Monday, June 4, 2007

A striking stairwell in Hilo...

This interior stairwell is at a office building in downtown Hilo, often times you will see something similar to this in many Hawaiian buildings. Due to the temperatures and humidity most buildings try to take advantage of the tradewinds any way they can especially since air conditioning is very scarce (expensive electricity contributes to that) and evaporative coolers are worse than ineffective (when the humidity is this high you really don't want to ADD to it!)
Post and Pier house styles are preferred for this reason as well, the air can circulate underneath the home and cool it (as well as keeping the living area up of the ground and thereby out of reach of most pests and flood waters), most people in Hawaii live a "greener" life than they realize...or ever intended; using filtered rainwater, less mechanical cooling by specialized home designs, recycling, Freecycling, composting, eating home grown produce, and lots of people hang their washed clothes out to dry (electricity and gas are just to expensive), solar is also used from simple passive to the most elaborate of set ups. But we still have a long way to go...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for visiting my blog and for commenting there.

The last time I was in Hawaii was 1955. The first time was 1953. It was a small city then.

Thanks again.

Brent Norris said...

Whoa! I would have loved to have seen Hilo then.
-Brent
http://bigislandfun.com

AlohaTrevella said...

What brought you here then Abraham?I bet it was really something to see, I mean its great now but very much the county seat...I would have loved to walk downtown in the old days and just looked around (before the tsunami of course!)...

Nice site Brent...