 How do you do, everyone? Welcome to Human Humane Architecture on Think Tech, Hawaii. I am the co-host of this program, DeSoto Brown. And our regular host is currently on vacation in Germany, the land of his birth, Martin Despang, but he is joining us today by Skype as we delve into yet more architectural history and not just history, but architecture in Hawaii. Good afternoon, Martin. Hello, DeSoto. How's paradise? How's paradise? I miss you guys. It's fabulous. It's not afternoon for Martin, everybody. He is enjoying the pre-dawn darkness of Germany, but with the rather tremendous time difference, Martin has to get up in the dimmest of the nighttime and to join us in the afternoon in Honolulu. So tell us, Martin, what are we going to be talking about today? Well, if we can get picture one, I miss you guys and I miss paradise. And this is a glimpse of a piece of paradise on another island. This is Kauai. Yeah. And this is what Germans, by default, think of paradise. Our culture is very confined, both climatically. We had, like, 60-something degrees yesterday, and it can swing. It goes to 80 and 90. And we're also, I guess, culturally little confined as everything is pretty dense here and it's all built. And so we dream of tropical islands. And we've been doing this for a while, if you can get picture two. I've moved on to the north of Germany, and I'm tuning in from the Kaza Kleinschmidt. That's my best friend, Paul, from school is hosting me temporarily whenever I'm here. And he actually got me this DVD you see on picture two, which is Blaue's Hawaii. And his father was a chef, and he had a restaurant at a forest. And he told me they served the Hawaii toast. Isn't that something to say? So the so-called Hawaii toast is here on the screen right now for everyone to see in the upper right corner. And that is a piece of white bread that's toasted, has a piece of ham on top of that, and then on top of that a slice of pineapple and a bright red cherry. And not only was that popular in Germany, but there were other things in the United States that were using ham and pineapple in a similar way. And then we also just read recently of the death of the man who purportedly invented the pizza with a Hawaiian pineapple topping. And in the lower right corner. And that movie, which is obviously still sold here in Germany because Blaue's Hawaii means Blue Hawaii. And so the legacy of that movie portraying a pioneering tourist Hawaii is still, you can still buy it, obviously. And we had actually shown glimpses of that particular movie at the beginning of our collaboration. We were talking about the international market plays CIS, and at the very beginning it plays in downtown booming Honolulu at that time. But today we wanna talk about how actually the movie closes and finishes. And to that regards, can we get number three? There was a building because this show is also about architecture. There was a building built around that time. And can you explain what we see on picture three? Well, in the first picture, we saw the Cocoa Palm Grove on the island of Hawaii, which in 1950 hosted the first hotel on that site, which was called the Cocoa Palm Lodge, very small 24 rooms, five employees. In 1950, it got turned into the Cocoa Palms Hotel, Resort Hotel. And the photo we're looking at here is later on in that time period. This is in the 1960s. And the resort grew very dramatically from the 50s into the 60s. And it was out of the mind of the owner and manager of the hotel, which was a woman named Grace Bushlander. And she came up with a tremendous amount of interesting ways to promote the hotel and make it a different and wonderful sort of faux or fantasy Polynesian experience. And so there's our Cocoa Palms right there. And we Germans were eating it up, as you can see on the next picture, and actually the couple following pictures too, where I learned through you, and this is from your tremendous archive, that you collect these things, that the marketing directors were making, redoing the covers for the movie, the posters over and over again. And these are all German ones, as one can tell. One is familiar with the German language. Correct. And then the movie was a hit all over the world, which is something we're gonna see a little bit later on too. That's true. And in 2014, that's the next picture, I happened to be in Kauai and I drove by and we have to say the hotel is not anymore the way you just described it. Because in the early 90s, Harkin in Niki and the Harkin season just started. So I hope you guys stay safe by the time I'm here. Applied through and ever since the hotel was out of commission and there was several attempts over the years to reopen it. In 2014, I was able to take this picture because that iconic lobby structure was still there, which even more sadly, I think the year after they put it on fire at some vandals basically did that. That's a very sort of iconic piece that's by one of our favorite architects from the shows, Pete Wimbley, who in the last show we talked, whenever he had the chance to do some more buildings with more public experience, he was more getting into the tiki while other more institutional types, he was stealing more in a modern tradition. Correct, that's right. Let's go and see some more of these movie poster pictures. Yeah, very cool, next picture. There we are again in Germany. Germany took to Elvis very much, just like the USA did. And architecturally, so number seven, the next picture is actually how that entrance looked in its original way. And you taught me that this iconic tower is actually alluding and referring to some indigenous tectonics and way of building. But of course, as Pete was doing it, he was not mimicking it as some do these days. But he was interpreting that. Correct. And that tower was based on something that was a structure that was found in significant Hawaiian heiows or temples for the native Hawaiian religion. And they're called an oracle tower. This, and as you said, this is not an identical version, but that's what it's based on. And the building behind it, which is the lobby you were just describing, is again, not an actual Polynesian structure replicated, but instead it is a modern American-style, Polynesian-style structure that is based on some authentic indigenous architecture in other parts of the Pacific. But it is still very much of the modern age in the Hawaiian islands and the USA. And the sort of adoption of culture and the nature of exotic, we just got overly excited about yesterday and prepping for this show, which results in probably a couple of shows about that. And to the very right, you see what kind of car in that picture. Just above the Think Tech Hawaii logo, which just vanished, you can see a little Volkswagen Beetle. And that comes from the land where Martin's speaking to us from now. And Volkswagen Beetles were tremendously popular in the USA and here in the Hawaiian islands very much. And we could get all involved in that. I don't think we have time for that today. And we all, because you told us a couple of shows ago, you rolled over in one. I certainly did. Yeah, I've heard some memories. So number eight is once again, another, so they couldn't even stop. They redid the covers of the posters over and over again. Really sort of unique must have been because I never saw it was the lobby of that building. So this is number nine and I subtitled that, The Voodoo Lounge. So they were really playing off this sort of, not just exotic, but this sort of mystical notion. They created these weird lights and lamps and basically customized the whole thing, this sort of fantasy, illusion, perception, dream, obsession of what people would think, what the strange plays half around the world might be, what they wanted it to be. And it's a mixture of the modern and the primitive. And that was something that was very popular at that time period. Now you refer to this as the Tiki, the Voodoo Lounge, and that is referring to the fact that there was a movie that was made, another movie made at the Cocoa Palms Resort was called Voodoo Island from 1957. And in fact, the Cocoa Palms promoted itself as being a major movie location because in addition to Blue Hawaii and Voodoo Island, there was also a film called Sadie Thompson, another one called South Pacific, or not South Pacific, but Beacon Love Song. And one of the structures that was on the grounds was built for the film Sadie Thompson, and then they left it there as a chapel, as a wedding chapel. And talking weddings, let's go to jump to picture number 10, which shows us two postures from two other cultures where this was also popular or populated. And on the right is a Japanese poster, Blue Hawaii is what it's titled in Japanese phonetically. And on the left is the cover of a magazine from South America, which shows the really iconic final scene of the film Blue Hawaii, which is this wedding in which Elvis and his girlfriend, Miley Duvall, are married. They are writing on a barge, which is on one of the lagoons on the property of the Cocoa Palms and dressed in Hawaiian style with some Kauai people in the background as extras, attending them at their wedding. And this was a hugely influential scene. People were really sucked in by the romance of this and the location where it happened. And as we like to zoom in and look at the details, if you can get number 11, even to me, surprisingly, me dreaming of exotic, I was thinking, you know, Hawaii would have huge shells on the beach and a dozen. So they actually went to, I think it was Tahiti and got these huge shells and they used them for the sinks in the rooms. And you were guessing in which particular part of the hotel that was and for that we could bring in the number 12, which is also the permanent background picture. Correct. There were nine of these freestanding cottages. There were five called the king's cottages and four called the queen's cottages. And these figure very prominently in the Blue Hawaii film that we've been talking about. I believe that those shell basins were only used in these cottages, which I think must have been the high end part of the accommodations. And you also saw in the previous picture that the shells were backed up by this gold, shiny gold tile, which I think was there to add elegance to what must have been the premier accommodations. Exactly, and once again, all the way through the detailing, which is perfectly described as a combination between moderns. So having a sink, having running water is truly an achievement of modern society. But then again, using this archaic, natural, big thing is basically the primitive, right? Absolutely. And there's another detail that struck me in the movie and this is number 13, if we can jump to that one. And we had our tech guys at school, thank you guys, do these screenshots. There's this final scene where Miley, who is Elvis's girlfriend, got really upset with him and she expresses that through slamming clothes, these vertical wooden louvers. And you can see on the right is another view of the room. And in fact, the room on the right and the postcard is in a separate building on the grounds of the Cocoa Palms Hotel, which was referred to as the Blue Hawaii Building. And it had blue interior decor in honor of the movie. But of course the point here is the architectural touch of the vertical louvers, the natural ventilation that they offer, not to mention that they are a striking architectural detail too. Yeah. So you said there was this modern comfort that the American and global tourists requested but it was camouflaged and hidden in picture number 14 in these cottages. They were pretty much like blending with nature and that kind of stuff. Let's go to one more detail, which is number 15 because what's really striking would usually only corporate hotels do. They design everything, the total piece of artwork down to the little SS wars and accessories here, which is an esch tray. And I believe it's a letter opener, right? Talking branding to the best, right, to the max. And this is not something that is done all that frequently just because of the cost. I mean, it's only the high hotels that are going to do this and it's also of a time when people wanted Polynesian or exotic themed souvenirs. So the ash tray is supposed to look like a woven Laohala or coconut frond hat. And if you turn it over on the other side, it says Cocoa Palm Hotel and that's the type of thing people liked in those days. Yeah. And they did the same to the architecture. In the next picture they took that sort of very typical Moby American pool and basically tropicalized it by giving it a sort of edge out of lava rock, which you said imagine, you know, it was probably not very practical, not very nice to walk on, but this makes like a generic chlorine pool look exotic. And that's the way they did it with everything in the building. The ultimate scene in the movie, the portraying is number 17, which as you mentioned already is that wedding ceremony where everything humiliates and you see the celebration and that sort of match between the cultures. And this is the legacy of the hotel, both as the movie. And we just went online to see what the current status is. And now the project seems under redevelopment and there's a website of the developer and if we can get number 18, this is how the architect portrays the cottages. And we were discussing this, we were a little shocked. We were saying, well, this has little to do with the original cottages, which intention was almost to be invisible. This here reminded me of Alani and the residential part. These are pretty much American structures. They're once again, Polynesia-ized by Chevron guardrails, but little to nothing to do with the original. And I don't know what's going on on the roofs up there, if that's some kind of thatching, which the original buildings obviously had underneath, of course, they probably just had corrugated metal roofs for decent care and... I think in this case, what I can see is this very interesting term of value engineering. I think that that's got value engineered and these are pretty much generic ordinary structures that once again have little ornaments here and there. And again, number 19 is what it used to look like, where I'm thinking it's almost like the architecture was swallowed by the jungle. And again, tourists came and that's what they wanted to see. They didn't want to see structures that they were familiar with. They wanted to see stuff that was exotic that they didn't know. And the hotel was developed in a setting that you couldn't replicate. It was a huge palm grove that was already there plus the lagoons were already there. They just fit in the structures into this incredibly beautiful natural environment. Exactly. And that's why we were increasingly shocked when we went to the next slide on the website, number 20 here, which is almost like the jungle is now swallowed by the architecture. You see lots of buildings. You see a palm tree here and there, which is almost contradictory to the original concept. And you said perfectly, if you have this legacy, why not building upon it? Because there's a market and there's competition and if you can distinguish yourself, we talked about this crazy German word, alleinstellungsmerkmal, which means there's something that distinguishes you from other things. Why not doing that? Yeah. So we were thinking here again, I mean, the development probably goes on, but whoever sees this show, maybe there are some suggestions what you could do. And with number 21, we've been using cars as vehicles for thought for a while. And I want to share this one here from my archives, which I use, again, cars to think about architecture a lot. And there's this gentleman, which I think he had a place somewhere in Hawaii. This is Neil Young, obviously for all the old folks like us knowing young folks looking up, he's a legend too. And he talking legend, he owns a 59 Lincoln Continental. And he said, this is iconic, this is unique, this is total piece of artwork. So I'm going to transition this into the future. And I'm going to do this with a team of mechanics and going to convert what is not up to date anymore, which is the engine of the car, which probably has a gas mileage of three miles per gallon. And they turned into a hybrid with 30 miles per gallon. So it's a, he calls it link vault. And what does this have to do with architecture potentially? Maybe gets more clear on number 22, which is I said, I moved on to Northern Germany. We have not that much wood as in the South. So we use vernacularly tectonics. They're not on similar to how your folks used to do it and using a, you know, a wooden post every once in a while. We call this half timbered tectonics. So there was a 300 year farmhouse that was threatened to be demolished by the clients. And we converted it and adapted it to their contemporary needs. And we did it in a very radical way. And we thought we need to do it in an equally innovative way as the people, you know, were very innovatively building this 300 years ago. So we kept the mindset, the methodology of innovation, which then by nature couldn't result in, you know, retrofitting the building back to its original stage. It looked differently. It got a new spatial and thermal threshold of, you know, triple glazed glass. So it's highly energy efficient. And we just thought this is the way that people would have done it 300 years ago if they would have had the means. Now, did you totally disassemble the structure and rebuild it or did you keep the framework as is? We kept, and this is, let's go to number 23 because there it comes apparent why I make this connection here. This was me and two years later, last year, 2016, driving by. And by that time, the developer had started to gut the building. So to take out all the, as you can see, you know, it's a concrete frame structure. So the building actually didn't get entirely destroyed by Eniki, but everything that was light infill, like the roof and the facades got damaged. And, you know, my feeling is to Soto that in the early nineties, you know, Tiki wasn't really that chic anymore. This is actually why one of the major, you know, Tiki researchers started to look into that as he told me, and you got excited about it. Because, you know, it was sort of not the style of the time and you poor people didn't like it. So I'm pretty sure reopening the hotel in that same fashion, so to speak, didn't seem to be opportune anymore. And they might've just cashed in the insurance money and didn't do anything. That's all speculative. But now you can see the bare bones. So the question is, you know, what do you do with bare bones? And we had the same. We got at the thing, we had to, you know, take out some wooden posts that were rotting away. We were cleaning it up, but then we needed to get more light into there. So we took out some of the sod break infill and replaced it with glass. We pushed it back, we created it all nice. So sort of a creative, you know, interpretive kind of method to do that. So here's some ideas. We always close with some potentially, you know, weird and interesting ideas about what could you do? And this is number 24, which these are two examples from my emerging colleagues that I have the privilege to work with who actually get excited what you can see about vertical wooden louvers again. Right, so there's this sort of idea about, we're in the tropics. So why not basically, you know, as you said before, a wooden louver has the potential to let the breeze through. Right. And basically feel them in paradise. Right. And in the photo, I can see that there's dry ice vapor that's going through those vertical louvers showing the air movement. Exactly. So we tested that, we prototype it and it's just sort of a rediscovering of not necessarily sort of original, once again, vernacular things, but interpreting that, just like Pete Wimbley has been doing it, you know, saying, you know, we got woods, but we don't, we have invasive species. We might repurpose these. We might apply different technologies to process that. So there's a whole sort of range that you could make it again specific to the culture. And, you know, not doing the fake thing, talking Ollani again. If you'll go to Ollani, you knock on what looks like wood and it's fiberglass, but you don't notice until you do that. And who knocks on buildings, you know, not everyone, you know, woodpeckers, maybe, but, you know, the woodpecker is probably pretty upset, right? Because he needs wood, he likes wood and he packs on plastic. That's kind of irritating, isn't it? Well, fortunately, we don't have woodpeckers here. So that's not going to happen at Ollani. Okay, mm-hmm. Okay, so maybe we go to the final picture here, which is like, well, so our other buddy, I could sand burn our investigative and activist reporter, was sending this to us. And he said, hey, look what's happening actually pretty close to me here. The picture at the bottom is actually the proposed Google headquarters in London, United Kingdom, by the currently very well-in-business designer and architect, Thomas Heatherwick. And look what he's doing, look what he's proposing. There are the vertical louvers, which we not only saw in the scene at the Cocoa Palms Hotel in Blue Hawaii, but we also saw them on our favorite building, the Alamoana building, which had them back in 1961 that changed their position according to the time of day to provide shade to the interior of the building. And that was high-tech back in 61, and now it's, as you said, it's ironic to see one of the most powerful companies in the entire world constructing a building in the 21st century that's using that same technology that we've already seen. Exactly. So this is probably a stretch, but we now, are we saying Pete Wimberley, our tropical, tiki architect in Hawaii, has inspired the hotshot star architect, Thomas Heatherwick, in a way, maybe he doesn't know, maybe he doesn't know. Maybe he doesn't know, but what he really tells us is that there is a tremendous tradition of innovation on the Hawaii Islands, not only originally, indigenously, but also sort of over the years, especially mid-century, there was really people were really trying hard and doing the best to tiptoe and walking on these eggs of like being respectful of the culture, but also bringing the best of their culture. Yes, and I think that is, you and I have discussed this before, the Hawaiian Islands are physically very small and physically very separated from the rest of the world, and yet the influence is spread internationally in lots of different ways, culturally, as well as technology and all kinds of things. So that's something we can be proud of and excited about. Exactly, and we're gonna dive a little deeper in about two weeks, because we're on a two-week schedule and we're gonna look into crazy cantilevering canopies, which is actually one of your little things that you're excited about and you got me excited about and that's how it works between us. So I'm looking forward to that. I think we're out of time for today. So I go back to sleep and you have a good rest of the day, DeSoto. Thank you very much, and I will be going back to work and sending you pictures of the kooky tropical canopies that we'll be looking at when we get back together two weeks from now. And so until that two-week time comes up again, everybody, we'll be saying Aloha from Human Humane Architecture, Martin from Germany, Meen from Hodelulu, and see you next time.