 Or this is our show, ThinkTik Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture, and us is me, Martin Despeng, and you, Distleto Brown. And this is our Valentine's Day edition. Happy Valentine's, Distleto. Yeah, happy Valentine's Day too. What do you got? Everyone else? Oh, is this economy? This is what our university, how they recognize this, with this university academic newspaper for the students, and it shows love is not without challenges. Probably has never been and will never be. As this first slide here tells us, because the main big picture here is from my dad. So what are your Valentine's wishes comforting messages for him, cut off the sign, so to speak? Well, two things are being talked about on this page. The first thing that we're going to discuss is that your father celebrates what he refers to as his second birthday, if I'm not incorrect. And that is because when he was just five years old, he survived the bombing of the city of Dresden in what became East Germany and is now just part of a unified Germany. And that was one of the worst bombing raids of the entire war, certainly in Germany, and it killed tens of thousands of people, it decimated the city. And his mother managed to survive because she chose to go to a different, not the regular shelter she would have gone to, a bomb shelter, but she went to the train station, I think. Is that what happened? And they survived. And so in the face of this unbelievable tragedy, your father refers to having had a second birthday, having survived that manmade disaster. And I might also point out here, too, that since this is an architecture program, this also brings up stuff that we've discussed before, the rebuilding of cities after World War II in different parts of the world and how, in some cases, they chose to replicate what had been destroyed rather than to start entirely from scratch. And that's also relevant for us because we are entering the discussions here in Hawaii about the rebuilding of the town of Lahaina. So while that wasn't a bombing raid, what happened to Lahaina was comparable to what happened to a number of places during World War II being destroyed and then having to rebuild all over again. Well, that's a long-winded explanation for the photo at the lower right corner, which shows Dresden after it was completely destroyed or mostly destroyed and all that was left was ruins after that bombing raid in 1945. Yeah. And that was on February 13th, which was yesterday. That was the 79th anniversary. And apparently what's going on with anti-Semitism reemerging, unfortunately, around the Gaza, we don't want to forget that while certainly that bombing was not good for many reasons, but it was a reaction that we're discussing currently how appropriate our reactions are repercussions about the initial massacre that happened to the Jewish people and now what's going on, right? So while there were many killed, there was also the reason why it was bombed is because Germany went to that very dark side and killed millions of others, innocent people, Jews and homosexuals and old people and people they didn't think they were worth enough. So that's the whole scope. Well now my father coming full circle sends us this picture here because there is a fear growing and what's that fear about the Soto? Well the fear is depicted in the large photograph, which looks like a real picture, but which is not, shows Putin and Trump huddling together in a bed for Valentine's Day and with red roses between them. And that's because Donald Trump has been very openly friendly and sympathetic to Putin who is a dictator who is openly a dictator who is openly now attacking other countries and this is unfortunately as you just said what happened in Germany back in the 1930s and 40s. So for the supposed potential president of the United States and I'm going to say right now he's never going to be president again, but regardless of that for him to be huddling up so to speak with a dictator who again is an openly bad man who he encourages, who he praises along with other dictators is a shocking thing and as you just pointed out that one of the foundations of Nazi Germany was that there were certain people in society who were inferior and who should be killed, who should be wiped out and the Germans not the Germans themselves but the Nazis chose the Jews as their primary target to be wiped out because with this crazed idea that if you kill all of the people you don't like everything will be okay. Well the United States has not gotten to that point yet, but there is a great deal of right wing open hatred of other people, different people and people who are depicted as bad and the main target of course has been those brown skinned people who come in from Central America and South America, they're the bad guys. Again everybody it's a very simple thing to do for a dictatorship to pick on a certain group and say that if we kill all of them they're the problem, they're the cause of all our problems and at the very worst we wipe them out. And per again the nature of love, some say a big part of love is forgivingness. Our escapism expert, exotic ones, Azana always says love is the only thing that grows if you give it away versus greediness which money gets less if you give it away. So at the bottom right where you see Dresden all in ruins you also see as my grandmother and you see my father there and then you know having survived and also having gotten back on their feet and given a chance by half of your ethical background America together with the French together with the Brits and together with the Russians big back who chopped up Germany and said okay we get you back to our fee on your feet and we give you another chance. Well as you pointed out a fourth of that has done which is the Russian sector has then also gone back to totalitarianism or they kind of were in it anyways so that became the unfortunate part of Germany but fortunately again then the under under Gorbachev and the Glasnost that was given up and that one was given the second chance. Well Putin unfortunately was pretty much you know in the situation he was in that in that Russian sector as a KGB agent let us point out exactly exactly that and so he now says romantically that was the best part of his life so now my father is worried he's gonna come back but he wants it back under the condition that it was which was under the totalitarian regime under under the GDR so what can we all do is making sure it's not gonna happen and what is our most recent contribution to cheer up my dad that we already talked about but today we're gonna get real because before on my morning stroll with the turtles I walked by to get myself double checked on and that's what we are voting here from the star advertiser in red what is that well the Trump Tower in Waikiki has changed its name it has dropped the name Trump and in the two pictures in the upper right corner you can see us looking at the Trump Tower in the background and expressing our displeasure over that name well fortunately they've managed to do that the tower no longer has the Trump name and that's a good thing because there is so much bad baggage associated with Donald Trump that the fewer things that are named for him the better and personally as someone who lives in Honolulu I am glad there is no longer anything in Honolulu that bears his name particularly that large in your face high-rise building which overshadows the breakers hotel which is where we were when we posed for those two pictures yeah and again love and forgiveness that sort of tricky reciprocity Michael our producer and I would just before the show before you come in talking about well how much are we forgiving the building now for you know what it had before your doggy is supporting that as we hear so you know it's it's it's something to reflect on but it and I keep saying the building actually originally and that we don't even know how much the Trump was just the brand that got put on and how much that was on the radar when the architects were guru in glass designed it and we discussed and is actually not inherently such a bad building unfortunately the many that we go through in the shows in the recent shows with compare in Chicago to us what Howard Hughes does was in the midtown flunk area all the blue ones are going up they're actually much worse I mean this is at least substantially a stack Linai as Kurt Sandberg like to call it but it has a sort of clear plastic raincoat mood over it that if one would that pull that away. Maybe then again and the question is how much are we forgiving the building for you know maybe what he you know did wrong and now maybe wants to make up for it right and how much do we give it as everything and us a chance right so it says to the next slide going back to Polynesian pop. And the discussion of profound or you know pretentious and presumptuous and we have this discussion this was showing up a couple of times that we never got to it so now we get to it. This is an equally kind of touchy discussion that we had as in one of our doko Momo talk stories which happened to be hosted in one of the tropical brutalist buildings of the central Pacific Plaza of the Pacific in downtown and so it was one of our former mentees was with us in school and got her training there and she talked to us on behalf of her Hawaiian name she also has an American first name as you know being a hybrid of two cultures as you are and she was speaking on behalf of her Hawaiian there and we had this discussion again about how much is the Polynesian pop a cultural in appropriation or not and it became a very heated discussion that I was involved I was the reason for that because I was feedback and at the top right what I was saying is that the international marketplace that you just recently did that show that we I show we show quote here at the top right where you were talking about how you thought how culturally appropriate it actually was to both of your cultures you know to your Hawaiian culture but also your American culture trying to you know be as much in line with it not just surfacially but also substantially being made out of woods being easy breezy little shops for little people all these things right and so we had this again discussion that was that was fairly interesting and the next slide is what she shared with us is basically that she said well you howly guys which is 100% of me 50% of you traumatized me and my childhoods by you know reducing me to Tiki kids and we said well we're we're sorry for that which I meant I was serious about that but I also said and this is at the bottom right and sorry it's a little covered up by our logo but what's important is what we still see there is our exotic isn't a Zuzana in her traditional thanks Michael for freeing it in her traditional attire the Durnal and I said hey you know when when you come as as Americans or Hawaiians and you want to see Germany you go to that southern you don't necessarily maybe these days we might go to Dresden too because we got it back to its old beauty because of rebuilding yes very much so as you said our topic as well here but traditionally go to what was governed by you Americans the American sector and I once talked in a previous show way back in the previous urban transcendence show to the director of the call my museum and he was coming up with this really interesting theory that if the sectors had been divided up differently the logo of basically Walt Disney which is after the Neuschwanstein castle which is a fake because it likes to look medieval but it's not if you Americans would have had the eastern sector like the Wardborg which you know very well from your VW emblem for example well that's the Wolfsburg but the word sorry it is what the word the word works which is that most high-end German car this boring referring to our automobiles architecture show so of course that was a kind of a glitch here so of course not the the the Wolfsburg which the big dubs have as an emblem but the Wardborg's had as the emblem so it would have been that castle but that did not happen so I said to her you know you you come and then our young girls same age as you have to get into the journal and have to carry the beer marks at Octoberfest that's what you want to see in them but that's not what they are they wear jeans and what else what you wear so it's it's the same thing and it goes both ways but what I try to say in this this big picture here is actually me which a very dear friend of mine who had dearly missed Earhart Schütz who you see at the top right who I lost in 2000 we lost in 2016 where he passed away in the young age of 60 in the Arab desert still under mysterious circumstances and he at that time was you know I informed him that when I was still in the prairie in Nebraska that there was this position opening here in Hawaii and that I wanted to apply and this is as he was the greatest in in this very humorous way the way he responded to it and what is that well it's an amalgamation of your face with the body of Tom Selleck as Magnum PI already famous all around the world as a television personality and at top your head is the famous or infamous Hawaiian or Hawaii toast or toast to Hawaii as it may be called which is a German invention which by putting a piece of pineapple onto cheese and ham and a piece of bread becomes quote Hawaiian so you're in a Hawaiian or tropical setting to show that that's what you are going to become soon you're going to become a Magnum PI wearing toast to Hawaii on the top of your head yeah and so where's that fine line between that cheesiness which is part of what the Hawaiian toast has which has nothing to do with Hawaii because it very little dairy and cheese was not existing in the in the pre-contact days who are more substantiated and again Magnum PI starting in this in the 80s was trying to basically cope with the post traumatic disorder of Vietnam veterans the first time in TV a series that were not depicted as bombs and basically you know done people but people who struggle with this but try to reconcile and somehow through processing and self therapy and reflection and very much you know our dear friend Von Lincoln who we have back thanks Ron he was with us showing the students his Kahala that he remodeled and he will be with us in the Holly Kalani we couldn't be more happy about it and the same thing you know Ron you are a Vietnam veteran as well you're a veteran in many ways and you are hero in many ways and again you are not shy to talk about these times and we'll continue to talk more when we go back into the automobile architecture together and the Jeep is our you know vehicle for thought of reflection for that part so you know Magnum was not just a surfacial as unfortunately the reboots of all of these are there more or less crime stories with our scenario here as a as an exchangeable billboard could be Miami or any other any other tropical you know shoreline metropolis but but way back it really had a quite a serious attempt and ironically as we were saying German not even you would think censorship is something of former East Germany that we don't want back put in bringing it back West Germany censored as well as censored out that which I thought was too heavy for the Western TV audience when really you know Tom Selleck alias Magnum P I was going too deeply into processing that thought oh this is too much for the Germans we cut this out not until private TV was re airing that there were there were dubbing the whole thing which which is really good so let us go try to get the angle back which is actually not angle back because you know zeitgeist and architecture are intertwined and you need to reflect on the circumstances of things so now we want to do an excursion from the Polynesian pop one story to tropical brutalism which might actually be sort of a development and evolution of one to the other one that gets us to the next slide because our most favorite recently building expression of that one is Steve ours Davis Pacific center that we kept talking about quite a bit and then top left the show quote is that space that he created that we think he was basically doing in a way to say he's waiting for the next era to come that's unmoving it all you need to do is take the fixed windows off and you get the cool breeze going through because it's an exoskeleton and nothing is in the way and that that exoskeleton is crafted in a way that it has enough depth and these vertical fins to shade you and so all you need to do is come up with a little bit of more of I just you know for the studio review we have and this is a reminder for you because you're on it this afternoon and the introduction and getting you all together and sending you the zoom link I was doing a Google link to the definition of cooperative and it includes as one of the major means of methods it includes sweat equity what people do with it when they come up from scratch and do things together so that's all you need to do on this one floor and again then you know talking about the iffy point of our former students about you know gender and sexual exploitation that's something to be continued about but we refer to Milton Diamond prime scholar in that field with this Pacific Center for Sex and Sexuality that maybe some things are to be revisited not in a way to discriminate but to undiscriminate you know behaviors amongst genders in that case so this building here we took this picture here sort of at night this is the corner of the plinth of the building it doesn't just have the tower but it also has a podium that's rather large so again it's while under the umbrella oh we turn you know monofunctional office space into residential and make we then make this a little believable neighborhood yeah but for who do you do this for more for rich people because these these units in there these conventional condos that they're unfortunately jam into this nice hippie open easy breezy potentially co-op space is going to be some little cubicles to live in so it turns from potentially inclusive to once again exclusive and that gets us to the next slide because tropical brutalism as you and bunded are on this bookbearer that we have the draft of they're inserted in there you point out that for example 4th Street mall was not brutal as the term brutalism is mostly understood because it's the tombrew so as you see yes there was a lot of volcrete as we like to call it local basalt infused aggregate infused materials but you also see a lot of vitality on the streets right you certainly see a lot of people of different sorts and kinds on the street and that gets us to the next slide because this is a doko mall doko momo walking tour that got this all started there and there was also multiple panels at the air aid that you were part of and this was the doko momo walking tour that supported that and you see to the left when semi was here with us there was and a non-traditional participant who we like to call the urban no less that was chatting up in and he was putting up with her so these people were actually not talking about you know anymore and these are growing years of getting of growing importance right because a lack of making a living and having a shelter on this island is if not the most prime challenge and while again it gets we were we were told by this community guy who's involved in sort of the redevelopment of downtown but the one in the behind the glass tower that's Joe Paul Wrongstedt that I believe it was actually a condo building and it got confirmed who are doing the research this is what it is now it is a hotel there's the price tag there it's somewhere in the three mid 300s if you do the math times 30 right that makes it $9,000 rent so again a hotel is very profitable is actually even more profitable than housing that is even more thanks to bar gov who joins us from India is even more profitable than office so once again it might actually be be be driven by you know not by love as that gets more while sharing it but by greediness you know and you just try to put you know deeper price tags on things so that's the worrisome aspect of it right yes that's correct and what's interesting is to see this entire process of downtown Honolulu which many American cities are going through and I think internationally as well turning away from office space as people work increasingly from home and we have technology to do that before but COVID in 2020 pushed us into it even if we didn't want it and now we see we think we have to deal with these buildings which need to be repurposed and how they get repurposed as you just pointed out there they're sort of the two ways to go seem to be either hotel which is more lucrative for the owners versus condos which costs less but in any case there are a lot of considerations to change something from office use to residential or hotel use but again this is fascinating to me because we could never have anticipated that this would happen and that downtown has lost so many workers and that now we need to repurpose so many buildings is a major thing for us to deal with in a lot of different ways yeah and go to the next slide because there is this really unbelievable we wouldn't have you know even thought about how we always thought about we could actually sort of kiss you know downtown awake again and now it's been kissed awake but the question is who kisses is awake you know which prince is that or which monster is it it might actually be the monster of capitalism sorry to say because this building bounded had to point out to me and I couldn't believe until I drove by in in in the evening when it got dark this is again all this was double checked by Don Hibbert who always got the numbers and the dates right and stuff like that and we writing this book together which we showed on the on the third page that we again we want to we want to base it on again on climate and cultural compliance appropriateness and this is this is not it once again there is a very unfortunate example here that's a repetition of something that we saw before that we see at the top right but we won't have time to explain you gotta see us for that next week again because we ran out of times for some exciting 30 minutes so please be with us again and please subscribe our channel here and don't it because this is how this all runs without you it won't run and you are our as you see down there a viewer of that number so please be back with us next week and until then as we found out today please stay very tropical gentle because this is what tropical brutalism has been doing and also what profound Polynesian pop versus pretentious Polynesian pop has been doing so for more on that and what's behind this one here see you next week bye bye bye