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...

Turtle Pond on Keawe street...

This little jewel is hidden away inside my office building in downtown Hilo...if you look closely you can see a turtle sunning itself on the center rock stack, it appears to be a red eared slider (the kind you buy for $2.00 when they are the size of a silver dollar) this guy would overlap your average dinner plate and probably tips the scale at over 5 pounds! There are three very happy turtles in this pond and too many tilapia and guppies to count. This pond is the perfect zen counterpoint to a busy office building, perhaps we can enact legislation for all office buildings to have a pond ;}