 meaning you, DeSoto, in your Bishop Museum. Hi, good morning. Good morning. And me, Martin Despang, in the bathroom studio of the Grand Hotel in Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii, are broadcasting live to playlists, to this playlist that you're watching, we have to say, of our show, Human Humane Architecture of Fink Tech, Hawaii. And you are a 14,000 accumulated viewer. And this is our 261st show. So let's get that started. And it's part of a sequence of comparing two cities, two windy cities, the one of Chicago, Illinois, and the one of Oahu, Hawaii, because it in some ways wants to be like that. We have some reasons to think so. So let's go to the first slide, DeSoto, and commemorate something that we had to think about last week. What was that, DeSoto? We had the anniversary of September 11th, 2001. And it's difficult to believe it has been that many years, if you're an adult, to think back to that very horrible, terrible, shocking day in which the World Trade Center in New York City was completely destroyed. And not only was it shocking that the airplanes actually were flown into the buildings, but that they completely collapsed. And that's something that if you saw it happen, we both did. We're old enough to do that. And they were both by an architect who left us with two promising buildings here to make, you can never make up for it, but at least there's humanity surviving him as the architect of this tragic case. And this is Queen Emma Gartens and 1315 Alamoana Boulevard, which we think are still the finest examples of tropical exotic dwelling here from its century modern. And so in Chicago, we have a building by an architect who we also have a building from. I have on campus at my work. And this is Edward Jarrell Stone with a show quoting the building at the very bottom right. And as we have to say, there was shoving, which we call a microwave banana in front of it, but you can still see its original beauty behind. And that was actually fairly early was in 1971, as I was reminding myself and looking back into that show that we did about revolving, it's about the architecture up at your age. And Edward Jarrell Stone did a building in Chicago that in at its time in 1974, where it was called the standard oil building later renamed the Amoco building. And now it's the Aon building that was built in 1974. So three years later than the one we have on campus here up at your age. And that building is still standing. It used to be the tallest in Chicago. And I think it was the third tallest in the United States, not even the world. And we see down there that little chart from the Chicago Tribune that shows the kind of the competition and heights going on. If that building next to the Chicago Tribune tower would be built at tower, then that would push this building back to position number five. Because you have genie gangs and Regis tower topping it. Then it's Mr. Trump, unfortunately, who trumps her tops her with that. Then we would have Smith and Gil with that Chicago Tribune tower. And then we have the CS tower. So unmatched another icon from the 1970s. We were saying, you know, one was innocent as far as fossil fuel. So we can't blame it for what it did back then. But all the other three buildings are now squeezing themselves in between this standard oil building and the CS tower. We're not so sure. We think they actually have to careful analysis. They haven't shown enough consideration of environmental issues that have been increasing ever since. Also, we want to just sensitize us about climates. Our climate here is always hot. And the sun is really something to protect yourself from, especially our light skins and our bald heads. The two of us needs to wear a sun, needs to put sunshade on or wear something to shade it from the sun. Exactly to prevent skin cancer. But there's that climate in Chicago, it has that too in the summer, but it has something else that you experience in your childhood and I, we both grew up in that cold. And in fact, in the very left picture at the bottom where these people are walking on, I took this picture about must have been the aqua tower genie gang's tower, which we see that is a pretty tall building, but it looks almost short compared to Ed Stone's standard oil building here. It was just finished. So it must have been around 2009, 2010 when I was there to take that picture. And what are we emphasizing on here as far as materials science, this Soto that we were talking about that again, we won't have here lucky. But again, don't be too comfortable because again, material gets really brittle, you know, a short amount of time getting beaten by the UV. But in addition to that, what could be broken by the cold? Well, there are lots of different things that happen in cold. And as you pointed out, when we were talking before the show, that white stuff on the ground is snow. And cold weather, the variation between hot and cold is something that is very potentially damaging because we talked about this a lot. Heat makes things expand, cold makes things contract. So when you have a cycle like in Chicago of extreme heat going to extreme cold, even if it's spread out over a period of months, that expansion and contraction can cause a lot of problems with materials that gradually will become brittle, as you said, and it can make things fall apart. And the problem is, of course, even metal, not only metal, the stone and concrete, if you've got something adhering to something or being held on by something, as that expansion and contraction continues, eventually you can have things crack, break, and literally fall apart. Yeah. And we said, you know, in the last show we were saying we're in Hawaii are lucky to lead the ranking of life expectancy. So people get the oldest here statistically because the human body doesn't have to power against both extremes because, you know, the human body has a constant temperature that it needs to sustain and maintain. So in order to, you know, heat it up, takes energy from the human system and then also to cool it down. So we only have to keep ourselves cooled down. So this helps our system to actually maintain itself longer. In Chicago here, something happened to this building here, it was clad with something beautiful that you see in the central picture there, that sort of this ghosty effect. That's a picture I took in the lobby of the building and the security people were kindly believing me that I was not another terrorist. But meaning well, and I captured this picture, thanks, Eric, for zooming in as to show you see the picture above is me taking a picture of that situation. And this is reflecting the staircase and the bell astray there. And so this material was highly reflective and it was marble, it was beautiful. The picture at the right of that shows you some yellow spot on it looks like someone spilled coffee, but I believe it was like water from cleaning creeping up on it on the that's like a column that touches the floor that shows the vulnerability you were saying people have, you know, marble as countertops, and it stains because it is not as closed and it's structure and it's porous that granite is. And so water can seep in there. Now, when, as you were talking rightly so about things contracting and expanding, when humidity expands, we notice if we leave a beverage in the freezing compartment of the fridge at burst and causes a mess. And because water expands. So this is what happens to a spongy material that marble is not a hard stone but a soft stone. And I think in the in addition to that, it was the fast nurse of how the stone was attached. So some of that failed and cost only 15 years after the building was built. So in 1989. So I was we were thinking must I still have witnessed and it's an original condition. And yes, I have because my year in college at UNL was in 1991. So I was actually there, you know, wait a minute, no, now we're talking stupid. So I haven't right because in 89 it was reclad. So I just missed it. That's the case. Yeah. So I can only imagine from the images. And just to give you an idea of the poetry of that one means thunder row or the sort of grumpy, hardly smiling cigarette smoking guy always fly this building's dark. You figure, right? If there was a relationship, I leave this up to real as architectural historians, or others, I would say. And so at material stone wanted to contrast that with a light guy with a smiling guy with a with a happy guy. And that's why I believe he choose this, this bright white marble. And in fact, there's another difference significant difference between, you know, weather that we have a lot of cloudy days in Chicago, there's like the lake effect, you know, clouds pushing in. And so you have that situation that you see at the very top left, which you hardly ever get on postcards because they choose to have and sun out there. But this condition you have or not. So what this made that the building was climbing this white material that was reflecting the clouds were reflecting in its facade. So it was like dematerializing itself at that time was must have been really, really beautiful. Again, as I was just remembering, senior moment, I had to miss it and not seen it in that one. But if you ever be in Chicago, please go into the lobby. You can take the same pictures that I took there that we talked about in the center. It basically gives you an idea how the building was that small picture left to that sort of height chart there is how it is clad. Now, after that, we have to say that the the the money the budget for the recladding was as much as the initial building costs. That's how basically and that just tells us, you know, these coats, these raincoats with puffy material underneath, because there needs to be insulation that also very likely had to be replaced. We all don't have that. It's just sensitizing us how much easier we have it or we could and we could should have it. Once we design buildings, which we are currently not doing because we're throwing the same moos as we identify over the buildings as we do in Chicago. Also, next slide, what we also do again, Senator Stanley Chang always sends us his newsletter the minutes before our show. Thanks Stanley for that. And we have a chance to glimpse through it at the very bottom left. We have one from his last week's newsletter that gets sort of nostalgic about nostalgia of buildings. And it says that people are probably since Ronnie Reagan took over and one was saying, Oh, everything in the past was better than until Carter where one believed the future is the best. People get romantic about traditional buildings and historic high rises. That's the point to a point that they want to be in them. And how is this about our Chicago Tribune building that we looked at before last week? Well, we've got there's a lot of things to talk about in this and I think the one thing that comes to my mind initially that I just want to just bring this back to us here is we talk a lot about older high rises being easy breezy. That's not something that is necessarily a valid for Chicago. And we're not talking about it as a romantic thing so much as we're saying it is a environmentally conscious way to not have to do as much fossil fuel to heat to cool buildings here. When you've got a lot of open, you've got open sliding doors to your lot and I, and you've got jealousies and you've got windows that you can open and that's true of the older buildings. Those are not necessarily elegant buildings. We're not talking about old word elegance, but we are talking about something that perhaps is, well, there are attributes that are really positive for us today. And I know that's not what we were discussing before, but that's what just came to mind when I looked at that little piece from the newsletter to think, yeah, there are a lot of good things from the past. And we talk about that a lot that are not necessarily just purely design elegance, but are utilitarian and sensible. Yeah. And as far as Stanley Chang is concerned, he's again the one up there on the political stage to try to figure out the utmost challenge of providing housing, dwelling in dignity for all the people, right? So it's sort of a little seems a little off subject, but actually not as we will find out. And there's actually potential in it quite a bit. This one here shows the conversion of a building from one use to the next, because it was the main building for the newspaper, the main newspaper, the Chicago Tribune in Chicago, and they moved out. And now people move in because it gets converted into a residence. This is obviously a high end high rise residential. And I, you know, these pictures are from me visiting these few months ago, and it's currently under construction. And you have these sort of glimpses of actually they advertise more the top of the tower where this where the tower becomes an outdoor space and sort of a garden and urban garden. That's obviously, you know, you can imagine it's beautiful to be up there in the evening, sunset times, not so much in the winter when it's packed with snow once again. And they're adding little things up there. There's this little chrome canopy for for a new entrance there. And when you look up who the architect is is one of our friends here on the island, because they love to build new buildings here recently, I rise is for hard use. And others is Solomon Court will be once here they are again. And talking as sentimentality going to the next slide. Germans are not free from that either. This is a very prominent and interesting example. It's by an architect who when I went to school was really a hot name and still is and he was, for that reason, I believe, hired by the ETH, one of the highest respected Ivy schools in Europe, the in Zurich, the Eipke Nessische Technische Hochschule, it was a professor there. And so he was initially at the bottom left that image there. That was in the same year actually that Ron designed the Halle Polanyi, bravely resisting and staying away from really bad postmodernism. And so color of it, color of design, you can see this almost being a hybrid between the Corbusier andropius, you know, the Bauhaus or the Fagos factory. But then he got sort of depressed, professionally speaking, because he people he said people just don't believe in modernism anymore, they gave up on it. And so why would I want to try to force something, push something, you know, that they don't like. So he sort of thought he had to recalibrate and re strategize and he did it in what was for some, including me a little hard to understand. But the more I think about it, the more I think I get him. And I understand him. He basically said, Well, let's save not modernism as sort of the imagery of it. But it's sort of philosophy of industrializing arts and crafts and providing high quality for the people by mass production and new technologies. And it but so he said, I want to do that. But in order to then you know, having the people like what I do and what I do for them, I need to go back in time because people at that point, in the 80s, 90s, were sort of again, going retro and conservative politically. And, you know, as politics is just an image of culture, right? So he went to build in such a nostalgic romantic way in a place in Berlin and Germany are capital again, after their unification that you told me that had fascinated you a lot and you have been looking at that a lot. And where is that? And we see that at the top left. The place is called the Potsdamer plots. And it is located in Berlin, as you said, before World War Two, Potsdamer plots was considered this exciting, wonderful part of the city. It had the most traffic in all of Berlin. It was the place where they had the install the first traffic lights in the 1920s. It was surrounded by a variety of important buildings. It was also an entertainment center. And then it was mostly destroyed. Much of it was destroyed in World War Two. And then it happened to be the location between where East Berlin and West Berlin were created. And the Berlin wall was built through it. And all of the buildings were completely destroyed. Everything was wiped out. And after reunification and the destruction of the Berlin wall, this huge tract of open land was available in Berlin to be entirely redeveloped. So this was not only a huge project to deal with just in construction, but there was a lot of pre-planning of which architects to choose, how are they all going to be integrated, etc. So this is part of that fascinating to me, urban change of major urban part of a city completely wiped out and then entirely rebuilt all over again. Yeah, and then obviously that prime piece of real estate, how do you redevelop that, right? How do you which architects do you choose? Which architecture are they representing? So you get this really interesting three guys from the gas station kind of consortium here of at the very left is someone who we going to revisit who many consider and I agree, former governor Neil Abercrombie was crazy about him for good reason. That's Renzo Piano. He is, you could say the most intelligent and sensitive ecological of all the big shot star architects out there. The one on the right, that glass tower is familiar to us and will continue to be because he is a hybrid of American and German as I am. And that's the legendary unfortunately not around anymore because he got run over by two cars on his bicycle at his young age of 80, not that long ago that is Helmut Jan, a German born architect that we will revisit who shaped Chicago as many other cities also are exotic escaped as an expert. Susanne is the town of Munich, he put two high towers there. So this is a Helmut giving his footprint you know of being German American. And then there's Hans Koloch in the middle with this brick high rise and Koloch by that time having gone sort of retro basically took his clients to America to Chicago and New York and they were studying and getting overly excited about these 1930s Art Deco high rises. And they decided that to be the style for this new building at the turn of the millennium, which is rather interesting, right? Because why do you pick something from going back to represent something that obviously goes to the future as you had just correctly explained. And in the 2000s up there, as little guys top right show quote, we're also dinking around. We have the expo coming up in my little sleepy hometown of Hanover and we were also going back as this image shows to my architectural ancestry, the Hanover School of Architecture up there with Conrad Willem Haadeh his main leader and he did this building with his facade that fascinated me because it had little to no mortar joint and trying to you know, do this as well and evolve that was quite the endeavor. And there was some experimenting and you know, trial and error that goes with it. And so it was with this Hans's building, which it's a little odd because I swear here in front of everyone, that someone who's very knowledgeable in the material science, Matthias Ava, who's my family modified timber buddy drove me through this street here and this building was all scaffolded. And he told me the story that it needs to be reclaimed because Hans by that time, he probably saw them in that not building that we will elaborate on this show later in one of the future volumes that was built in massive brick. Well, at the beginning of the new millennium, that was not possible anymore with ordinary developers. A labor is not anymore what he used to be at the time of the Manette knock. So he had to find a compromise and compromise was to do the clandest with a precast concrete, which we have great specific rock and precast here big times in Campbell industrial parks on industry and they were then baking the bricks into that. Well, something must have happened that over the time, some of these veneers that were baked in fell off. And so same thing as with Ed Stone and massive remodeling. The difference is that once you look for it with Ed Stone, it's out there right big times not covering up history. But here, not only did I not find anything about it. So I think Hans must have done a good job. No offense with his liars and eliminating everything up to the point, which is really weird. To my personal archive of pictures on my phone and computer where also cannot find that proof of evidence picture driving in Matias's car. But believe me, that's the story I was told. And I believe it was right. Because what why else would you have scaffolded the whole building? Right. So far about again, about architects and addressing their buildings having to dress warm. Once again, reminding us of that we don't have to do that here at all in Honolulu. In fact, we could leave the buildings almost naked. As buildings used to be here, just the hollow pealy grass roof over you covering you from the sun at the rain. And there were some enclosed ones that you have one rebuilt in your museum that we talked about that were just as you taught me for temporary occasional human events and activities as sleeping and storage, right? But the main inhabitation and habitation happened basically outside. Okay, we bring up the next slide, but only to briefly talk about it. And that was important for you to sort of because you said there's also an urban aspect of nostalgia and not right? Absolutely sort of just do an appetizer of that and then go back to that next week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a picture. These are pictures of Rockefeller Center in New York City, which was built in the 1930s and achieved a tremendous amount of fame internationally. And not only was it the most modern, it was very important and very thoughtful and future thinking in allowing open spaces for the rest of the world to come in. And up until that point, when you built on a lot, you built a commercial building out to the very edges and you occupied everything. And here, they intentionally left open plazas and open walkways for the public to come in, walk through, even if they didn't have any business there, they welcomed people in. And it was also very finely detailed. They spared no expense in how well it was built, how well the art was done, etc. So it's the Rockefeller Center is really an icon for urban development, which some of those concepts ultimately spread to other places, including right here in Honolulu with the financial plus of the Pacific many years later in the 1960s. Yeah, and I have to again, in defense of Hans, there is something very, very heroic about, I mean, the the typology of high rises is an American invention. And the ways American did that, especially in the pioneering phase, there is something really absolutely fascinating about it. I have to give him that. So maybe again, to return to that, once you do high rises in Germany, wasn't that bad of an idea? Again, should you then evolve that technologically, ecologically, that's something to think about, especially for the emerging generation now, that will save this all world that our generation, speaking about myself has unfortunately, let's get to the point where we are, where we're very, very worried about it, right? Okay, I think that's we ate up the last three minutes. And again, you already said what we going to see next, we will start next week with that simple positive of the Pacific, because there's also something very worrisome going on as we're speaking, that was brought to the attention or attention by our Doko Momo friend, Graham Hart, thanks Graham for that. So until then, please all stay easy breezy breezy easy and appreciate it more the way we have it here because in Chicago, it's getting fall there getting cold back home where Suzanne is from, we have three degrees Celsius at nights already so we're getting there. Anyways, stay happy and healthy here and see you next week. Bye bye everyone. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com Mahalo.