 human architecture. And we're broadcasting in the midst of COVID-19. And we're on the search to that maybe some of the most COVID combating contributions might lie in the past and can, you know, give us guidance for the future. And for that, this is the volume two of our killing worth wellness world, tropical exotic world of wellness, with one of the utmost protagonist of the architectural embodiment of tourism, which is the industry that used to run us until now. And for that, we're broadcasting live back to Long Beach, California, to a killingsworth long term partner, Ron Lindgren. Hi, Ron. Hello. Now I gave you last name, even he adopted me now. And of course, we're having with us again, our co-hosts back in Honolulu, Hawaii, where it all started, this little Ron. Hi, this little. Hello, everybody. And let's get the first slide up and Ron jump right in and do a little recap of where we had last time in the one year one. Yeah, when I last had the pleasure of being with both of you, I was talking about how those successful design aspects of those early killingsworth hotels that were in Hawaii where they all those sort of good things reappeared again in hospitality projects around the world. And this slide all showed images from the Boca Beach Club, which was a good example of how Ed had learned lessons in Hawaii and applied them in semi tropical Florida. It also was a bit tragic in the sense that later management basically obliterated in renovations just about all of the good things that Ed added that made it a memorable hotel. And they also buttoned it up as a hermetic building, where as before it had some of those easy greasy aspects that both you and DeSoto are always talking about. What I want to do this week is show you some really exotic and tropical teams where some new a new factor came in a very, very powerful new factor in Ed's architecture. But first, I want to answer a question that I posed at the end of my last meeting with you. And that was why of all of the 222 hotels that Ed designed that only 15 percent of them were built, that sounds like a bit of a failure. But very quickly, I'll explain that that's sort of par for the course with hospitality design. First of all, a number of our developer clients had never done a hotel before. They've done any number of other kinds of buildings, but then through a very painful trial and error experience, they found out that for a hotel, they didn't particularly have the knowledge, the stamina, the patience, and the financing to really carry out a complicated, really risky, long term project. In other words, they had romantic visions of having their own prestigious hotels in their investment portfolios. But all of that came up really hard against reality. And of course, some developers who had specific sites but didn't own them, they just wanted schemes from the Killingsworth office to sell a bank or someone else on providing money for development and building of a hotel. And I have to admit, it didn't happen all that often, but some developers and investors simply weren't sold on the schemes that Killingsworth office presented them. But if you go to the next slide, please, this happens to be a collage of some projects that I'll talk about. These were all foreign hotel projects, and it was involved in 37 different countries. The problem with international work was that it often founded on unforeseen and completely uncontrollable and sometimes even tragic events. For example, that project in the lower left-hand corner, inroads into the Middle East were completely lost because of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Number of our hotels didn't go ahead. Inroads into the Caribbean region were lost because of racial tensions and got so bad that there were technically climates in the late 1970s when tourists were being shot to death by nationalist snipers on golf courses. Inroads into Mexico, project on the lower right, were lost when our very own client, a billionaire German, by the way, Martin, antagonized the very president of Mexico himself in disagreements over the use of foreign investment money to build hotels. Yeah, the solo artist with that picture, he said, this looks real, but once again, this is thanks to the intricate, heavy hands of your business partner, Larry Stricker, that we had the show with last week and then next week again. And you add it, he said not only he was working on that, but also his son, David, that he's now doing the vineyard together, right? Correct. Every image on that slide is either a drawing by Carlos Denise or a model built in our office by Larry Stricker. I was going to say that the 1992 Los Angeles riots, whilst the Halle Calamities Los Angeles Hotel just a week before construction was to begin on a 33-story urban tower right downtown, but no doubt the greatest blow to potential Killingsworth work around the world was a decade-long collapse of the Japanese economy that started in 1990. Banks suddenly just didn't have any money for construction loans. In Hawaii alone, five Killingsworth resorts were lost on four different islands, whose value at that time, the aggregate value, would have been about a billion dollars. Wow. Now, while 15 percent, again, doesn't sound like much, with all of those reasons, it turned out that that was pretty much par for the course. In Hawaii, however, seven out of 22 commission hotels were built, and there our batting average was a sparkling 30 percent. And it's fascinating insight, Ron, from somebody who's actually there. And I was going to give a very quick recap of some of those Hawaiian things that Ed did that made those hotels so successful, so that when you look at the two that I'm going to show you today, you'll be able to pick up on them. Remember, he provided unforgettable, memorable arrival experiences. He had the structural expressionism where the columns and beams were exposed. He raised the lobbies up so that they had vantage points raised up in a sort of a king of the hill method. He was a classicist, so he used a lot of actees and symmetry. He certainly used very lush garden and water features. And finally, he created guest room plans that were really revolutionary in their humane layout. His hotels really became elegant and comfortable homes away from home. If we go to the next slide, please, when Ed was faced with the opportunity to design in really exotic and faraway places, he added one new and powerful element to all of those things that I just listed to you. And that would be historical and cultural precedent. During his travels all over the world, as a hotel designer, he really became interested in immersing himself in foreign cultures. He wanted to know what the world views were like and what the various artistic expressions were. He saw himself as a sort of collector of cultures. And what he intended to do, if you could talk his clients into doing so, was to incorporate sort of native architectural forms, planning strategies that were from the past, and to use local artisanal skills into his architecture. He sincerely felt that the experience for guests in his hotels would thus be immeasurably enriched by doing so. Next slide, please. His first successes as a collector of cultures were in the Southeast Asian nation of Indonesia. What the slide is showing, it's a collage of some things I'm just going to touch on. Indonesia is now the largest Muslim nation in the world, but it also contained the Earth's most monumental Buddhist temple at Borobudur. That's what that enormous ziggurat is in the lower left corner. Also, the powerful religious Hindu temple sculptures found to the right are actually found in just about every native village in Bali. And finally, there was Javanese wooden architecture, palace wooden architecture in the upper left-hand corner. All of these things were an incredibly rich trove for Ed to dive into for artistic expressions for hotels. And you have said, Ron, that you have visited all of these and settled them together with Ed, right? Yes. That was the glory of working with Ed Killingsworth on international work. It's a chance to actually see these places and be inspired myself, not only Ed, but myself and other members of the Killingsworth firm who often traveled with him for just those reasons. I was saying that Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia, 11 million people at present. This was the very first place that Ed built a foreign hotel. He was also his largest, well over 1,100 rooms, mostly for business travelers. Oddly, it was built over what was less than the foundations of an unrealized Russian sports facility. Next slide. Frankly, I have to admit that the mid-rise concrete hotel that Ed and I and Larry Sturker all worked on in phases from 1974 to 1991 didn't have any particularly distinguishing architectural features. But in its sort of modern plainness and its simplicity, it did serve as an effective backdrop to a really remarkable freestanding tile roof entry lobby structure. Looking at the picture, Ed convinced his client, Bertamina Oil Company, to recreate the museum wooden palace architecture of ancient Yogyakarta in the lobby design. All of those exposed columns, beams, and wood structure are heavily carved, and they're all inlaid with traditional gold and vermilion ornamentation. This, in my mind, is Ed's most lavish lobby interior. He left it to those who knew how they could do it so that it was a genuine expression of the architectural past. Next slide, please. This is one of my favorite photographs because it's this broad sweeping view of Ed's romantic vision of what a Balinese hotel could be like. Bertamina, who was Indonesia's largest oil company, again provided a site for Ed. This time it was on the Indian Ocean on a beachfront site in the Nusa Dua region on that island southern shoreline. Ed's challenge here, in his own mind, was to combine that immersive Hindu cultural experience for the guests with the very best of Western hospitality services. The clients were definitely expecting Western comforts in 560 affordable guest rooms. The clientele were mostly middle-class European, Australian, and New Zealander tourists who were looking for something memorable in their time in Bali, but something they could afford. Next slide. This project turned out to be the most overwhelmingly complete expression of Ed's being a collector of cultures. Now to this end, he provided all of the site planning locations for all of the buildings. All of the building plan layouts, and he did the complete design of all the guest room wings and, of course, their rooms. But very wisely, again to have a genuine experience for the guests, he left the architectural forms, structural expression, and the public interior spaces to very fine Balinese architecture and interior designers. One thing he did demand of them, however, was that he wanted the entire hotel to illustrate the great ancient epic literature of something called the Ramayana. So everywhere you look in the hotel are sculptures, bar relays, paintings, textile art, all which tell the story of this famous Hindu wandering king. And interestingly, his wanderings over decades together with his army of monkeys bears a very strong similarity to those of Odysseus in the ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. What we're looking at on the slide is the fact that monumental stone sculptures could be erected everywhere. The relatively soft stone immediately takes on the look of great age because in very short time, valleys, heat, humidity, and the heavy rains caused algae and moss to completely cover the stone. And all of a sudden, you think you're in a place that might have been there for hundreds of years. What you're seeing is a 60 foot tall rear elevation of a theatrical backdrop for outdoor Balinese dance performances at the hotel. A very large dressing area for 80 to 100 performers was built under this 60 foot tower. Next slide. Ed's again unforgettable arrival experience, which is absolutely necessary in his mind for a client's experience. Here it's centered on a vast and very classically symmetrical entry water court. It's much larger than an American football field. And as you can see, it contains scores of mythical snake creatures, all carved in stone and spouting water from their fearsome mouths. Next slide. The entry courts stepped water platforms were interconnected with broad waterfalls. This was an amazing water experience. The grand lobby structure is on the left and they were flanked by what appeared to be traditional Balinese temple towers. But instead of being religious towers, they actually cleverly concealed the overhead elevator equipment rooms. Next slide. This is an aerial view of how this resort sprawls along a beautiful white sand beach and the Indian Ocean. You see that enormous water feature with that symmetrical axis centered on the tile with Port Couchier and the lobby structure in the center of the picture. Very symmetrical and classical on the entry side, but Ed very cleverly made a contrast on the other side from the lobby with these meandering lagoons in a very informal park atmosphere. And he also shared with us one that it has a life underneath it, right? Yeah, the life above and on top are pretty amazing. First of all, the guests drive up ramps in that typical king of the hill way so that you're up in the air. So you can see that water, either the classical symmetrical water or the brandering lagoons in both directions. But under the lobby, there is a completely hidden underground one mile long, 18 foot wide service tunnel that connects all of the guest room building service elevators. The problem at a huge hotel like this, Midrise Hotel, is that you want to get your guest room room service meals to the guests quick, fat, fast and hot. And so they were all day long, all night long, people in golf carts carrying food and other service material were zipping around in these underground tunnels. Next slide. Now, the guest room buildings were really just low to Midrise. They were only two to five stories tall. Every one of them had views of the Indian Ocean, either over a man made lagoons or in this particular picture over some private swimming pools. And here you see Ed's structural expressionism again in an elegant stacking of those exposed concrete structural trellis works. These guest room buildings and their facades look a bit modern, but because everywhere this monumental stone sculpture was located, that kept the hotel from looking new, but rather something built amongst some ancient ruins. Next slide. This is the daytime view of the lobby building itself. Amazingly, it's a completely all wooden structure. And it shows that its interior rose all the way up to an apex about, in fact, a very shadowy apex about 80 feet above the floor. That tall central sculpture is of the warrior hero Rama's wife. He's someone who waited over decades very patiently for his return and the return of his monkey army from all of his epic adventures. On the floor, you see that there are placed these life-sized statues of all of her beautiful handmaidens. Up in the rafters, if you look closely, there is a display of gilded, mythical creatures called Geruda birds. Geruda birds happen to be sort of the uber service with a preeminent Hindu god Shiva, who rode everywhere place to place on the backs of these birds. Next slide. This is basically almost the same view, but this is the nighttime view. And I added it because it's such a palatial lobby and the space at night is appropriately very exotic, symmetrical and beautifully lit. Next slide. This is a very serene view of that lobby, but it's from the lagoon side. This was one of those magic days when the lagoon was absolutely still and the lobby is reflected so beautifully in those waters. This, in my mind, summarizes Ed's success here in bringing the experience of Balinese architecture to, you know, what I would consider discerning international travelers. To the right is a five-story guest room building to side, but as Ed always loves to do, it's basically lost and appropriately hidden away in the tropical greenery. One of the last things I'd like to say about this hotel is when the pandemic is behind us, the crypto valley is expensive, but I'm happy to say that guest rooms at an exotic and memorable hotel like this go for less than $200 a night. And I think we should go to our next slide. Martin, did you want to jump in here or should I just scrub what this is again? Well, this is an amazing list that you gave us from, you know, a while ago, but still it just shows how relevant your guy's work is because this is the best off like what the trip advisor or whatever it's today where, you know, tourists ring. And you can see here that the several top projects in the world are all by you guys. And this gets us back to Hawaii because, you know, the best is where it all started and that is in Hawaii. I mean, that's how I understand that list. Right, Ron? Yeah, and what I would say is the fact that Ed managed to acquire the very first four hotels of what were listed as the best tropical resorts in the world, and that was back in a 1990s rating list in the Condé Nast Travel Magazine, that really is an indication of how much care he lavished on the Hawaiian hotels and resorts. It really was his love letter, his love letter to Hawaii because he especially thought that his favorite island in the world was Oahu and his second favorite island was Bali. But I also have to say it's also a compliment to Ed's junior partner, Ron Lindgren and Larry Strickler, because most of these, you know, topping projects are designed by you. There's you, Holly Kalani, there's you, Kapalua Bay, and then there's, you know, Larry's, and of course you design them together in teams, but the main authorship and the Mauna Lani, which we're going to have next week, volume three of a project that actually you guys work together on the Mauna Lani ground. So a compliment to Ed, but also to his junior partner. Yes, very much so. In the next slide, I'll explain a little bit about how Larry and I became co-designers with Ed. When I mentioned that Bali was his second favorite island, sort of tragically, Ed never got to visit what I think was really probably his most colorful, exotic, and in my mind, the most mesmerizing hotel he ever designed, but he had some serious health problems, which included some open heart surgeries. And the fact is that he had to curtail traffic or he had curtail visits, especially international visits, because he needed to be in the reach of his hometown doctors. He couldn't even get to Hawaii anymore. On the other hand, he's stepping back a bit from some of the stresses of his practice restored his health. Larry and I took over the travel and took a lot of the initial client meetings and the travel from Ed and having been mentored by him for decades, we felt almost comfortable in doing so. The end result was he gained another 16 years of life and didn't pass away until the age of 86 in the year 2004. Next slide. Martin, I think I'll leave this one with you. Yeah, this is again quoting Harvey Keller's video that's online, Island Treasure, where actually the interview concludes in front of these beautiful drawings that Ed shares as a young boy made. And again, as you explained to us now, I think this is sort of making up for his inability to go there himself at that time. So these drawings kind of helped us to remember, which he says, you know, Bali being if not the most favorite place in the world that he has seen and had a chance to have an impact on. And next slide. Disoto, help us out how this relates. Well, this is a picture of the island of Kauai, but there's a connection to the island of Bali because when Ed was part of the planning process for Bali when they were beginning to kick into very high volume tourism, one of his recommendations which was put into law was that buildings could not be taller than a coconut palm. And in fact, at the same time that that came into existence, Bali had also happened on the island of Kauai, where the county government again outlawed buildings over four or five stories tall. And that leaves the only high rise complex on the island being the Kauai surf, which you see in these pictures here. And it was a reaction to these high rises that caused Kauai to outlaw buildings that were too tall, just in fact as Bali has done as well. And I might add that I believe that Ed had heard or knew about the Kauai guidance of not having a building taller than a coconut tree that's on the same site. And he just picked that idea with a group from UNESCO and applied it very well to Bali's plans for future tourism development. Well, that is a good thing that we started it and he carried it forward internationally. So after that, and you guys were a pioneer in what we call sensitive tourism. Right. Yeah, and if we go to the next slide, we got a phase out, we're getting close to the end of the show, but you just sort of walk us through that. Well, as we've said, this is the time of COVID-19 and we don't know what the long-term effects on tourism are going to be, but we are in the fact, in the process of reimagining what Waikiki could be and Waikiki is often referred to in a derogatory way as a jungle. But for you, Martin and your students, the word jungle is not necessarily a bad thing, but instead could be used to emulate what natural jungles are like. And this reimagining that we see here of Waikiki strips away a lot of the exteriors of the buildings and turns them into easy breezy structures where people live with vegetation and in communal areas. And we get away from a hermetic existence, which requires the use of a lot of electricity for powering air conditioning. And there's our friend Kurt Sandberg, too, who's the guy who wrote about it. Absolutely. Next slide is we got to go fast, but quickly, you know, implementing innovative technologies. This is the tribute of our emerging talent, Kelly Keanu, who's experimenting more than that, implementing to using cocoa pods as building materials. And in the tradition of your guys, Jakarta and Bali lobbies, again, using natural materials, local materials, original materials. And last slide here is, again, the sort of species within the jungle of Waikiki. So next slide, last slide for that, please, Eric. Again, Es called Waikiki the concrete jungle in the Harvey Pelle interview. So this is primitive, one of our inventions, and we have the chance to work this out and get it endorsed by one of your partners, Ron, you recognize, and this is Alfred D., before he passed away some two years ago in a similar high age as Ed. And so this slide is going to let you, Ron, not get off the hook, because we're going to see you again to talk about what we've been thinking about in last time, about the nature of courtyard. So see you back for that, looking forward to, but until then, please stay all safe and sound obviously, but as cosmopolitanally, uh, trophically exotic as as Ron and Mary. Thank you guys. Okay, bye. Thank you. Bye bye.