 human well-being, tragedy, combined and even caused travesty. And we will use that to think even more, I guess, observatoryly about the past to project for a potentially better future. And for that, we're broadcasting live from relocations from Honolulu, Hawaii with the Soto Brown Long Beach, California with Ron Lindgren and myself here near Munich, Germany. So good to have you on the show again. Let's bring the first slide up and needless to say, if you haven't known Ron, you are a long term professional and personal friend of Edward Killingsworth, who, as we pointed out through many shows, has like no other shaped the island of Oahu, but also other islands at the very bottom left is your very own authorship signature, signature project of the couple who obey on Maui. And at the top right, we see the first episode with your friends and colleague partner in Killingsworth late office, Larry Stricker. And this is the monolani on the big island. So let's go to the next slide. And we do a little break here and thank you, Ron, for having stepped in because Larry had to step out for a week. And so we're going to do the volume two of the monolani next with him. So thanks for stepping in to talk about something very important. And this is going back to you guys, Soto and Ron here at the National, the Komomo Symposium that we were holding on our island of Oahu last year, and you were both keynote speakers and here are sort of, you know, impressions of you guys up on stage. And we were very happy, Ron, that you did not stop you went above and beyond to share with us where this exciting pioneering hospitality typology work that you started on the island led to in your business and has spread out all over the world. And in this show, we want to give a little bit of a glimpse of project in different similar tropical climate and go to the next slide, which isn't particularly tropical. Yes, but it gets close to another place very well because this is where I've been for two years before I came to Hawaii. This is the desert, the southwest desert of Arizona and our desert Red Bull Brooder that we have done a show with has shaped this place very well, but you guys as well. So let's jump in. And by the way, thanks to talking about Mary, Mary is by the way, the project architect of this art of this project that you now on on his behalf and talk a little bit about. Yes, I'd like to say that the source point for all of the later work in the Killingsworth office was the original Kahala Hilton in 1964. And it ended up getting the office and other two hundred and twenty one commissions for hotels and resorts. And the success of that later work, and we're going to look at some of those samples now really came from lessons that we learned from that hospitality design. So here is the Phoenician Hotel, which is an example of how the Hawaiian resort design informed and inspired a later work. This is surely, well, it certainly was the most luxurious hotel in Arizona when it opened in nineteen eighty five. If you look at the the large picture, it had four hundred and seventy four rooms and a hundred and thirty one pre standing casitas to rent. And they were all built right at the base of the Camelback Mountain in Scottsdale. But it's the desert. But notice how on the foreground, the golf course is beautifully green. There are lagoons running through it. The fact is that Larry Stoker's design idea was to take all of those buildings and form an enormous circle, and that circle surrounded a heavily landscaped swimming pool and garden terraces. And so by doing so, he created a very surprising and welcoming tropical oasis in the desert climbs of Arizona. The this project came to the Killingsworth office because its owner, Charles Keating, was sort of the infamous junk bond king who spent some time in federal prison. He and his family loved a stay that they had at the Montelani Bay Hotel. So the happy irony is Larry designs the Montelani Bay Hotel, a client sees it, and then comes to the office and has Larry design him his dream hotel. One last detail. Let me let me after that ride around because he just told us before the show that actually what was an inspiration for Larry, which he told us in the last show was the Monta Quea Hotel by SOM and they stayed there first and you said they didn't like it. So, you know, the Montelani was the real sort of, you know, the convincing piece. You know, the Monta Quea problem for this very large family of the Keatings, the Keatings have four family members that were gold metal swimmers in the Olympics. And these are big, tall kids and both boys and girls. And unfortunately, if there's one thing to say not so good about Monta Quea, which is a wonderful modern building, is that the guest rooms are rather small and ordinary. And that's I think why they appreciated the larger rooms at Montelani because the setting at Monta Quea is better than what Montelani had to work with. Yeah, I think that's fascinating that we have this, this direct line of Monta Quea Beach Hotel, Montelani Hotel and then the Phoenician Hotel. Yeah. And I'm going to encourage our audience to go to the legendary video that Harvey Kellogg did with with ads, which we are referenced to at the very bottom right. And you can you will then enjoy ads talking very humorously about that climate, the client background, that scandalous client background. One last thing about the Phoenician I wanted to mention was that the American Precast Concrete Institute selected it the finest piece of concrete work in the United States for that year. Absolutely. And that year was when in the 1980s. Did you recall that it opened in 1985? Oh, that's what I remember yet. OK, let's move on and get a little bit more tropical to the next slide and share with us what we see Ron. Yeah, here we're looking at the Marriott Palm Desert Hotel, which was really a convention facility for a long time. It was the largest hotel in California at 895 rooms of but it incorporated a great many things from the earlier Hawaiian work, especially in the use the lush use of water, the luxuriant use of greenery and also providing a really memorable arrival experience in the upper left hand corner. You see an aerial view looking down onto the project. The entry road curves gracefully over Lagoon. And when the guests get out of their car, they suddenly step into that space you see on the right, which was an enormous atrium and it again provided a welcome and unexpected touch of a tropical garden as the centerpiece of this enormous space. Waterfalls splash down on either side of the stairs. The stairs themselves went down to a boat dock. You could get onto a boat at the boat dock, go out through giant sliding glass doors at the front of the hotel, which you see on the left at the center photograph and and get to all sorts of amenities that way. Of the the atrium originally had skylights and for reasons of economy, no doubt, construction cost, value engineering. They eliminated some skylights. This this was unfortunate in the sense that the shadow play that could have occurred in this enormous space was lost, but even more so trying to keep the tropical greenery healthy when there wasn't, you know, enough natural daylight was a problem. So we had to do some real tricks here. I should say Larry Strikker did because those palm trees that you see, which are 40 to 50 feet tall, they're they're real, but they're freeze dry. But that's the kind of gimmick we had to use to keep the hotel looking green. It's a it's a it's a bunch of phony greenery, unfortunately, or non living greenery that that could have been alive. But it's still much better than what we see at the bottom left, right? Right. Yeah, I'll talk, I'll talk about what what that sort of barren space in the bottom left corner is in just a few moments. The center picture to the left did show that every guest room did have a deeply intended balcony so people could step out and it was furnished. But even better, every balcony had a built-in concrete planter with some very luxurious trailing lines, which also happened to be drought resistant. The this was an interesting hotel as far as the client, the Marriott Corporation at this time actually had their own contracting firm, the Marriott Construction Company. That was both a good thing and a problem. One of the problems was that even during construction and not following what the working drawing showed, all of a sudden there were there were decisions made to save some some money. One of them was the fact that for about a 4 percent save the guest rooms, which were sort of ordinary, would have had nine foot six inch high ceilings very memorable, very airy, very spacious. But to save four percent of the construction budget, they suddenly lowered the floor floor to floor heights in the guest rooms from 10 feet to only eight foot six. So they saved money, but in the process, keeping the experience for the guests even worse. They for reasons that still escape me, they decided to remodel the atrium. Now, the atrium from the both dock level at the water to the ceiling was 80 feet high in enormous space. But as you can see in the photo, it was very green. There were beautiful, luxurious vines hanging from the guest room balconies. But they decided to eliminate the central garden completely, wipe out the waterfalls, remove the hanging vines and end up with what you see at the bottom left corner, which is sort of a sterile lobby bar with an uncomfortable ceiling 65 feet overhead. And then there are these strange pendant lighting pictures hanging there of all of which is is cheaper to operate, obviously waterfalls and greenery maintenance cost money. But to sacrifice that did mean sacrificing the totality of what had been a much happier guest room experience. And I won't go any further than that. Well, I'm that the unfortunate thing is that this trend of sort of ugly fine is continuing as we started to discuss in the volume one with Larry about his monolani, which aesthetically a little bit, you know, more cultivated, but basically substantially the same way in bringing the project versus bringing it back to it. Great original authenticity. So we're going to tell all these clients over and over again, we won't get tired. If you're owning a killing's worth, that's an obligation. That's a treasure. And just like if you have a classic car, you know, that's only preserving its value if you keep it in its original condition. So guys who are all about the money, keep it in your own interest or bring it back to the original because then it's going to be worth the most. As we speak within that language. That's right. The only language they understand that sort of the next slide, Ron, and get really tropical now, but the other tropics that are continental United States. But this is certainly one of the finest examples of modern architecture in semi tropical Florida. This was the Boca Beach Club Hotel in Kabana's, which also followed some of the design precepts learned in Hawaii. Now, 50 years after the famed architect Addison Meisner, who basically designed Palm Beach himself, he built the Boca Raton Hotel in a very distinctive and elegant and theatrical Spanish style, a revival style. But management wished to augment the old resort with a modern hotel designed to attract a younger, more active group. And this is showing the fact that one way to get to the hotel was by boat. And if you go to the next slide, we're looking down on an aerial view of the hotel. It was located between the Atlantic Ocean at the at the right, where you see the White Sand Beach and an intercoastal waterway on the left. And also in the zoom in on the left, you can see that guest room. The guest rooms were provided with balconies at that time. And then you'll see pointed out earlier, Ron, was that this is in an area of hurricanes. And so there would be some additional considerations in the construction and the design of this hotel would have to take that into account. Indeed, what we're looking at is another beautiful illustration by the famous Carlos and me. Next slide. Yeah, we're showing that the Ocean Front development, which was purposefully designed to be very residential on scale, there were some two-story cabanas where people would stay all day enjoying the Florida weather. And to the left of the picture, you see a very interesting sort of concrete structural tour de force. It was a one-story restaurant, but the concrete beams also were hollowed out and were planters as well. Just filled with all kinds of beautiful flowering and hanging vines, forming that sort of low pyramidal shape. But if we go to the next slide, you'll see in the upper left hand corner that about 10 years ago, the Boca Beach Club became a Waldorf Astoria resort and everything that we saw in the previous slide, the cabanas and that very interesting architectural restaurant, that Ocean Front development was completely demolished and replaced with some rather forgettable, small and rather dinky structures. That's about all I can say about that. Something else. We want to answer that. Go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say on the photo at the bottom of the left showed it again, the effects of another unfortunate renovation. Very unfortunate, especially in today's times, because the original guest rooms, all of them had at least step out balconies. For whatever reason, in a later renovation, the Waldorf Astoria people in their infinite wisdom removed the balconies by pushing a fixed glass out to the face of the building. Of course, that made the guest room a little bigger by two or three feet. But when you think of what we're facing today with this seemingly endless to death pandemic, something we might have to live with for quite some time, the fact that the easy breezy connection to the beautiful weather that usually is there in Florida was lost in a hermetically sealed building is is a real tragedy. We need fresh air and air circulation in guest rooms, not hermetically sealed rooms. Right. And not with the air conditioning recirculating the used air. In the end of three, the female show clothes illustrate a tragic tradition of importing sort of invasive Floridian architecture with a sort of bat mock-up of Architectonica's great sort of mind-and-vise project The Atlantis Way Back, which obviously the Howard Hughes Affordable Tower might have been inspired by and now the show at the top, you see you were on the parade left looking at it and we're having coffee at the farm and you said Architectonica's was was a joke, but it was a good joke. This one here is a bad joke. So we got to start and we got to stop to do bad jokes. And obviously the whole state of Florida has unfortunately become the adopted home of who supposedly runs our country in the United States. So, you know, Florida needs to basically free itself and strip back from hermetically from the fakeness and go back to redevelop. Remembering, you know, Paul Rudolph's early ages of the Florida easy, breezy homes to kind of bid. And as you both said, yes, in these days, being easy, breezy means also being easy, breezy. And that's more than ever not just essential, but existential. And Ron, you guys were ahead of the game. You created something that we should reconnect to because it can save architecture, can literally save your life. Right. At the very least your well being, right? Yes. Yes. Next slide. Next slide. This slide is just showing that, indeed, the original hotel did have at least step out balcony. They weren't deep enough to furnish, but you could step out, slide your kicker, sliding doors open and enjoy all that easy, breezy south Florida weather. And in the foreground, also enjoying that beautiful weather and staying fairly decent apart is a family group. It was a sculpture. They had killings worth particularly like and selected for a location on the lawn on one side of the hotel. Children playing together. And in the next slide. Oh, and before we go, Ron, and bring it back for a second, Ron, the last slide. This is obviously our message to the current or future owners. This is what to bring it back to. This is the condition that we want to see again. But they buy it as they try to point out. But in the language that you guys understand, which is profit and money making, you want this back because it helps to, you know, and you know, someone was sharing that you talked to someone who said, you know, just medical precautions or even the next thing you know, someone cut it here is more than ever most integral part in keeping surviving under these paradigms, right? It makes a lot of fun. Yeah, we're just showing that the hotel is has some formality to it. Some New York interior designers were involved who were very talented, but they didn't let it get to look so stiff. And they love greenery. So here we see a long hallway, which actually is open to one side to a view to view of the ocean. But it picks up some of that 1920s flavor of Palm Beach. And also, as the soda reminded me, some of that flavor of those early hotels in Hawaii, like like the Moana of the Royal Hawaiian. Yes, and the next and the next slide is showing again that sort of New York elegance and formality, but it has that wonderful touch of beautiful fiqus trees beautifully maintained so that it's almost an evocation of Philip Johnson's finest finest restaurant the four seasons in New York City, which I think is closed now. I think they think it got remodeled, but it ended up being closed. Is that correct, Ron? Do you remember? Yes, they they closed it for a while. They remodeled it. And as happens too often, they remodeled the very life out of it. Yeah. And if we look at the next slide, this is my favorite image of the show today. This entry experience at the Boca Ritone Hotel shows Ed Kelly's worth structural expressionism in its finest hour. This is even an improvement on what you find at the Kahala and the wonderful use of the Royal Palms in architectonic rows to form colonnades and porticoes on both sides and closing the space and this is a very unusual night view by the great architectural delineator Carlos Beniz. I have never seen such a rendering attempted of a night view before. And and what a wonderful way to arrive at the hotel either by car or by boat. Next slide. Yeah, this is again showing the the structural expressionism, the columns and beams and in the midst of all that surprisingly delicate concrete work, it's this very strong structural element, which is an elevator core that has openings up to views on four sides. And if we go to the next slide, we'll see how that structural expression of expressionism was almost a kind of a firestorm of columns and beams of and that is the entry portico experience. And in the next slide, we look at that portico experience from the side. And just as in the past, as a scene on many Hawaiian projects on the left side, the beams are the same width as the reveals that run the full length of the columns. So that it looks like the beams slide right through the columns and this provides a wonderful sense of delicacy there. No, and we want to say hi to Eric Bricker, who's going to do a, I was called it a Hollywood movie about your guy's work. And I hope he will sort of point out that sort of which we like to call the signature style of the, as Don Hiver called it the, you know, the flying beams or the flying trellises and you call it structural expressionism and all that more we want to call it. But, you know, when you go through the project chronologically, you can see how that evolves. It's almost like DNA, the evolution of a DNA that it gets more and more expressed and you guys get more and more creative with it, Brian. Pretty fascinating. I would advise viewers to keep in mind what they're seeing on on the screen right now, because the very last slide brings up a tragedy that occurred at this hotel. Can we get the last slide up Eric? Next one. Thank you. It's you have to look very closely and that's why we've taken we've taken a little sliver out of that photograph of the very famous, probably the most famous American architectural photographer Julia Shulman very, very lovingly took the photographs of this hotel. And if you look closely, there's a very eerie site and that is that portion of Julia Shulman's face, which I recognize very well, is appearing on on the column face in this black and white photograph. And those who believe in ghosts because Mr. Shulman died at the age of 99, just a few years ago, might believe that he's haunting the place, because again, in their infinite wisdom, the new management of the hotel completely destroyed the entire entry experience. In other words, they tore down all of the columns and beams for forming the Portico. They tore down the rows of royal palms. And what was left was nothing but a kind of sterile windswept plaza. And how and why this happened. I can't begin to imagine because again, I don't know where they're saving money. And they've only cheapened what had been an exciting arrival experience to one of the most wonderful modern hotels in Florida's recent history. Ron, I'm going to give you a hard time because we're at the end of the show and that we can't close on a on a on a down note on a pessimistic note. So the soda you help us out with telling us about the nature of concrete in Florida. And that gives us a chance to take way out on a potentially good note. Well, my my last thing to add is that the Royal Palm, which we've seen just earlier, just a few seconds ago, is native to both South Florida and Cuba. And it is used. It has been used for many years as a sort of an architects living architectural element to be at very elegant and very upper class and special way to not only frame buildings and driveways, but in this particular case, it echoed all of the architectural structure that the Ed Killingsworth company put in there and to lose both the palm trees and the structure is a terrible shame. But the palm trees do go on. But that's being said as the natural palm trees are native to Florida. This growth of artificial palm trees is native to the hotel. So no brainer. The message to the current or future management or ownership bring this back. Obviously, all we can say. And with that, we have to close. But Ron, give us a very brief one, two sentences outlook of what the volume two of this show you will be in the next couple of weeks. Very soon, we'll see a few more projects that were definitely tropical and also inspired by Hawaii. But I'm also going to mention the fact that of the 222 hotel projects commissioned in the Killingsworth office, only 15% was were built. Now that might sound like a sad way to end the program. But when I talk to you next, I'll explain why that very low batting average for building hotels is really just part and parcel of hospitality design. Okay. Okay. And on that, I'll thank you very much. Look forward to see you for that and more. And until then, please stay easy, breezy and easy, breezy tropical Lee as you run, Larry and Ed.