 Aloha and welcome to another episode of Dokumomo Hawaii's show about local architecture and mid-century modern architecture here in Hawaii. I'm today's host, Graham Hart, and we're doing this series in kind of preparation for our September Dokumomo National Symposium going to be held here in Hawaii. Today's show is about architect Edwin Bauer, and this is going to be our third installment. John Williams and I have kind of tag-teamed doing a couple of shows here and there about Edwin Bauer, and we've got another special guest, Denby Fawcett, with us as well today. So actually, thank you both for being here today. But if we can go to the first slide, I kind of want to introduce the importance of Bauer and why we've been doing so many shows about him. So Bauer's done just so many different projects during that time period throughout Hawaii really in general and specifically in Waikiki and has really defined the skyline, and we didn't really know a lot about him. We've slowly pieced together a lot of his projects, but now we're starting to learn more about his personal life and who he was. This is a great photo that actually Denby was able to find, and just from left to right here are all these gentlemen here on the screen. We got Alfred Price, Pete Wimberley there in the Loha print, Guy Rothwell, Edwin Bauer sitting there dead in the middle, and then Vladimir Asipov standing above him, and Wilson Fisk, so really up there with the greats of that period. So actually we want to start off with maybe the next slide, and having John talk about his introduction to Bauer. Yes, the Doko Mamu group does a walking tour every October, and really great walking tour. And four years ago I picked out this building just because it looked really interesting, and I wanted to learn more about it, and started doing the research for being the docent for this building on the walking tour. And I just, the more I looked at the building and studied it, I thought the composition of the architecture, the way the forms were arranged, just the detailing was really great. Now this is a photograph of the building when it was pretty new. It's still there, it's still very much intact, except the ground floor looks nothing like that. But if somebody ever came along and wanted to restore, it would be a great project. But after learning so much about the building, I knew that the name of the architect was Edwin Bauer, but I didn't really know much more than some of the other prominent buildings that he completed in the 1950s and into the 1960s. So for me it was just, who was this guy? Well, if you go to the next image, I wasn't the only one. So I actually live at this building, this is the Kalia, and I've lived here for ten years, my mom actually bought into it about 14 years ago. And we have been living there for quite a while, and I'd always appreciated the building, but I wasn't the one that sought after it. But after seeing this postcard, kind of actually roaming around on the internet, realized like, wow, this building was really well designed and was kind of very celebrated back in the day. And it was really something to kind of look at and kind of wanted to know more, and so then I learned a little bit about Bauer as well. And then John and I started kind of exchanging some notes about who was this guy and all the projects he had done. And on the next slide, John has, yeah, kind of helping another. Yeah, this is from our walking tour this last October. Halle Hanna is a Bauer building, and it's just off the edge of Waikiki across from the Waikiki Fire Station and Waikiki Library. And as I was presenting the building to several groups of people that were coming along, along comes Denby. I came on the tour, I'm a columnist for Honolulu Civil Beat, and I was actually thinking, oh, maybe I can get a story out of this tour. So when we stopped at Halle Hanna, John was telling us about the architect that did it, and his name was Edwin Bauer. And he had also done a hotel in Waikiki called the Breakers. And that brought back to memory to me why I knew Bauer. I had gone to the Breakers about 10 years ago when I was working as a TV reporter for KITV. The cameraman and I had gone down there to cover the theft of some fabric art. Thieves had broken into a hotel room there and stolen this very valuable fabric art. But the cameraman and I were more intrigued with the building than we were with the story. We were supposed to be there covering, because to see this beautiful low-rise hotel in the midst of Waikiki, which already, of course, was getting very high rise. So we kept asking questions like, who built this? Why is it here? Why is it still here? Why hasn't it been torn down? And the features of that hotel are sort of like this Halle Hanna. And it's low. It's comfortable. You see a lot of sunlight. There's opening. And it had Hawaiian features to it, lava and lots of landscaping. So when I went on John's tour, then it brought to my mind, oh, this architect is incredible. I do want to know more about him. So John told me there are no pictures of him at all. And I thought, no pictures. How can that be? This guy's prominent architect in Waikiki. So I went home and started looking on the internet just to kind of show off to see, of course, there are pictures of him and found not only a lot of pictures of him, but also all these buildings that he created. And I grew up in Hawaii in his period in the 1950s. So I thought, oh, my gosh, all these things that I've been surrounded by all my life are many of them by Edwin Bowen. And if we go to the next image, this pushed me to go back and try to find out more about where Bauer came from, what were the influences on Bauer's life. And on the left, you see that Ed, this is from the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1920s, Bauer's father. His name was Louis A. Bauer. Louis Bauer was in a partnership with a gentleman by the name of Quinn. And they were developing residential properties on the west side of San Francisco. And this ad in 1920 would have been about when Bauer was 15. And so obviously, Bauer was growing up with a developer that was interested in not only developing houses, but just the world of architecture. And so Bauer went off to college. He attended the University of Southern California, graduated in 1929. Then he worked for several smaller architects. And the reason that there's a picture there of the Golden Gate Bridge is not because Bauer designed it, but he was working with a firm, Moro and Moro, for six years in the 1930s. And about the midpoint of that, this picture was taken. Irving Moro was the architect consulting on the Golden Gate Bridge. So this would have been very much part of Bauer's experience in the 1920s, having this and working for such a prominent architect. But that still didn't answer, well, how did he get to Hawaii? So if we go to the next image. On the left is a picture of Roy and Estelle Kelly and their three children. Roy is phenomenally well known here in Waikiki and Honolulu. He developed the Outrigger Hotels. All of that was after World War II. But in 1941, Roy Kelly had a successful firm of his own that was developing and building small apartment buildings. And in 1941, before World War II started, Bauer came to Hawaii with his wife and his first of his four children and worked for Roy Kelly. And that was pretty obvious choice for Bauer because it turns out that Roy Kelly and Bauer were classmates at University of Southern California. And also we found out that Bauer's father had been coming to Hawaii on a regular basis, starting back in the 1800s when his father was only 20. So we still don't know all of that. But the image on the bottom is of a small apartment building. Bauer was released from the War Production Board in 1945. And barely five months later, he was already designing this apartment building. And that article in 1946, he's already establishing a name for himself. And if we go to the next image, this comes back to Denby. She can identify what we're looking at. Yeah, this is the Breaker's Hotel. And Bauer on the left is speaking with Fred Mahoney, the fellow in the suit, who's the owner of the Breaker's Hotel. And you can get some sense of looking at it, how nice that hotel was and is to this day. It's still very popular. And people come back year after year to stay there. And one thing that's a feature there that's not architectural, they have cats there. When you stay there, you can borrow a cat to sit with you by the swimming pool. So it's very nice that cats are kind of tame and love the hotel guests. Go to the next image. Now we're getting in to the 1950s. And these are pictures that Denby helped us with. Yes, I found those pictures by getting in touch. It turned out I was Facebook friends with Edwin Bauer's daughter, Paula Bauer. So I messaged her on Facebook and then called her, asked, was your dad an architect? She wrote back and said, oh, yes. My father was Edwin Bauer. So we started talking by phone. And she sent me these wonderful family photos. And she said her father did so much work in Hawaii. He'd do two or three major projects a year and actually turned down work. He had so much. He was so popular. And I think it would go to the next image. One of the things that Graham and I, in our discussions, in our discovery about Bauer, you really just knew about Bauer himself. It was always Edwin Bauer. But he actually had some very creative people under his employ. And Graham, talk about some of what you're seeing on these images. Yeah, so in the background there, there's that postcard again of the Kulia. And going through the old plans and documents of the building, you can look at the bottom corner at the title block and see these writings about Edwin L. Bauer architect and Frederick Liang associate architect. And then later on, it was Bauer and Mori. So he had different people that he associated with. Later on, it was going to be Bauer Mori Lum was the firm name. So he had Arthur Mori and Benjamin Lum. And then he also had Clarence Miyamoto, or yeah. Clarence Miyamoto. Yeah, Clarence Miyamoto working with him as well as Frederick Liang. And so each one of them took a different position in designing and drafting and really being the architect for a lot of these different projects. Because he had so many at the time. We were talking about this earlier that Bauer's work was, he had built so many of these large towers and apartment buildings all within a decade that he must have had a fantastic team to get that through. And we included that image on the right there of the memorial. And just the range of projects that Bauer's and his team were doing, just amazing. And just a consistency and a quality to the work that I think even if the people that worked with Bauer were really strong designers, there had to be an influence coming from Bauer to achieve that consistency and the quality that he was getting in all these projects. And you're talking about, to other architects about the architectural detail, but we should care about him, people who are not architects because we may not know it, but we're surrounded by him. I mean, he's every place we turn, a church, a building here, part of a school. Like he even designed public housing into which he put furniture, built-in furniture because his daughter Paula told me he knew the people in the public housing didn't have much money and wouldn't be able to go out and buy dressers for their apartment. So he built it in so they wouldn't have to worry about that cost. We also, on this program, want to get to one of Bauer's big clients and big projects. And if we go to the next image, I'm leading to Bauer. Yeah, so this is actually one of Bauer's like kind of long-time clients and he did a lot of projects for him. And this was Kaiser's Hawaiian Village, which is now the Hilton Hawaiian Village and looks nothing like this at all, but this is kind of one of the first buildings that Bauer did with Kaiser and really helped kind of define that style of these two-story walk-ups, but he did other projects with Kaiser and one of them is on the next slide here. So this is the Kaiser compound or the Kaiser estate that we've been calling it. It's actually a series of buildings that's got a whole campus really of different programs on these different buildings. So actually John and Denby, I think you guys know more about these than I do. Well, I'll give part of the background is that when Kaiser set out to develop this home and compound, he brought in the designer George Wright and that was a very, that was a big deal to bring in somebody like that to be the designer. But then through Kaiser's relationship with Edwin Bauer, Edwin Bauer became the architect of record, the local architect doing the construction drawings and it also allowed Bauer to bring in these influential and talented designers. But I think Denby can describe what we see on that compound. Yeah, well, this is on, as most people in Hawaii know, right out on Port Lock Road. And so you'll see a number of houses. There's a big house, a guest house, circular kennels. And then over to the right is a boat house. And Henry J. Kaiser, I once had the opportunity to speak with him for about four hours. And he told me that his genius was not knowing anything except how to pick the right people. And he considered, I think, Edwin Bauer a right person because he kept him on through many projects. And Henry J. Kaiser, his other quality was he was also very loyal to people he respected and liked, which he clearly did bower because he gave him so much work. I believe the house was completed about 1959, 1960 to give a time frame. And it was very much about the time the whole Hawaii Kai suburban development was being done by Henry Kaiser. Actually, in the next slide here, if we look at that, these are some close-up photos of the main house. And it's very horizontal, very open pavilion, very mesian. And it's kind of mid-century architecture language. And pretty awesome for something that was someone of wealth. We were kind of talking about this kind of wealth. Could have been doing anything. And he chose to do this. Well, I think people built different houses in Hawaii in that era. They're not the huge block out the sun concrete blocks that you see today. And this house fit in with the neighborhood. It was low rise. I mean, clearly, Henry J. Kaiser had the biggest lot on the block. But the houses were low. They were suburban. They fit in. And I think, well, let's go to the next image. This is getting into some of the work later on with Bower. And on the left, you see the Waikiki business closet. That was a pretty big building. That was 1965. That's an opening announcement for the building. And all the features of the building, including the revolving restaurant on the top that Bower was very proud of. And at this time, the firm was Bower, Mory and Lum. And Mory and Lum really hadn't gotten to Bower until the Kaiser house was completed, or under construction, excuse me, when they were working on it together. Then the image, 1111 Wilder, that's still Bower, Mory and Lum. And that was finished in 1969. But then that article that's showing in that clip, this is an article that was in 1970. And it's announcing that Ben Lum is leaving the firm of Bower, Mory and Lum. And as it turns out, Ben Lum left and started a firm with Clarence Miyamoto, who actually had also worked for a while for Bower. And the interesting thing from Denby's article in Civil Beat was that actually Clarence Miyamoto saw that. And addressed one of our cohorts, Alison Carson and excuse me, Alyssa Carson, and sent her an email talking about his time with Bower. And so there was different people in his firm were having different reactions. And by now, it's the mid-70s. And the firm's changing. I included that photograph of a building under construction. That's the interstate building that's on South King Street, for those that have been in Hawaii for a while. That was where the Honolulu Civic Auditorium used to be. But that building, by the time that was being built and completed in 1975, that it was Bower and Mory Architects, so that the firm had been changing quite a bit. Yeah, and he had a lot of these great collaborators and different people that he worked with. And we were learning about all of these different things about his work life. But then, when Dempia came in and kind of had this more decided story about his personal life, and she found out some amazing information, which is actually on the next slide, this kind of completed the whole story. Oh, yes. When I was looking for the photos, I mean, that was the first thing that came up to me. And I thought, holy cow, he went missing in 1984. And he's never been found. He got on a bus on Cuyo Avenue. And that was it. He was not seen. And so I sent an email to John right away and said, did you know? They've never found Edwin Bower. I mean, we found him everywhere in his buildings. But he's gone and has never been seen since that day. He got on the bus. And he had in the notice there, it says that he's suffering from dementia. And he's wearing to look for a man, wearing a little tag on his arm with his address in case he gets lost. And describe that he's almost blind. He can't see. And that it's a very terrible situation for someone like that to be in, to be missing. And the notices, especially the small one, it includes that there was someone that saw him, the last person that saw him, got getting on a bus on Cuyo Avenue. And as it turns out, that was George Wimberley. He, of course, he had known Bower most of his career and said hello to him, understood why Bower didn't recognize Mr. Wimberley. But it was just kind of the full circle of this incredible collection of architects. And they knew each other right through it all. I was able to speak with the detective, Joe Self, who was leading. He was the head of the Missing Persons Bureau. And he said that they searched very, very hard for him. And it's terribly hard to find people with Alzheimer's. Because often, even if you find them, they're afraid. Because he may have gotten off the bus somewhere and then be very afraid. And so they will hide themselves even farther. And you can't find them. Yeah, I mean, when Denby had emailed John and I about all of this, and we kind of found out the whole missing story or the end or the mystery of Bower and what happened to him, we just kept thinking that this is such tragic irony. Someone with so much vision as an architect who always had such forethought and sight and worked with his hands and everything really lost his mind and lost his vision at the end. And it's a tragedy. But it also kind of a little bit paints the picture of why we don't really know much about him these days and why we've had such a long kind of struggle to find out more about him is because really he went missing and the story went with him. There was no one to pass on a lot of the personal information that we found out so recently. And then Martin Despain, who does this show often, said when I spoke with him that Bower is the fourth cog in the wheel of the four great architects of mid-century modern Hawaii. So you would have Valdemar Asapov, you have George Pete Wimberley, and Alfred Price, and then Edwin Bower. But he disappeared off the scene, and that case is still open in HPD. Yeah, it gets to this incredible story of these four amazing architects and designers and what we've taken on ourselves is to spread this story about Mr. Bower. And we're going to continue doing our research. These programs have actually brought people out of the hinterlands and wanting to talk and show stories. So I think Denby and I still have some more interviews that we're going to do, especially with a couple of Bower's children, which is really interesting that two of them in particular are really willing, apparently, to help us understand more about their father and even more about Edwin Bower's grandfather and why did his grandfather make so many chips to Hawaii so we can really get a more complete picture of who this person was. Let's go to the last slide real quick. And we've got a couple of minutes to wrap things up. But I think it's good that John was pointing out next steps for finding out more about Bower's personal life and everything. And then I'll actually be back in a couple of months to do volume four of Think Tech and talking a little bit more about the architecture and some of his other apartment buildings that he's done. We're hoping to do more of an analysis and show you guys some examples and diagrams and things about maybe why we think there's some genius to what he's done. There's a lot of talk about affordable housing these days and sustainability and opening things up to the trade winds and all of that in kind of an urban setting. Well, Bower was doing that back in the 50s. And so that's why, personally, I and I think many other architects are really We have a lot to learn. Yeah, we have a lot to learn and there's a lot of kind of good things we could take away from him. But I think there's one thing that I really like about this photograph. They all look like they're pretty pleased just the optimism early 1950s and just all the things that they were envisioning them, the group of them doing and accomplishing in Hawaii. I think it's a great kind of tableau of who these people are and where their place is in Hawaiian history. Yeah, and just to kind of add a little bit of citation to this picture here that we're looking at. It's from 1955. And from what we could tell, it was from a Kaiser competition. And these were all architects who were the judges for this competition that Kaiser put on. So I mean, just we always joke that Hawaii is such a small place. Everyone knows each other. But this is kind of one of those great photos where it really ties all these different stories together with a client being Kaiser and Bower working on his estate and many of his hotels. And then Pete Wimberley there who also did some work at the Kaiser Hotel at the Hawaiian village. And then Vladimir Asapoff and Alfred Price. Everyone's there. This is such a great photo. But so I think just kind of wrapping up, I want to thank you both again for being on the show today and talking about Bower and his legacy. And we want you guys to join us again. I think every Tuesday we have a show alternating between either someone from Dokomomo or DeSoto Brown as hosts and talking about this mid-century period in Hawaii. And we look forward to seeing you all at our symposium in September. September. Yeah. And thank you again. Aloha.