way to another project that he was the project owner on. Another on it which is the Big Island. So you guys stay tuned and be excited about that one. Let's move on to the next slide which for me shows this very unarchitectural approach of sort of these shelters which are very open again to the breeze and they're just cascading down just like the landscape. So a very dematerialized approach which is very unusual because we're in the mid-80's and we get to the guys more in detail but this is when architectural form was way more important than any other performance. And I picked this for a reason where we're going to tell you in a little bit that we're unable to take pictures of the project in addition to the pictures we have but the one on the right is from a project where we want to do a show with you Ron next but you already sort of tested that sort of detailing of the lanais which are basically have more like logias as we talked in previous show and the front part is more the sticking and sticking out lanai, right? Very, very elegant detailing. And so let's go to the next slide. The next slide is basically again showing the composition of the building in itself. Again the 80's have been tricky because being in postmodernism so the question is how literal were you and while this might look like an additional cove, actually you would never think about it as that when you're like in the building. When you're in the building the building is very much perceived as from this inside out versus outside in approach and that's perfectly portrayed in the next picture. And you please Larry tell us some exciting details about what we see. Next slide please and also what we don't see and what was planned. This is slide number six. Well let me say that the previous slide showed that we had purposefully been very informal and country casual with the arrangement of our gesture of ways. And that was in response to the fact that a previous architect had done a very fine hotel design for the site but the owners found it to be much too urban for his beautiful rural site. So we had the advantage of someone who hadn't met the client's requirements and could build off of those so that we really wanted the buildings to fit into the natural surroundings in an informal, comfortable and heavily landscaped way. And I think referring to the end of last week show I think we can say if my memory is correct from us talking around that was these were SLM right? That's correct. San Francisco office. All right. So let's move on to the next slide which has actually surprised me as the same model as the previous one and it basically shows the intricacy and that makes us actually talk about as you always recall and remind us of that it was a classicist right? And explain more to us why and how this applies to how you approach the building. Yes despite the fact that our guest room wings were purposefully informal as they stepped down the 10% slope and actually stepped from five stories down to two and one stories. The lobby experience and the entry experience is very formal and very classic and very traditional. At Killingsworth my boss, mentor and friend was very much a classicist and he was convinced that if he didn't arrive at a hotel front door or entry experience that wasn't memorable that didn't make you feel that you would come to a special place that he had failed. Well, he didn't fail here. He surrounded an enormous motor court with open porticoes from which beautiful flowering vines hung and a very large portco share. And as a classicist, there's an axis right to the center of the portco share and right to the lobby to the point where guests would walk in on that axis and find themselves in that gloriously high ceiling open lobby. And let's revisit that again next slide here. And you just saw that we're pointing out that classicism, classic comes from Rome and Greece, right? Right. And although they're on Mediterranean so there's a certain similarity to climate. It's not as cold as further north in Germany, for example. But the approach of the Greek temples is different. You have a distinct difference between the inside and the outside. And the other thing I was going to say was that these buildings are very obviously modern. They are not replicas of Greek temples. And we went through a stage where there were lots of buildings that were replicas of Greek temples that were universities and banks. And this uses a lot of the same things, but it isn't an exact replica. It's modern. And one thing to add on that, we're in the tropics. So these are kind of tropical classicist modern buildings, which is very exciting, right? Let's move on to the next slide. And I'm interested in the, we're on this now as a research to look at the evolution of a signature element within the Killingsworth body of work. So we started out with the Kahala Hilton, which we will go back to and do a show together in more detail. But it basically had the Kahala condos we did two shows about. It basically has the single column that has a negative corner, the mesian corner. Then in the last show, the former seaside hotel, you basically have a positive corner and you indented the center of the column. While here, you guys actually went crazy and did the quadrupling. And you were just this morning when we tried to, you know, talk, Ron, you were telling me about the quadruple rings of your Audi that you had to go to the shop, right? And that's why Audi choose the three rings. That has to do with the Olympic and the rings, right? So tell us more about the four columns, Ron. At Killingsworth had always wanted his lofty, soaring columns to be designed in detail in such a way that it looked as if the beams themselves that connect to the columns actually just slipped right on through. And that was a matter of creating indentations in the columns or, as you say, treating corners and so forth. But here, his structural expressionism is probably showing in its greatest advantage because this time the beams actually slide through the four column clusters. Yeah, you pointed out, you see on the right the detail, you see that dark thing up there and this is a lighting fixture and tell us more about that one. Yeah, at night, beautifully enough, although the lobby itself was very residentially burning with total lamps and floor lamps and so forth, most of the light came from the fact that the lighting designer placed ten fixtures on the floor level shining up in the very center space between all four of these clustered columns. This meant that the inside faces, all eight of them, shone brightly and illuminated the lobby in a very romantic way. We can't and won't hide any longer the reason that I really indicated that we can't show you images from how this looked in this project, but we will show in one of Larry's projects, the Ihilani, which you, Ron and I, when you were here for the Docomomo Symposium and both the Soda Newark keynote speakers, by the way, we drove up to and we basically saw it illuminated and we will share that with the audience. But let's jump on to the next picture here. All these pictures are basically the web out there and while the project had been completed in the mid-70s, while you pointed something out that Ed sort of had almost a little ducked jackal and Mr. Hyde attitude towards the built environment, the architecture and the interior furnishing, Ryan. Yes, it's concerned for hotels was that comfort was a paramount thing that had to be achieved and it comforted in many ways, comfort in the surroundings, comfort in the views, comfort when you sat down in a chair in the lobby. Now modern furniture and the very famous mid-century modern furniture and the work of the European masters like Corbusier and Mies, beautiful to look at, not so fine to sit in for longer than maybe 20 minutes. Ed had the feeling that the furniture shouldn't be comfortable, which meant that it also had to look comfortable. So he rarely, if ever, used pieces of modern furniture. These pieces obviously were built contemporaneously with the hotel and they were designed for visual and actual physical comfort. Yeah. Let's go to the next slide. While it was built in the mid sort of towards the second half of the 70s, it had its prime time in the 80s and was always encouraged the audience to think about what was going on with them in the 80s. What was going on with you in the 80s up there on the right? Well, one of the major sort of pop culture icons of the 1980s in the United States and even internationally, because you probably saw him in Europe too, was Tom Selleck in the role of Magnum PI, which is a tremendously popular TV program. And there's a picture of Tom Selleck on the front of TV Guide and there's a picture of me in the 1980s also wearing the iconic aloha shirt. And as you pointed out, unlike Steve McGarrett from the previous decade in Hawaii 5.0, Magnum was dressed for the tropics and we're looking at a building which is also dressed for the tropics or made for the tropics in the same way. Ron, explain more to us what we see and especially the shading devices. Yes, there were, as you can see in the photograph, there were louvers and they were vertical up near the roofline but then they kicked out almost as if they were kicking rain from coming in. But of course they were making the spaces inside shady and protective and louvers like that are sort of inherently tropical looking and we actually had originally designed some enormous double-hung windows to be up and concealed behind the upper louvers in a winter storm which happened occasionally just by using weights and someone's own arm strength they could actually pull those double-hung windows down for protection and the weights would actually hang in the very center of the cluster of columns. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, I have a house built in 1930 and the double-hung windows function exactly that same way. Exactly. Okay, now almost half of the show and now comes the point we have to reveal while talking this is a veteran show and now we come to the fallen veteran as far as this project here. So next slide here. This is in 2006 where our most activist journalist Kurt Sandburne who was successful of preventing which would have been horrible projects to the islands and here he was sadly reporting that pretty much this project here would become a fallen soldier and for the reason that we see at the top right and we would go to the next slide but we're not going to spend much time because it's going to hurt my eye for sure because this is what it has been replaced by and we agree we don't want to talk, I think it was the Marriott chain or something that looks to me talking the literal mid-80s, the post-modern looks like an upside-down M. Yeah, or a W. That's all what the project pretty much is and you were telling me, Ron, that you had almost saved it by talking that it would have been taken over your project by Disney and this is what very ironically this is referring to the show with Larry to come in the future and in case of the Ihilani this actually has been successful because the original Ihilani which you see on the left has been saved and then by other architects in an equally hilly style it has been added on but at least the original was basically kept, right? Anything you guys want to add to this sadness? Not really. The irony is that the condominiums that were built that replaced the entirely destroyed Coppola Bay Hotel are timeshare and I was given the opportunity by the Disney Corporation to perhaps have saved the original Coppola because they asked me to do some drawings for them, gave me two weeks and a $10,000 check and said keep it secret but we want to buy the Coppola Bay Hotel but it had to have some timeshare considerations. Well, unfortunately by keeping it that secret the Disney lawyers didn't find out that at that time the county of Maui did not allow timeshares anywhere. Bummer. Well, there we go. So it's down, it is not anymore but it actually it is in many ways but it's commemorated, it's memorialized. In how many ways, let's go to the next slide. This is our walking encyclopedia on Don Hibbert and his famous book if you can get the camera back to studio here, Designing Paradise. So Ron, you were designing Paradise because if we can get to the page back he was basically dedicating to you four and a half double pages to your project and so that way again there's an entire chapter about the killings with work and you also telling me as an addition on Shame on Me I haven't referenced that but at the end of the book he makes a very important point as well, Ron. His last chapter of the book he's trying to explain why there weren't going to be any more large especially mega hotels designed probably in Hawaii and he had all sorts of reasons and those reasons built up to what he thought were the reasons why the Kapalua Bay Hotel disappeared. So the last chapter in this magisterial account of Hawaiian hospitality design history is of great interest. Absolutely. And it's called The Clothes of an Era. Absolutely. So then this is print media here and it's still in print and it's wonderful so you guys should all get it. The next thing we can do research on is obviously the World Wide Web Gala, the next picture here. I found this one here. This is Harvey Keller from your adopted home in Long Beach, Ron and he did an interview with your friend and boss and partner at Killingsworth which is almost like an hour long and on minute two he basically states that this year project is one of the most beautiful ones that the office has ever done. So that's a great compliment, right? Greatest you can get from your boss and friend and more, right? And another one here on the next one here, this is one of the most famous and accomplished architectural photographers of the modern movements, Julius Schulman who we had pointed out when we were doing the show about the Kahala Kondos, his famous photograph of the apartments from the ocean side made it on the cover page of the main postcard that was promoting the National Doco Momo event that you were both keynote speakers and he also was persuaded probably didn't have to be much to go here which was actually quite some time after because the Kahala is mid-60s early to mid-60s and this is a decade later. Yes, exactly. So there's the famous Julius Schulman picture of a couple of little bay hotel. And I also have to say that, you know, here guys' legacy and this project's legacy lives on within the next generation of architects. We go to the next slide and maybe you guys can say some words about that. Well, this is, you're making a comparison here between one of the projects you worked on and this hotel that we're talking about. And on the left is this kindergarten or preschool that you did for a university in Germany and what you did there was sort of a similar thing to what was done at the Kapalua Bay in which there is a view. You're looking at a view. You've got a structure that is very light, very delicate and it makes you want to look through it to the view beyond. Because your preschool is in Germany, obviously it couldn't be open. So it's glazed, it's got windows there, but it's not dissimilar to what we are seeing at the Kapalua Bay too. And it has this inside-out approach. However, then next slide, it will always end up having a form. And again, we want to point out, Zeitgeisty at the bottom, this was that pivotal point in America where from Jimmy Carter, it went on from, I mean the conclusion of the progressive era to the beginning of the reactionary era. And this was Ronald Reagan. So that was embodied through formalism and postmodernism and Ronald highly credit you for having resisted that temptation and almost stubbornly just kept on keeping the torch of modernism and especially here in wonderful tropical modernism up that the architecture becomes what I call architecture or architecture, which you can see it's very similar although it doesn't want to look like architecture which biomimicry wants to unfortunately do these days. It is truly architecture, it's classical architecture, but it's way, it's performing and also in the way it comes across, it's very similar to how nature performs, right? And right in this picture we see a really commonality of the upright tree trunks of the coconut palms and the uprights of the building. Yeah, and next slide. Okay, and there we are going back to the kindergarten or the preschool, excuse me, which is at the top. It's actually built into a hillside so it is insulated but being partly underground. But you're pointing out also that we've got this similarity or we've got the situation again of the zeitgeist of the 1970s. That's your car, correct? That was immediately Americano as a kid. I needed one of these cars that was playing within a sandbox. Right. This is a 72-limit fury. And you got to have it for yourself. And I had to have it when I was a student. But also on the bottom right, this is the project that has informed me the most and this is I.M. Pei's bank in Lincoln, Nebraska, the NBC bank. But the point that I want to make is that I also told that emerging generation there is a very distinctive difference between the early 70s and the late 70s. And what is that? Well, that was the energy crisis of 1973-74. And we went from being very wasteful with energy to realizing we had to conserve energy as much as possible. In this particular case, you, as I said, put the building underground to insulate it. But there is a difference between building something in right from the beginning and then trying to add it all. Yeah. And how skillfully you do that. And so was Pei's, while my car was, you know, the epitome of the gas guzzler, 72, Pei's building was from 76 and it's very environmentally conscious, beautifully done. Right. And next slide is going back to the previous comparison. And while, you know, our project had been published in these sort of equal books here, I want to, you know, you know, thank you, Ron, that you hadn't taken what I can call, if you use, you know, cars as vehicles for thought and AMC Pacer approach in architecture where, which many eco-architects kind of tried to do, but they couldn't really, I mean, it was sort of a little silly, right? Correct. And AMC Pacer was this very iconic car of the 1970s that looked really interesting but didn't really fulfill what it was supposed to do. And so I called your project more, you know, having foreseen what another island, at least until recently before he sold his house on the big island. This is the old rocker Neil Young. Neil Young. Who had a 59, still has Lincoln Continental. He said, I'm not going to cash for clunker that. I'm going to have a crew of world-renowned engineers converted to 100 miles per gallon hybrid. And your project, Ron, never needed to be converted because it was already 100 miles per gallon car, you know, as far as performance, because it's such a tropical, exotic, biochromatic structure. Right. And not energy waste. No. And I was, next slide here, second to last, is I was recently to the subject matter of that our president has, once again, now what he already had, you know, threatened us with saying, I'm pulling out of the Paris Agreement. This is from two years ago where our government basically said, and our governor said, we resist that, and we do it anyways. And look in this article, you know, which picture they used as the portray Hawaii. Exactly. And so there's a picture of Kapalua as an unspoiled, beautiful thing that needs to be preserved, and thus we need to be energy conservators. Yeah. And so I think the legacy and the memory of your project is so typical, just like you made a compliment to our PI in car. There it is. Which you see at the bottom, which of course we now have to swap to an electric engine. Exactly. It's wasteful. But we only drive it once a week for the shows, right? Right. And there's Ron in the picture too. Exactly. And there he is with the project that followed this one here, that we're in the process of making the show. We're hyper excited about that. We're going to phase out by providing an image that you just had found as of this morning, Ron, and explain this to us really quickly. Yeah. So last picture, there it is. Yes. I discovered in my files a postcard of the hotel, which was sold in the lobby of the Kapalua Bay Hotel. And it shows the happy juxtaposition of the hotel Kapalua Bay itself, which for many years was listed by the US government as the finest beach in the entire United States. But when a hotel guest maybe had eaten a few too many times in the hotel with the hotel food, they could choose to walk down to the beach, traverse it, walk up some steps, and enter this independent restaurant very handsomely done by a local Hawaiian architect, whom unfortunately I can't identify. And you being Hawaiian too, how do you categorize the approach of these Howley guys, which kind of work for you? Well, that's a good point, but I think as long as it's done sensitively and done well and done thoughtfully, it doesn't matter what race you are. You're going to do a good thing. You're going to do a good thing. Greatest compliment you can get, Ron. Thank you. So we want to thank you. Indeed. I love it. We have to thank you. Thank you so much for having been on the show with us. Yes. The first time, but not at all the last time. I don't know. This was just the beginning. I'm not going to let you go. So we're actually going to see you next week already for another masterpiece of killings worth, and you guys can get your spirit back up because this is the only exception to the fortunate rule that all the other killings worth are still around and treated very well by the way. We can see them and enjoy them. So we look forward to see you then and until then, please stay as vintagely veteran as Ron. Thank you very much.