interesting tiki reads - General Tiki

K Kailuageoff Member Honolulu Lounge,Lewes, DE Joined: Mar 27, 2002 Posts: 1506	K Kailuageoff Posted posted on Wed, Sep 8, 2004 1:36 PM While we are waiting for Ben to post/photocopy/or typeset and print his book about his grandfather, here's something else to read. I found this article from the Honolulu Weekly while looking for web content on our old buddy Donn Beach. If you've already seen this, ignore it. If not, enjoy. KG The Way We Were His buildings set the tone for Waikïkï. Maybe we should take another look at what Peter Wimberly built. by Curt Sanburn December 20, 2000 In his salad days, Honolulu architect Pete Wimberly regularly wore a pair of Bermuda shorts, a short-sleeve shirt and sneakers without socks to his office. Once in the office, he would Scotch-tape cardboard over the air-conditioning vents, open the länai door and start sketching. "Pete was an outdoor person," explains fellow architect Donald Goo, who worked with Wimberly for 27 years, until Wimberly’s death at age 80 in early 1996. "He liked tropical breezes, and he hated air conditioning." By the time he died, George J. "Pete" Wimberly had established himself as perhaps the most successful resort architect in the world. His Honolulu—based firm of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (WATG) designed many of the Pacific Rim’s pace-setting hotels and is now the world’s largest "niche" architecture firm, specializing in the $4-trillion-dollar travel industry. WATG generates enough cash flow from its hotel projects in 35 countries (including the surreal Palace of the Lost City in South Africa and the gargantuan, just-completed Venetian in Las Vegas) to sustain branch offices in Newport Beach, London and Singapore. Upon his death, Wimberly was eulogized as "an architect’s architect";"the man who changed the face of the Pacific"; and "the epitome of the artistic architect." "When people come to the Pacific," Wimberly once said, "they want to see something that looks Pacific, not some New York hotel." And no one did a better job of creating the stage set than Wimberly. He was responsible for Tahiti’s Hotel Bora Bora, with its thatched huts built on stilts at lagoon’s edge; American Samoa’s Pago Pago Inter-Continental Hotel, with its authentically constructed thatch fale; Tahiti’s Tahara‘a Hotel, no taller than three-quarters of a coconut palm, spilling down a lush hillside above Matavai Bay. "Pete’s main purpose in life was to create a flow of people together," says his longtime draftsman, Tom David. "He introduced islanders to the world by bringing the world to them." Big picture-wise, David points out that Wimberly had to invent Pacific Island tourism in order to create the hotels he wanted to build. "And that’s what happened," he says. With his friend Bill Mullahey, the regional chief of Pan American Airlines, Wimberly traveled the Pacific in the 1950s, looking for new destinations, new hotel opportunities: Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Fiji, Jakarta, Singapore, Bali. The men were instrumental in founding the Pacific Area Travel Association in 1952. But it was Hawai‘i that first captured the young architect’s imagination and Honolulu where he flexed his muscles. Here is the repository for some of his best surviving work – and the graveyard for many a Wimberly landmark. This was once Wimberly country, and the ghost shapes of his fervid imagination still haunt old-timers. Late in life, Wimberly relocated to Southern California. When he became terminally ill with emphysema, he returned to Honolulu, the city he loved, and died shortly thereafter. Wimberly came to Hawai‘i in 1940 as a 24-year-old journeyman architect doing naval work at Pearl Harbor. When the war ended, he set up shop with Howard Cook in the architectural firm of Wimberly and Cook. Cook’s job, Wimberly told a journalist in 1991, was to "make actual buildings of my airy-fairy sketches." Among the team’s first postwar jobs was the rehabilitation of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, after its wartime service as a rest-and-recreation facility for Navy submariners. The stuffy, formal Royal was an opportunity for Wimberly to develop a few notions, he said, about "requirements for buildings in the tropics." He rejected European/American architectural norms as unsuited to Hawai‘i’s climate and culture. He decided that "it was time we began to think and to act on ideas about development of a regional architecture for Hawai‘i." What followed was 20 years of wonderful Wimberly buildings in Hawai‘i; buildings that, for many, defined contemporary, Hawaiian-style architecture. Typical elements in Wimberly’s early work included: o local materials: coral stone, lava rock, wood beams, thatch, bamboo, etc. – and glass; o local forms: flowing indoor/outdoor open spaces sheltered by big, dramatic roofs with big eaves; o liberal use of figurations, patterns and motifs derived from the cultures of the Pacific. A prime example: The Waikikian Hotel (1956) was an unair-conditioned, two-story beachfront hotel on a very narrow lot with lush, tiki torch-lit gardens and a dramatic, hyperparabolic soaring lobby inspired by Melanesian men’s-house forms. For the now-defunct Spencecliff chain of restaurants, Wimberly designed Top’s, Coco’s and Popo’s coffee shops with lots of lava rock and an almost cartoonish South-Seas flair that made them landmarks in Honolulu’s streetscape. The Kau Kau Jr. hamburger stand on Nimitz Highway (1956), with its little glass kitchen huddled beneath a fantastical, arrow-shaped, concrete-slab roof was certainly Honolulu’s most fanciful small building. On Kühiö Avenue in Waikïkï he designed the luscious, short-lived Royal Theater (1962) with its swooping walls, outdoor lobby and overscaled, googie-stylized bas-reliefs. For his college friend Donn Beach, Wimberly designed Donn the Beachcomber bar/restaurant with its big, authentic thatched roofs, right on Kaläkaua Avenue, cheek-by-jowl with another Wimberly project, the original International Market Place and Duke Kahanamoku’s night club, where Don Ho sang and drank through his salad days. Other Kaläkaua Avenue landmarks designed during Wimberly’s early years include the Bishop National Bank with its mural by Jean Charlot (1959); McInerny department store with an elegant, coconut tree-pierced awning (1959); the wooden crescent of the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Arcade (1960); the cooly modernist Rattan Art Gallery (1947); and, of course, Canlis’ Restaurant (1954), which seemed to be everyone’s sentimental favorite of Wimberly’s buildings. With its open-air dining room, bold Polynesian decorations, wall of orchid plants, koi pond, garden setting and legendary kitchen, Canlis’ Restaurant asserted Honolulu’s status as a uniquely stylish crossroads-of-the-world in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, palm-lined Kaläkaua Avenue itself, with all of its Wimberly-designed buildings, was among the most gracious boulevards of any tropical city in the world. Other familiar Wimberly designs from this period include the modernist Kapi‘olani Bowl building on Kapi‘olani Boulevard at Ward Avenue (1958), demolished in 1996; the striking Valley of the Temples Chapel in ‘Ähuimanu on the Windward Side (1965); and the domed Foodland supermarket at Windward Shopping Center (1953) in Käne‘ohe. By 1960, Waikïkï’s days as a low-rise district were over. The remote and exotic queen of tropical resorts was about to meet the jet age. Its fate was sealed 10 years later with the arrival of jumbo jets and jumbo hotels. The construction boom that ensued led to the demolition of every Wimberly building mentioned above, with the exception of the Foodland and the Valley of the Temples Chapel. The last holdout, Canlis’, was razed in September 1998 to make way for a four-story shopping mall. Remarkably, Wimberly and his firm adapted to the times while keeping his signature "gestures" intact in his newer, larger buildings. "Pete always like to make dramatic gestures," says Mazeppa Costa, WATG’s resident historian. A Wimberly building that heralded Waikïkï’s transformation was the 15-story Bank of Hawai‘i building (1966), smack in the middle of Waikïkï on Kaläkaua Avenue. It is one of the architect’s most enduring gestures, and its penthouse floor housed the architect and his firm for many years. The ebullient tower, with its gleaming white, oversized sunscreen of interlocking arches resembling stylized palm fronds – or, depending on whom you talk to, the crisscross pattern on a pineapple or Polynesian geometrics or pure geometry – is instantly recognizable; and it instantly communicates Waikïkï’s traditional lightheartedness, high-rise office tower though it is. The gay building, unimaginably frivolous by today’s grim standards, still sets Waikïkï’s tone. "This question has come up before, many times," prefaces Costa when asked about the numerous interpretations of the building’s lattice. "It could be any of those things. People are always wanting to make something out of it, but nobody ever gave me an answer that satisfied me." Five years after the Bank of Hawai‘i building cheered up the skyline, Wimberly was contracted by Sheraton Hotels to design a big new hotel on Waikïkï Beach, next to the Royal Hawaiian. This commission came to the firm just after Wimberly himself had gone to state lawmakers and had urged them to halt any more hotel construction makai of Kaläkaua Avenue. The architect’s idea was to leave the Moana and the Royal Hawaiian alone on the beach, amid the splendor of old gardens, wide lawns and the ancient coconut groves. It is ironic that, as a result of his failure to convince anyone of his glorious vision, Wimberly was awarded the single biggest beach-hotel project Waikïkï has ever seen. Sheraton ordered up an astounding 1,700 rooms to be shoe-horned onto the priceless beachfront site occupied by the Royal’s lü‘au grounds and parking lot. As plans for the humongous, 31-story hotel took shape, the Wimberly staff began calling the project the "monster." Wimberly and his partners got wind of the nickname and sent the staff a memo commanding that the project be called the "butterfly," inasmuch as the massive building’s two swooping wings resemble a butterfly – if you squint real hard. Mary Gaudet, Wimberly’s longtime secretary, remembers that until the Sheraton people named the hotel Sheraton Waikïkï, it was called The Butterfly by one and all. To this day, people love to hate the Sheraton Waikïkï Hotel, but it is hard to deny that, like earlier Wimberly buildings, the grandly scaled hotel has dynamic movement built into it; it too has flair. To this day, it remains one of the world’s most efficient and most profitable large resort hotels. Wimberly’s own favorite hotel creations from the 1960s were, according to Gaudet, the spectacular Sheraton Maui, clinging to the side of a prominent rock outcropping at Kä‘anapali Beach (1963); and the primitivist, bony, whitewashed Kona Hilton, built on a rocky point at Kailua Bay on the Big Island (1968). Both buildings are dramatic counterpoints to their volcanic sites, yet both are integrated into the landscape as actual land marks. Both sites would seem bereft without Wimberly’s buildings – in the same way that a Greek temple can enoble an unprepossessing hilltop or a heiau can animate a spit of land. Great architecture can actually do that. "Some people called Pete’s work ‘stage sets,’" Don Goo says, "but later, the same qualities were said to evoke ‘a sense of place,’ and then they were called ‘environmentally sensitive.’ And now it’s all the rage." Goo is a little rueful about the resurgent, revisionist interest in his late partner’s old work, as we think about the shape of the future, rooting around in the past for things we might have forgotten, for shapes we can call our own. "[Wimberly] never wanted to talk about buildings or architecture," Goo says of the tall, droll man, who married twice and raced Lotus sports cars as a hobby. "He just liked to get his pencil out and scribble away. Once, I remember, he talked about architecture at a university lecture – sort of. He’d show slide after slide of great buildings, native buildings of all kinds with lots of texture and color and form and detail. Buildings that had real artistry and meaning to them. Then he’d show some square box with nothing on it and say, ‘This is what they teach in college today!’ He’d do this over and over." There’s another lesson Wimberly taught, Goo says, that it might behoove us all to consider: "Another thing … Pete always insisted there is commercial value in good architecture. ‘You make places people really enjoy and you make money,’ Pete said."

While we are waiting for Ben to post/photocopy/or typeset and print his book about his grandfather, here's something else to read.

I found this article from the Honolulu Weekly while looking for web content on our old buddy Donn Beach. If you've already seen this, ignore it. If not, enjoy.
KG

The Way We Were
His buildings set the tone for Waikïkï. Maybe we should take another look at what Peter Wimberly built.

by Curt Sanburn

December 20, 2000

In his salad days, Honolulu architect Pete Wimberly regularly wore a pair of Bermuda shorts, a short-sleeve shirt and sneakers without socks to his office. Once in the office, he would Scotch-tape cardboard over the air-conditioning vents, open the länai door and start sketching.
"Pete was an outdoor person," explains fellow architect Donald Goo, who worked with Wimberly for 27 years, until Wimberly’s death at age 80 in early 1996.
"He liked tropical breezes, and he hated air conditioning."
By the time he died, George J. "Pete" Wimberly had established himself as perhaps the most successful resort architect in the world. His Honolulu—based firm of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (WATG) designed many of the Pacific Rim’s pace-setting hotels and is now the world’s largest "niche" architecture firm, specializing in the $4-trillion-dollar travel industry. WATG generates enough cash flow from its hotel projects in 35 countries (including the surreal Palace of the Lost City in South Africa and the gargantuan, just-completed Venetian in Las Vegas) to sustain branch offices in Newport Beach, London and Singapore. Upon his death, Wimberly was eulogized as "an architect’s architect";"the man who changed the face of the Pacific"; and "the epitome of the artistic architect."
"When people come to the Pacific," Wimberly once said, "they want to see something that looks Pacific, not some New York hotel." And no one did a better job of creating the stage set than Wimberly. He was responsible for Tahiti’s Hotel Bora Bora, with its thatched huts built on stilts at lagoon’s edge; American Samoa’s Pago Pago Inter-Continental Hotel, with its authentically constructed thatch fale; Tahiti’s Tahara‘a Hotel, no taller than three-quarters of a coconut palm, spilling down a lush hillside above Matavai Bay.
"Pete’s main purpose in life was to create a flow of people together," says his longtime draftsman, Tom David. "He introduced islanders to the world by bringing the world to them." Big picture-wise, David points out that Wimberly had to invent Pacific Island tourism in order to create the hotels he wanted to build. "And that’s what happened," he says.
With his friend Bill Mullahey, the regional chief of Pan American Airlines, Wimberly traveled the Pacific in the 1950s, looking for new destinations, new hotel opportunities: Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Fiji, Jakarta, Singapore, Bali. The men were instrumental in founding the Pacific Area Travel Association in 1952.
But it was Hawai‘i that first captured the young architect’s imagination and Honolulu where he flexed his muscles. Here is the repository for some of his best surviving work – and the graveyard for many a Wimberly landmark. This was once Wimberly country, and the ghost shapes of his fervid imagination still haunt old-timers.
Late in life, Wimberly relocated to Southern California. When he became terminally ill with emphysema, he returned to Honolulu, the city he loved, and died shortly thereafter.
Wimberly came to Hawai‘i in 1940 as a 24-year-old journeyman architect doing naval work at Pearl Harbor. When the war ended, he set up shop with Howard Cook in the architectural firm of Wimberly and Cook. Cook’s job, Wimberly told a journalist in 1991, was to "make actual buildings of my airy-fairy sketches." Among the team’s first postwar jobs was the rehabilitation of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, after its wartime service as a rest-and-recreation facility for Navy submariners. The stuffy, formal Royal was an opportunity for Wimberly to develop a few notions, he said, about "requirements for buildings in the tropics." He rejected European/American architectural norms as unsuited to Hawai‘i’s climate and culture. He decided that "it was time we began to think and to act on ideas about development of a regional architecture for Hawai‘i."
What followed was 20 years of wonderful Wimberly buildings in Hawai‘i; buildings that, for many, defined contemporary, Hawaiian-style architecture. Typical elements in Wimberly’s early work included:

o local materials: coral stone, lava rock, wood beams, thatch, bamboo, etc. – and glass;
o local forms: flowing indoor/outdoor open spaces sheltered by big, dramatic roofs with big eaves;
o liberal use of figurations, patterns and motifs derived from the cultures of the Pacific.

A prime example: The Waikikian Hotel (1956) was an unair-conditioned, two-story beachfront hotel on a very narrow lot with lush, tiki torch-lit gardens and a dramatic, hyperparabolic soaring lobby inspired by Melanesian men’s-house forms.
For the now-defunct Spencecliff chain of restaurants, Wimberly designed Top’s, Coco’s and Popo’s coffee shops with lots of lava rock and an almost cartoonish South-Seas flair that made them landmarks in Honolulu’s streetscape. The Kau Kau Jr. hamburger stand on Nimitz Highway (1956), with its little glass kitchen huddled beneath a fantastical, arrow-shaped, concrete-slab roof was certainly Honolulu’s most fanciful small building. On Kühiö Avenue in Waikïkï he designed the luscious, short-lived Royal Theater (1962) with its swooping walls, outdoor lobby and overscaled, googie-stylized bas-reliefs.
For his college friend Donn Beach, Wimberly designed Donn the Beachcomber bar/restaurant with its big, authentic thatched roofs, right on Kaläkaua Avenue, cheek-by-jowl with another Wimberly project, the original International Market Place and Duke Kahanamoku’s night club, where Don Ho sang and drank through his salad days.
Other Kaläkaua Avenue landmarks designed during Wimberly’s early years include the Bishop National Bank with its mural by Jean Charlot (1959); McInerny department store with an elegant, coconut tree-pierced awning (1959); the wooden crescent of the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Arcade (1960); the cooly modernist Rattan Art Gallery (1947); and, of course, Canlis’ Restaurant (1954), which seemed to be everyone’s sentimental favorite of Wimberly’s buildings. With its open-air dining room, bold Polynesian decorations, wall of orchid plants, koi pond, garden setting and legendary kitchen, Canlis’ Restaurant asserted Honolulu’s status as a uniquely stylish crossroads-of-the-world in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, palm-lined Kaläkaua Avenue itself, with all of its Wimberly-designed buildings, was among the most gracious boulevards of any tropical city in the world.
Other familiar Wimberly designs from this period include the modernist Kapi‘olani Bowl building on Kapi‘olani Boulevard at Ward Avenue (1958), demolished in 1996; the striking Valley of the Temples Chapel in ‘Ähuimanu on the Windward Side (1965); and the domed Foodland supermarket at Windward Shopping Center (1953) in Käne‘ohe.
By 1960, Waikïkï’s days as a low-rise district were over. The remote and exotic queen of tropical resorts was about to meet the jet age. Its fate was sealed 10 years later with the arrival of jumbo jets and jumbo hotels. The construction boom that ensued led to the demolition of every Wimberly building mentioned above, with the exception of the Foodland and the Valley of the Temples Chapel. The last holdout, Canlis’, was razed in September 1998 to make way for a four-story shopping mall.
Remarkably, Wimberly and his firm adapted to the times while keeping his signature "gestures" intact in his newer, larger buildings. "Pete always like to make dramatic gestures," says Mazeppa Costa, WATG’s resident historian.
A Wimberly building that heralded Waikïkï’s transformation was the 15-story Bank of Hawai‘i building (1966), smack in the middle of Waikïkï on Kaläkaua Avenue. It is one of the architect’s most enduring gestures, and its penthouse floor housed the architect and his firm for many years. The ebullient tower, with its gleaming white, oversized sunscreen of interlocking arches resembling stylized palm fronds – or, depending on whom you talk to, the crisscross pattern on a pineapple or Polynesian geometrics or pure geometry – is instantly recognizable; and it instantly communicates Waikïkï’s traditional lightheartedness, high-rise office tower though it is. The gay building, unimaginably frivolous by today’s grim standards, still sets Waikïkï’s tone.
"This question has come up before, many times," prefaces Costa when asked about the numerous interpretations of the building’s lattice. "It could be any of those things. People are always wanting to make something out of it, but nobody ever gave me an answer that satisfied me."
Five years after the Bank of Hawai‘i building cheered up the skyline, Wimberly was contracted by Sheraton Hotels to design a big new hotel on Waikïkï Beach, next to the Royal Hawaiian. This commission came to the firm just after Wimberly himself had gone to state lawmakers and had urged them to halt any more hotel construction makai of Kaläkaua Avenue. The architect’s idea was to leave the Moana and the Royal Hawaiian alone on the beach, amid the splendor of old gardens, wide lawns and the ancient coconut groves. It is ironic that, as a result of his failure to convince anyone of his glorious vision, Wimberly was awarded the single biggest beach-hotel project Waikïkï has ever seen.
Sheraton ordered up an astounding 1,700 rooms to be shoe-horned onto the priceless beachfront site occupied by the Royal’s lü‘au grounds and parking lot. As plans for the humongous, 31-story hotel took shape, the Wimberly staff began calling the project the "monster." Wimberly and his partners got wind of the nickname and sent the staff a memo commanding that the project be called the "butterfly," inasmuch as the massive building’s two swooping wings resemble a butterfly – if you squint real hard. Mary Gaudet, Wimberly’s longtime secretary, remembers that until the Sheraton people named the hotel Sheraton Waikïkï, it was called The Butterfly by one and all.
To this day, people love to hate the Sheraton Waikïkï Hotel, but it is hard to deny that, like earlier Wimberly buildings, the grandly scaled hotel has dynamic movement built into it; it too has flair. To this day, it remains one of the world’s most efficient and most profitable large resort hotels.
Wimberly’s own favorite hotel creations from the 1960s were, according to Gaudet, the spectacular Sheraton Maui, clinging to the side of a prominent rock outcropping at Kä‘anapali Beach (1963); and the primitivist, bony, whitewashed Kona Hilton, built on a rocky point at Kailua Bay on the Big Island (1968). Both buildings are dramatic counterpoints to their volcanic sites, yet both are integrated into the landscape as actual land marks. Both sites would seem bereft without Wimberly’s buildings – in the same way that a Greek temple can enoble an unprepossessing hilltop or a heiau can animate a spit of land. Great architecture can actually do that.
"Some people called Pete’s work ‘stage sets,’" Don Goo says, "but later, the same qualities were said to evoke ‘a sense of place,’ and then they were called ‘environmentally sensitive.’ And now it’s all the rage."
Goo is a little rueful about the resurgent, revisionist interest in his late partner’s old work, as we think about the shape of the future, rooting around in the past for things we might have forgotten, for shapes we can call our own.
"[Wimberly] never wanted to talk about buildings or architecture," Goo says of the tall, droll man, who married twice and raced Lotus sports cars as a hobby. "He just liked to get his pencil out and scribble away. Once, I remember, he talked about architecture at a university lecture – sort of. He’d show slide after slide of great buildings, native buildings of all kinds with lots of texture and color and form and detail. Buildings that had real artistry and meaning to them. Then he’d show some square box with nothing on it and say, ‘This is what they teach in college today!’ He’d do this over and over."
There’s another lesson Wimberly taught, Goo says, that it might behoove us all to consider: "Another thing … Pete always insisted there is commercial value in good architecture. ‘You make places people really enjoy and you make money,’ Pete said."

Post #113075 by Kailuageoff on Wed, Sep 8, 2004 1:36 PM