 14,233 or 263rd show on this program, think take a wise human human architecture, which tries to make us aware that our most beautiful natural environment here in Hawaii should be as beautiful as our built environment and in some cases it was and in many cases it isn't anymore and we need this back and that's what we keep talking about and we think we need to widen our sometimes limiting ourselves horizon in order to do that so we'd like to send us out and in most ideal case for many many shows we had three stars aligned strategically positioned at three different locations which was as it is again with you DeSoto Brown in your Bishop Museum hi DeSoto. Hello everyone, me Martin Despang used to be back in Germany but I'm back with you here too which is good in one way but as far as we just talked maybe not so good so we have our third star back which is our tropical exotic master Ron Lindgren from his long beach in California welcome back Ron. Hello I'm such a pleasure to be with you Barton and DeSoto again thanks for having me. Well thanks for being back and you're back in many capacities logistically we are have been for the last nine shows and many more to come comparing two windy cities and the other windy city is the one of Chicago Illinois which is in the Midwest and that's where you are from but also we want to compare it of course to us here and you had us blessed with many of the most tropical exotic buildings here thanks for that but there are other buildings they're not quite up to that pace from actually that same era bring up the first slide for that and that's what we promised the audience last time that while this building here in downtown Honolulu has been converted recently into unfortunately exclusive hermetic invasive housing we said how could this be done better and one way to do it better is the emerging generation at the very bottom there the three model pictures is going the full route in basically recognizing that all these buildings although some of them might want to look as being stereotomic monolithic as being made out of the material that you see on their surface but it's mostly not the case they're mostly um domino house the pervisian basically slabs on columns and they wear and are dressed with a mumo as we like to say because it kind of suffocates them this one is what did you think Ron was it clad with rightly so because it looks like from a distance yeah I I surprised when I first saw this unidentified tower I thought it was probably in Chicago because uh it almost looked like it was a brick construction uh DeSoto's mentioned that it's actually a red granite that has a sort of an appearance of brick but my biggest uh wonder about it was how childlike the design appears in the model that you see there uh you know when you ask a kid to draw a house or even a tall house the windows are always punched square openings right you know into the facade and everything is to be a house or a tall house has a gable roof which this does but even more is this kind of childish rendering of a stepped uh another stepped tower that's embossed no it's actually projected out from the facade of this building it's all a very kind of juvenile sketch in my mind it is and and this generation of children here is the more mature the emerging generation of architects who basically takes that childishness off and matures and transforms it into an easy breezy building just getting rid of that mumo or maybe less radical uh being inspired by actually the real existing top of the building that you see up there in the middle where the architects intended to attribute to that sort of traditional declination of a high rise from the bozards which has the base the shaft and the crown and here having pushed these windows back and that's something that another student basically proposed and knocking out the glass pushing back give each and every uh you know window a lani behind and then having you know pushed back a couple of peds where the wind according to myself study here in Waikiki grant that we're broadcasting from the the wind hardly ever goes in and last time we were uh referring to you wrong because in the conversation we have as you also being our most loyal viewer uh after the shows um it reminded us of a show we've been doing quite some while well actually about a year ago a little bit more and I wanted to have years ago when it reminded you of Philip Johnson back at that time right you want to bring that back to our memory a little bit I'll Philip got into that fashion a lot yeah I certainly had my foray in the postmodernism and Philip Johnson had a very famous foray in the postmodernism and the the most recognizable uh in to the public was the AT&T building in uh right in downtown New York City which was open in 1984 I sort of remember in 1984 because that was the same year that uh holly cloney uh hotel opened but uh Johnson made kind of an inside joke here by making a tower be or appear like at least to those who had some art training or or had loved the arts they might recognize it it was an enormous exaggerated mid 18th century chippendale wood highboat highboy cabinet and those in the know would get the inside joke the general public wouldn't but the general public at least had a crown of a building that was very active and uh as compared to its surroundings and the surroundings were a bunch of squarish ordinary generic glass towers with flat tops you you want to add your uh your zeitgeist memory of that building the soto well I happened to visit New York City in 1984 when that building was new and I spent time with a good friend of mine who was at that time an architecture student herself she's now long since become a very very uh successful architect with her husband and that was one of the things that she wanted to see and from a distance as Ranja said it does have a little quirky top on it which is a reference to this historic not architecture per se but woodworking and furniture making but down my memory is down at the bottom where the humans actually interact with the building I don't remember specifically what the base of it was like but it was not inviting and it wasn't very appealing and it wasn't something you really wanted to walk into and as I remember there was an open space but it was just kind of drafty dark uh and again not appealing so yes from a distance you had this uh sort of playful finish to the building but at the level which you actually interacted with it as a human it I thought it was lacking and I'd like to jump in too and say that the era of Chippendale furniture in England that Philip Johnson pulled this high boy cabinet top design out of only lasted 10 years in the history of art from 1850 to 1860 so in some respects it's in fact that was a portion of the Royal Cocoa area era in England yeah that's what happens when you don't sort of you know have an attitude but you mimic a style that's about the surface and not the substance yeah and it has proven to lack timelessness because a gentleman that actually you wrong brought to our attention a sort of little dismissed big colleague of ours of yours Mr. Gensler who passed away in upper age recently he had a chance I guess just before he passed away in high age we just looked it up to actually renovate and to remodel the lobby of Philip Johnson's AT&T tower so you know that is what what happens and you know we we will continue to talk about that certain things need to be adapted and adjusted and brought up to current code or energy sufficiency next slide and by the way not to forget we shouldn't have even jumped in but we're operating once again under most turbulence and turbulent times and moments we have Hurricane Ian plowing through Florida as you brought to my attention this sort of because you watched it right before the show at category four to five and we have over there you know Nord Stream one and two being blown up and leaking and Putin has threatened with nuclear war so there's like scary stuff going on all over the place so hard to not think about that and get distracted by that one but getting us back to the subject matter once we start to evolve things this project of ours where we had this several hundred-year-old farmhouse to renovate and take out a lot of the former salt brick infill and push it back and replace it with a new spatial and thermal envelope and creating these porches or lanais as we call them as they're very familiar to us being for you Ron how you grew up in the Midwest and for you at the Soto in Hawaii where we call them lanais the only way to do this in freaking cold Germany that we're fearing so much without Putin's oil and without Nord Streams and you name it is to have used something that often it makes it takes a long time to make it into architecture technology that's out there somewhere else and that's in this case I'm holding up this card here I picked this up found it somewhere it was the local Hawaiian band rebel soldiers and they gave a VIP concert here what we're introducing to your here is a little material signs which is a very important panel that is called vacuum insulation panel and astronauts in up in space would freeze to death if they wouldn't wear this material and also we would have really bulky refrigerators if we wouldn't have this material because it can do massive insulation and very very shallow fineness and so by pushing back the the facade here you would have the cold creeping up to you above right and we couldn't use a foot of rockwell insulation and the ceiling would have been too low so we use this material why are we saying that because if we can do this in Germany the student who was proposing to pushing all the windows back in that pommel piece of cake high rise could have done that just as well versus just leaving the the flush to the granite fixed glazing and just beefing up the AC behind which it already had by the way as an office building so how can you do this better and how has it been better and how can you achieve timelessness we call you on stage once again um around with that and gets us back to your hallig pilani with the next page and with the next slide and I let you guys talk about it yeah when I when I see you bare-chested like Putin on horseback uh and one of the head valets at the hallig pilani who's been there a long time uh you all remember the the cheers tv program and when you walked in everybody knew your name and every time I come to the hallig pilani I swear that all of the uh the people who greet you uh out at the front when your car when they hand you out of your car they for some reason they still remember me and all of a sudden I'm home and I'm with family again so that that's such a nice reminder of people who have lived uh in fact they have worked their entire careers at the hallig pilani as a place that they choose to work even when they had other options that could have been in some ways uh more attractive to them instead they found their their family membership at the hallig pilani so strong that they wish to stay there instead yeah this gentleman next to me his name is Terence and he's one of them and it's just like the situation that we're show courting at the bottom right these few years ago when you both were keynote speakers at our national docum almost symposium and you returned after many years and I witnessed that these people were saying hey I haven't seen you since 84 wow right and in this case uh when I come back out of the water as you spotted me also a show called talk ride when you were there and having a coffee in the morning you saw that same half naked man walking by and you took that picture that we incorporated in there so when I do this every morning Terence tells me the story and he told me I've been there since 83 actually because when the open when the hotel opened when he was half finished he already started there and he said Marriott wanted him but he didn't want Marriott he wanted the hallig pilani and he never regretted it as you said it's his family it's your family and there's these terms in the American academe that we call evidence-based design post occupancy evaluation life cycle assessment if you have not just the hotel management which has obviously changed over time and we should say thank you to Peter Shantlin who is the current one who basically in his last remodel accept the guest rooms that we were elaborating on quite a bit everything else kept in the original and including one aspect that we're worried about that we're going to show in the next slide soon basically have kept it but it's even more important it's like the people in there I mean there's just like this longevity and integrity going on that Terence just basically says you know you are his architect and the only time I heard that that is very warm harmony warm hearting is in Nathaniel Khan's movie about his dad my architect where the users of the project like the capital in the Bangladesh they even say oh the architect we don't really know it might have been an American or so but it doesn't matter he's our architect and this is our building he did it for us so not to get this wrong we're not having any kind of a starkal textual thing going on here that you know here's the master coming and they all have to go to their feet and worship right this is a real true appreciation of a workplace that you have been provided to them that they feel it's paradise and Terence is also teaching people like he said oh Martin I want to tell you about Dickey do you know about the Dickey roofs and I pretend like I wouldn't so there's staff that is educated sufficiently to teach people including architectural professors how much better could that be P O E E B D L C A Y's awesome so which is that element that they were worried about that might not be brought back next slide you guys tell us oh the fabric yeah there's that there are the fabric panels that's right um yeah when the when the re when the remodel was done recently for quite a while they did not reinstall the fabric that was placed on the sides of the pillars in the outdoor section and fortunately when Ron pointed that out and I had gone to visit to see what it what everything looked like I saw that the hardware was still there for those and so I was hopeful that they'd come back and in fact they have so we can see in the recent picture with Suzanne on the left in the distance behind her there are those fabric panels that were re-established and Ron I think that was the work of the woman who was the interior designer is that right the lighting person and she did the lighting in the interior design is that right oh well first it's great news that they're hanging again this was actually a I sort of designed Joe upon the part of the interior designer who was a gentleman from Seattle and the idea was if you want to really kind of cloud the difference between indoors and outdoors how about having outdoor hanging hanging material there and the material was such that you could take the rain you could take the weather and so forth and so that was one contribution to add a very residential soft touch of curtains hanging off of concrete columns and a very successful one too yeah and before the show we actually included our exotic escapism expert Susanna who you said already so that we saw at the bottom left anything you want to share from your exchanges Ron with her well what I'll say there is the one person that I'd even more like to see when I came to the Holly Clonnie other than Terence is number two Suzanne would be number one and this this photograph where he where I imagine that she's offering me a cup of hot coffee out of an official Holly Clonnie cup really makes me want to come back there and enjoy that experience again you know it's a half a lifetime ago for me since I designed that I'm an octogenarian now I was 40 years old when I was commissioned to design it and it's still my most memorable and important piece of architecture and if an architect even gets to have long memorable important piece of architecture he should consider himself very fortunate and speaking of generational this is really interesting about that guys because extending the family Suzanne's oldest and our third oldest together Sammy who we also showed the project he was just indulging and enjoying and he's sweet 16 now and so he was just like saying oh it's so calm it's so tranquil this is really paradise and only after he basically at some point started to look up and he said oh my god this is huge this is a big hotel what are we counting 500 rooms wrong about 456 originally see you know your numbers so he was just like absolutely so usually with I mean talking generations I mean you know this is the I mean they walk around like zombies with their cell phones as we old fogies come you know playing about it they got tiktok going on all the time with whatever it's on there right and I was about to say we're listening to Snoop Dogg who's your neighbor in Long Beach Ron as he once told me but of course Snoop Dogg is an old fart for them so they're listening to they're exposed to to stuff right if you can get a 16 year old slash young excited about that one once again that's the best P O E E B D LCA that one can possibly get so congratulations on that one that is very high praise and I agree with all of the everything that everybody just said and I feel exactly the same way about as I said when you walk into the grounds of the holy kulani and you walk into this sort of courtyard area which is a courtyard on a very large scale it is so tranquil you've just driven down a very busy street with a lot of traffic and a lot of pedestrians and you come into this area and all of that is closed out yet you're still in the open and it's so successful and it always has been and so yes thank you Ron for for creating this which I still love to go to 40 years later as well and if we go to the next slide we'll see something that I have obviously I thought a lot about it because I designed the hotel but the last nine volumes of you're talking about skylines in Chicago and and Honolulu and sort of comparing them and seeing what's good and what's not so good about them in my case I had the happy opportunity for the first time in my career not to design an object building but design a bunch of buildings that are in fact linked and interlinked sometimes in hidden ways that created courtyards and and exterior spaces but at the same time it created a very lively skyline of its own very variegated all those dicky roofs that Terrence were talking about actually occur at 18 different levels in amongst the buildings and you see that in this watercolor rendering of the hotel that was completed about a year by before the hotel itself opened up yeah and it's very successful it's very successful and there is something we have to correct because I keep running around and telling a story that you have to say you can't confirm so I have to go back to your business partner Larry Stricker who we also gonna talk about in the next slide but not now we stay on this one here and that is that I obviously wrongly correctly or wrongly remembered obviously that I remember that adds a killingsworth the founding principal of the firm who was a high modern master and in that tradition obviously of the growth POS and and the Mies van der Rohe flat roof boxes that way he was objected to the to the dicky roof but before the show you inform me that in case the opposite is the truth right please share that with us and everyone yeah I had especially when he worked overseas and southeast Asia but also overseas from California and Hawaii always wanted to see if he could include uh some local building uh methods materials and ways of planning and putting them together so in reality uh when he and I first went to Hawaii and saw the Haleiklani site ourselves for the first time we met the clients at the time which is the wire house or number company before they sold it to the Japanese and when we got back on the plane we looked at each other and if he he looked relieved because he said Ron what are you going to do on that site and left it to me so I had my two weeks to design the hotel before we had to have some drawings done uh and and turn around again and go back to uh Hawaii now surprisingly during that time although he looked over my shoulders a few times as to what I was doing he never made a single comment of their positive or negative of what I was doing and the greatest praise that he gave me was when the drawings were done he packed them up went to Hawaii made a presentation to the Hawaiian Honolulu press and the AIA chapter in Honolulu of what the Haleiklani would be like that was the first time that anyone had a chance to see what the old Haleiklani was going to be replaced by and uh I felt miffed at first that I didn't get to make the presentation and then I thought wait a minute what what uh a great honor it was that Ed himself took it and did did the selling and enjoyed the the uh the process very much and came back a younger man wow and being one and a half minutes before the end of the show uh you made our day uh run in multiple ways also because I have to go back and coach in the afternoon the emerging generation and I was feeling a little bad this semester because I'm asking them to do four projects four designs two by the way and temper it in the cold and where all this mess is going on then two then back in the tropics then hopefully appreciating it more but again I felt like okay you know four designs in one semester might be a lot but it's not because I will go back today and we'll say you can design a 497 room hotel 56 sorry uh in the in the most challenging yet beautiful context in two weeks which I learned today so wow thanks for that I wish there were one of my two week sessions working for a children's room could have been that productive the the project the site the challenge the opportunity was so great that somehow I rose to the challenge and I never I've never risen uh that high uh certainly before and not after unfortunately well you you did a darn good job in fixing up the Kahala Hilton too so don't don't downplay that you've got two masterpieces here we saw Kapalua Bay which stupid people tore down so there's more there's many more there's the there's the Long Beach Marriott so there's many more but as humble as you are we we all see why you love this the most and we agree so with that we're at the end of uh these try and verette back and hope to have you back uh next week Ron because we got uh we got to talk about the ihilani on behalf of your business partner Larry Stricker and more things so hope to have us all back next week and until then please all stay as easy breezy breezy easy as you Ron bye bye thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii if you like what we do please like us and 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