WDW Magazine April 2016 - Disney's Hollywood Studios | Page 114

Gavin - That lobby, just walking in, you can tell. Could you talk a little about working with
Hawaiians and how you made it truly Hawaiian?
Joe - Yeah, sure. I mean, there are all kinds of things here, you know. Hawaiians have a very
specific attitude about places, for example. There is no such thing as a generic place in
Hawaiian thinking. Places are very specific. Very specific. You are exactly where you are. And
so, we did a lot of research with the Hawaiians into the specific story of that piece of land.
And then, there’s another thing, a Hawaiian idea about land and how land is organized along
two different thought patterns. One is that time is organized according to the flow of water.
So that which is traditional, old, based on the ancestors, antique, that is up in the mountains
where fresh waters begins and that which represents the future is down in the ocean where
life comes out of the ocean. The Hawaiians came to Hawaii from the ocean. And so, if you
look carefully at Aulani, it is more traditional, more rooted in the past in those areas that are
away from the beach. As you go down towards the beach, it becomes more modernistic,
more contemporary, you know. The ‘AMA ‘AMA restaurant’s quite contemporary. That’s
very deliberate and very Hawaiian in terms of how you think about space.
And the other division is, if you are facing into the future, meaning with your back to the
mountains and you’re faced to the ocean, then the more feminine side of your body is to
the left, the more masculine to the right. And that’s another division that we made at
Aulani, through the art program, to the landscape program. So when you get to Aulani,
you’re actually standing in a Hawaiian space. You’re not just at a place about Hawaii. You’re
at a place that has been designed and thought of as Hawaii.
And there are millions of these. There are millions of these little details like that.