 Welcome back to Humane Architecture with Martin de Spain, your host on another beautiful early evening on a Tuesday here in Honolulu which is a metropolis here on the islands of Hawaii in Oahu. And today we have a guest who comes to us from San Francisco but who's very familiar with the islands because he's home grown here on the islands. And that is Kurt Sandburn, thank you Kurt for being here with us. It's my pleasure. And you know I want to keep it short and sweet as far as your bio. Actually I have to start saying how I introduced you in the last show and then we met and you were a little critical about that which I said is basically you're the most investigative reporter on the island. So I insist on saying you are that but you're much more your writer. You are which I insist to say the most critical mind on the island who is putting not afraid to put his finger into some hot spots. So you grew up on the island and you have written books. You had you had formats to write. You've done many things. Maybe you want to talk about the ones that mean the most to you. I think what means most to me is having helped start and written throughout the history of the Honolulu Weekly which is I think a much missed paper in Honolulu. And I wrote a lot of different things for them. And I was editor there for three years. And I've since written a number of different articles on different subjects. And I would say I'm not sure how invest that I'm not I would not call myself the best investigative journalist on the island. I just think I'm curious about things many different things. And I just I'm curious about them. I write about them when I get interested in them. And however that falls that's that's what happens. And I've enjoyed it over the last 20 years. That's very fair. So maybe to fight this out more here you know in front of the public. Maybe you try you saying that you know an investigative reporter could be that for the sake of itself and just saying OK let's jump on to the next topic and let's touch as many as we can. But the term we finally agreed on to make the show's name is activist journalism. So that is that you actually jump on topics that really get to you in one way or another. And so you gave me the permission to actually look and we've known each other for some while to look actually which I call your activism acts. And I I found there is different ways you you you are an activist. So if Zuri can maybe bring the first picture number one which I call the Activism Act of Preserving. Can you talk about that. Well this this particular image I wrote a piece for Civil Beat about a while who's incredible collection of beach pavilions and they're in various states of repair and disrepair. And some of them are really incredible. Some of them are just spectacular and much beloved buildings in the landscape. And at the end of this piece I catalog them photograph them. And then I found out that the city was considering replacing a lot of them with a row of porta potties with a little Hawaiian style roof on top. So it would be this easy clean no hiding places row of porta potties that are beach parks. And I just kind of let people know this was in the works in the city. And I think they've kind of pulled back from that. I hope I hope the city understands how much people love the beach pavilions from many different eras. And some of them are really incredible. They're just some of the most purest examples of modernism on the island. And they're just so simple open to the air. And they're beautiful. And I'm just so that that was one one case. And they're they're made sorry if you came back that picture please for one more second here. We see a clue for that that's actually the person that's lounging their ride. So he she was coming with his bicycle and basically stopping there. It's just crashing and enjoying, you know, being in the shade being in the easy breeze. Whereas the portable is just for one reason that we all know that we need to do at times. But it's it's nothing else but that. So this is really about that's a gay lagoon by the way that that structure there. And I think there was a recently a fire at one of those. It actually I think it was that I think it was very it was very sad to hear. I don't know how it started. I don't know who did it. But yeah, very sad. So that might, you know, get you the criticism will Kurt is only things that the stuff from the past is good. And whatever we do these days might not. So I want to bring up the next category, which is the activism act of promoting things. And so this is a case study for that. What is that? Well, that is the edge of the solar roof at Rainbow Drive in a couple of Avenue in Honolulu. And I in one column for the civil beat I called it the best new building in Honolulu. And that was your idea originally. So I do credit you with that. But I totally agreed with you. It was simple functional and it served multiple functions in a very simple and inexpensive way. And I give credit to Rainbow Drive in for having the budget relatively small budget to kind of make this make the drive in much more comfortable and and you know, generate electricity for itself. And I ran into I think we ran into have the pleasure and privilege to have my oldest son Joey here who's here with us. And so good to have you here. So in the morning we were running by and we met we ran into Jim, who is the owner of the Rainbow Drive. And we talked to him and said Curtis back and he says hi. And that was one of the pieces that you wrote for civil beat fairly recently fairly recently. And you know, many of the articles actually are once again, I'm not afraid of name things. So this is again one where you said, well, there's good stuff that we need to name. There's also stuff that's not so good. We also need to name. Let me go back to the Rainbow Drive in for a second. It illustrated for me one of the main concepts that I love about Hawaii architecture. And that is the simple and I the simplest shelter against sun and rain. And it has many, many iterations in Hawaii. And it's one of my guiding principles is the Hawaiian concept of a lanai. And it's incredible versatile uses for today's Hawaii and including we'll get to this later, I guess. But the old Honolulu high rises, the older ones are I decided they were stacks of lanai. And people lived in, could live in stacked lanais in Odenoi. Anyway, so I just want to make that point about that building and why I liked it so much. But your question was? Well, it wasn't so much a question, but it was just elaborating on. So the, you know, that you were criticizing the portable solution with that sort of Hawaii on our roof on it. That is more decorative because the port, the party pots are actually getting hot because they're closed. So it will not be pleasant to be in there and taking care of business. Whereas the lanai beach restrooms are basically pleasant to use. So you're just saying that's exactly. So Jim, the owner who also asked to be on the show, so hopefully he will do it. You asked him actually about, so is this a local building in your writing? And he was surprised to begin with because I said, I've never thought about it this way. But actually now that you challenge me, yeah. And he lists everything that you just, that you just named and said. So what the point is maybe, although it doesn't, it doesn't look Hawaiian on the first glimpse. And especially not the perception we have, which is sort of branded by tourist industry and other forces. But it feels the way, you know, people have always been building here. People have always lived on their cardboard. I've always gotten their cardboard. That's because it's the simplest place to hang out. But technology has a wall so we don't have the sticks and the thatch anymore. So steel is available and for that structure seems to be the most appropriate to do. And then we have renewable energy that helps. So, but saying, you know, there are articles who were the most provocative. If I ever, you know, heard and read here and I loved it. And there were some of them were called ugly Honolulu, literally. So it gets us to the third category of activism act, which I call literally preventing. And, Zuri, if you could bring up the third picture, tell us, you know, about this example, a case study. This is an old one 30 years ago. I moved back to Honolulu from New York and I grew up in East Honolulu. And I drove out to Sandy Beach one day. I saw a big berm on the Malca side of the highway. I thought, oh, they're great. They're going to build houses and they're going to hide them from the highway with this berm. Which is an earthen mound, raised earthen mound. And then I found out that they're going to build houses on top of the berm. And I immediately was incensed that my, where I grew up, Sandy Beach was going to be suburbanized rather intensely. And so I went to a meeting and got involved in the Sandy Beach fight. A big historic Sandy Beach fight in which a group of activists, many of them from Hawaii, I was from all over the island, got together and basically prevented this development from occurring along the, all along the Malca side of Klondon on the highway. You know, it would have totally changed the mood and feeling of Sandy Beach and the whole Kaivi Coast. And I'll just say that we were very successful in that effort. Wow, voters voted two to one to oppose this development. And just last year, some people got together to finally purchase the last two remaining private parcels in that entire coastline. So at this, at this moment, the entire coastline is protected in open space and in its most natural form. So that was a big, big fight and it took years. And we went up against all the developers and all the bankers and all the politicians in town and we won. And that was a major lesson that I learned in my relative youth. And I learned that with proper messaging and proper organization, you can change things and protect Oahu if you need to. So the Sandy Beach fight, that is what led me into the Honolulu Weekly. And I started to help start the weekly and I got involved and I wrote for the weekly pretty passionately, I think, on issues pertaining to quality of life and architecture and planning and so forth. And there was an article called Growing Up Howley and it was controversial. And I, you know, I read a lot of stuff. So, yeah, it was, I read a lot about architecture. I complained about the fact that the whole culture seemed to have adopted this whole Hawaiian roofline, that Dickey Roof, the double-pitched Hawaiian roofline. As though that were going to be the answer to all of Hawaii's future architectural questions. Plantations. And not only is it a kind of boring, if you see those roofs everywhere, it's not going to mean anything. And it's also, it refers to references appeared in Hawaii's history as a sugar oligarchy that isn't that pleasant for a lot of people. And it's kind of, you know, colonial, if you will. It's not very advanced or interesting to me. It wasn't. I looked at someone like Vladimir Asipov, who was a, I was very familiar growing up with his buildings. And I loved the simple and linear spaces that he developed and refined and made absolutely gorgeous. And his high-rises, which did the same thing. And I just sort of, off that and the old concrete, reinforced concrete high-rises that were very simple. And the breezes blew right through, you know, the mocha side was the hallways, then Makai side you had the lanais and the views. And that struck me as a great vernacular form of architecture for Hawaii. And as we got more and more closer to now, I saw all these buildings going up that were hermetic, that didn't have opening windows, and didn't have cross ventilation. I thought, why are we doing this? Why are we building these boxes to live in when we live in Hawaii? That's a good keyword for actually the next picture, please, Zuri, which gets us to the point, which is actually the background picture that Zuri has used the entire time here. So you did that on the, sort of what we call the, you know, keep the country, country range at Sandy Beach. Well, yeah, that's not the country, but yeah, it's cool. It's not the city either. Okay, given that. But then... Countries of North. It's okay. It's okay. But now I want to call something, keep the city city or make the city city. So this is another project where you sort of were preventing slash protecting. Tell us about that one, please. Well, I heard they were planning a kyoya, the owner of many hotels, and like he had a long time, you know, good member of the community. It was purchased by a New York hedge fund, and they just wanted to maximize the land they held. They held huge chunks of Waikiki, and they wanted to put a big beach hotel right next to the Moana, sandwiched between the Moana Hotel and Kyoya Beach Park. And the hotel was going to break all kinds of laws, city laws, pertaining to setbacks. And they were going to go right up, you know, really close to the waterline. And I thought this was crazy. And there was a building on that lot already, a seven or nine-story building, a wing of the Moana Hotel that they were going to tear down and put up a 26-story combination hotel and apartment. Now this would have been probably the most expensive apartments in the state if they had been allowed to build it. And so I wrote about this in the weekly. I wrote several stories about it. And some activists locally heard about it, understood the issue, and they began to sue the city over it. The city granted them their permits. And so they sued, and finally, just about two years ago, the state Supreme Court ruled in their favor and against the city for granting them exemptions to the Waikiki Special District rules. So, and it was a pretty decisive unanimous opinion by the Supreme Court. And it basically, I was happy to hear it because it seemed to me to totally fly in the face of the existing laws of the city to protect Waikiki Beach and not to allow massive encroachment on the beach itself. So that's a, and the developer had to back down. And so the beach, there's not a huge tower next to Cuyo Beach Park. There's the nine-story building that has been there for 50 years. So that's... Congratulations. Compliments on that. Let's keep that thought and we're going to have a one-minute break. We're going to be back with Kurt Sandburne and his thoughts about activism journalism. Thank you for watching Think Tech. I'm Grace Cheng, the new host for Global Connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m. where we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs. So please tune in and Aloha and thanks for watching. Bye. Aloha. I'm Richard Emery. I'm with co-host Jane Sugimura of Kondo Insider, Hawaii's weekly show about association living. The purpose of these videos is to educate board members and Kondo residents about issues relating to association living. We hope they're helpful and that they assist in resolving problems that affect the relationship between boards and their residents. Each week, Thursday at 3 p.m., we bring you exciting guests, industry experts who for free will share their advice about how to make your association a better place to live and answer a lot of very interesting questions. Aloha. We hope you'll tune in. Ask me about No Need. Welcome back to Humane Architecture here with our today's guest, Kurt Sandburne. So we're going to continue here. So far, once again, people might say, well, Kurt, you know, you're preventing us from the worst, you know, things we could do. We love you for that. And another one, maybe we don't even want to get to, which you have actually dedicated two pieces in your recent civil beat, which is The Realist Carlton, but having said that, I don't want to go there because I want to go to something positive because, you know, I've always and only known you as a very positive person who always jumped on something and gets very passionate, which actually came across really well before the break. When you really believe in something that you want to keep and your island's as beautiful as they have always been, and it hurts you if you see developments that would prevent that from happening. So the next picture, number five, is a vision. It's a vision that you're always open to crazy things, to evolution, maybe we have to say, because, you know... Giant monkey butt trees. For example, that. And, Zuri, if you give us the next picture, Kurt can familiarize himself with that even more. This is actually something you've been sitting in front of on the floor, and we talked about that. So what is that? Well, that is... I believe one of your classes did that. That was stripping the existing Waikiki and Honolulu highrises down to their bare bones and making them actually literal lanai stacks. And when I saw that, I was thrilled. How realistic it is, I don't know, but it illustrates the concept of flow through ventilation and simplicity and stack spaces for many people. And that's great. And Zuri, can you give us the next picture? And I want to share, and you want to talk about, you just touched on, you said, how realistic is it, you know? I would respond to that, what if? And again, kudos and compliments to the students who have done this exploration, and one of our students hosted the model over the summer at his place, and he does, to make a living, he builds kitchens. And that's Dustin Solar, so thank you, Dustin, for that. And one of his, you know, kitchen business people was former governor Evercrombie. And Evercrombie came with his wife, what I heard, and Dustin delivered that to me, and they had a great discussion that was instigated by that model. That was rather passionate and rather about, you know, a realistic vision. And I know you wanted to talk about other politicians, as we have done before, who have been, you know, positive and encouraging about envisioning, right? About, you know, provocative proposals that maybe we need to counterbalance the pure power of capitalism only. Well, I know, former Mayor Jeremy Harris was, I think, pretty visionary. And he had this whole process to bring all the communities on the island together and begin this visioning process in which there were, oh, I don't know, how many different envisioning teams around the island. But they all came up with little small-scale, small-bore projects that would improve their communities. And they were each given, I believe, a million dollars or something. And each of these things were done. And, you know, a canoe allows here and there or entry signs. And these little things, and I think Harris is, unfortunately, am aligned by a lot of people. But I think he really understood that Honolulu is a beautiful city. And he wanted to keep it that way. And his plans, he had this very beautiful, ambitious plan for the redevelopment of Central Oaxaca with a spine between Capulani, basically, and King Street, and Baratani, excuse me. And how to redevelop that in a kind of interesting way. And it didn't go anywhere because, you know, but I just think he had some really good ideas. And he's not given enough credit for some of his ideas. And Zuri, can you jump us over to picture nine already? Because that's showing a piece, and thanks for zooming in. That was perfect. This is one of the components of that sort of revisioning, rethinking paradise, you know, studio we did. I see a streetcar there. Exactly. So it's reintroducing something that I know your heart is in as well, which reflects and rethinks transportation. And in the following, Zuri will kindly show three other pictures that relates back to a project that I had started my practice with my family business, my father, Günther, and my son, Cynthia. And again, Joey is here visiting me. And this is me revisiting the project just this past summer. And I'm just going to, you know, keep the pictures as a background for your thoughts about transportation or the future of transportation on this island here. Well, I wrote a big piece for, in seven years ago, in 2009, for the Honolulu Weekly about the rush to build Mayor Handeman's train. And it was elevated and heavy rail and horribly, in my view, wrong. It's the same plan the city had since 1966. And it was no change, no innovation. And I also reported on Commandment Schools did a study, an internal study that was not meant for publication, which suggested elevated rail to Middle Street. And then there would be a loop, a light rail transit loop through the city. And then there would be the elevated train out west. And I thought that was really interesting and I wrote about it. And now we're in a situation where everyone's wondering if the train, as it exists, can get to Alamoano or there's thoughts of stopping at Middle Street. And there's all kinds of things I've heard. They want to make it subway through the city. And other groups want to do the light rail transit, at-grade street cars basically from Middle Street, circulating through the city, which won't destroy the city the way an elevated heavy rail train will, in my opinion, do. And getting it into Alamoano, getting it to Waikiki, getting it to UH is just, I can't imagine how it'll work. And how awful, I can't imagine how awful it would look and how much it would destroy the city itself. And not to mention it's going to be elevated around. It's highway on the harbor. So we have a lot of choices out of us. The legislature is going to deal with this session, I understand. And there's various ideas being talked about at least to figure out what we can do with this rail now that we've got it started. So that's a big question. I like your illustration of me showing light rail transit. And many cities do that, have done that. Very few cities have done heavy rail. And it's, in my view, an antiquated idea. So I'm hoping we can further conversation on light rail transit. People say it takes a lane out of existing streets. Well, you lose a lane of cars and you put in the train and then people don't need their cars. And you can... So anyway, I think it's a big question. Awesome. So we're getting to the end of the show. It always goes fast. Thank you so much, Kurt, for having been here. And when I just see that passion coming out, that fire in you, that fuels you, I just love it. And I would suggest there should be many more activists like you who are very passionate about things and fight for it fearlessly and relentlessly. I also want to close with extending an invitation. Whenever you're back on the island, please consider this moderator seat yours. If you have someone that you want to bring in, that you want to talk about, please do that. And please continue to be a great motivation and inspiration for me in particular. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. And have you back on our show Humane Architecture next Tuesday or the evening here in the metropolis of Honolulu, Hawaii. Thank you very much.