 the first time in 2023, which is very new and fresh, we welcome you to this or show, which is Human Humane Architecture on Think Tech Hawaii. And today's episode is going to be called the Danish Boston Boost with guest Matt Noblett, who is the leader of the firm, Danish architect in Boston. And we have the Soto Brown in his Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. And we have me, Martin de Spang, back in Munich, Germany. So quite spread out legs. And in this episode, we will further talk about how some tempered architecture and it's doing well in the short summer can give us inspiration for our endless summers back in Honolulu. So happy new year to everyone again. And with this view here, this gets us back to what connects us because that's where we all met in person the first time at the end of the last year. So the Soto, tell us what this picture here, well, we see what it is, it is Honolulu, we see the skyline, and we see an explosion there. But tell us the circumstances in fact. This is the celebration of the new year, 2023, coming to us in Honolulu. And this is a view of Waikiki on the right and an explosion, as you said, of fireworks in the sky on the left. And I took this picture looking from my family home on the slopes of Diamond Head looking towards Waikiki. And as I think it might be, this is the first time in 40 years or thereabouts that I've watched this new year's celebration from the Spanish point, because I haven't lived in my family house for many years, because I live in my own house nearby Papahulu. And the point is, my mother, who was 102 years old, is unfortunately, or realistically nearing the end of her life, I will be moving into this house. It is an Asapoff designed house, Vladimir Asapoff, famous local architect. So I will be immersing myself fairly soon in the care and feeding of a house from 1948, which is going to occupy a lot of my time, but I think will be enjoyable. So that's how I'm starting 2023. And thank you for asking. All right. Thanks for sharing again. Sorry about your mom, but I appreciate your point of view of hanging set. She had a very good and long life. Absolutely. Since 1920, and that's a lot of stuff to have seen and experienced. So she was looking down here at a newborn and didn't even see the Royal Hawaiian down there, because that was 10 years later, right? Well, no, yeah, she was she was in 1920, there was no Royal Hawaiian hotel. There was only the Moana hotel. And this is the view that I grew up looking at from when when I was born, just in my lifetime, Aloha Tower at 10 stories was the tallest building in the entire Hawaiian Islands. So I've seen Honolulu go from no high rise buildings to hundreds and hundreds of high rise buildings. Indeed. And I put in that little caption at the bottom there. And then it was all over the news that our German minister of defense was criticized for having wished everyone a new year by standing in Berlin at the time of fireworks where their cell phone supposedly so the technical quality wasn't anywhere, well, any anywhere close to what we get here from you, Eric, and from think tech. And they basically said it wasn't, you know, the most sensitive what you did. But Matt, you and I talked and said maybe the the reaction to that was was was a little overboard. Because myself, I can say how can you look at explosions and not think about the explosions that are going on at in the Ukraine for not leisure purpose, but causing pain and death. So I give her that. And again, the way she said it and the whole, you know, setting maybe wasn't the most wasn't the best. But that being said, let's get to the next slide, which is a compilation of many things here. But at the bottom right, we have this is the star advertiser, the online version of it that I scroll through. And we have, of course, the daily coverage of the disaster that is going on in the Ukraine. But unlike almost now nearing a year ago, where it was the main thing, right, we unfortunately almost got used to it. And some way less, you know, tragic in the scope. I mean, still bad enough is the news above it. And maybe I leave this up to you when you heard about that, because it kind of speaks about how desperate we Germans tried to have the tropics here in Germany, which is impossible climatically, because tropical fish can never live in frigid cold water, right? But we still try hard. So I leave it up to you guys to explain what that is and what incident happened there. Well, there was a huge cylindrical aquarium in the lobby of a hotel in Berlin, largest tallest aquarium in the entire world. And as you said, it was filled with tropical fish, because the Germans love to look at things and dream about the tropics. And it unfortunately burst. And fortunately, however, it occurred at 550 a.m., just before 6 a.m. So two people were injured, but nobody was killed or badly hurt. And that was because nobody was up at 6 o'clock in the morning in this building. So now, except for the fish and they have, of course, died. And the amount of water was so extreme that it broke through the front of the facade of the building into the street. So yes, it is a sign of desperation to try to create the tropics in the temperate zone. But I do have to say, I have read that this is the warmest winter on record, possibly in Europe to the point where there isn't in the Alps, there's a real lack of snow. So you may be having tropical fish in the water sooner than you think. You're getting an A for your weekly German lesson to soldier, because right above that, what you just intuitively translated, record temperature on Sylvester, which is New Year's Eve, 20 degrees Celsius in Munich. And do a little material science here. The material of that aquarium was actually not glass, but plexiglass. But from the background of your office, the the root of your guys office met, you want to talk about where plexiglass has been used in which project. And for that matter, please get us the top right image of what we see there, Matt. Well, I mean, plexiglass is used not not infrequently in building construction, because obviously it's transparent qualities, but the fact that it weighs far less than glass. So it's a lot easier to support. And probably one of the biggest uses of it, at least up until that time was the Munich Olympic Stadium and in Southern Germany that was built for the 1972 Olympic Games, which has a giant cable net structure that's clad with with plexiglass plexiglass panels that have weathered quite well over the years. They had to be replaced once so far, but are really a kind of a key material component to one of the more successful projects of, I think really the 20th century in terms of modern contemporary architecture. Yeah, and we've talked about this quite a bit before the Soto as well, right, about the project. And if you're probably not fast enough as I was last minute, thanks to you, Matt, because when we talked last time, you said what, you haven't seen that amazing exhibit. So I we rushed there and saw it in the last couple of days. And us, as you see up there, our Günther, Günther Desfang, looking at your Günther Benus, and you have a Frey model, one of Frey-Auto's models in front of it. And then talking about, you know, authenticity and appropriateness of materiality in the built environment, on the left part of this image here, you see semi-MI before we left, stopped by you, the Soto, you prepare about as far as timely. We went to Hanama Bay. And Hanama Bay, you both told me you haven't ever seen that, which I've seen once. And then I have its creator, Francis Oda, once at Eddo Komomo talk story, talk about the visitor center. And we see this in the picture at the bottom, in the bottom in the middle there. And he explained it as to be sort of camouflaged and hidden and almost seeming like natural. But the irony is that, as sad as it is that the natural coral bleaches, this stuff here, which is all fake and man-made, is also bleaching. And you see kind of cracks in there and some fiberglass coming through. And that's kind of almost that running for me. If you consider what Hanama Bay has been the scene for a movie, that is very representative for your youth to Soto and statehood. And maybe you want to talk about that and also about the show quotes of the architecture that is portrayed in that movie. Well, the movie that we're talking about is Blue Hawaii from 1961, which stars Elvis Presley. And you can see in the lower left corner, there's Elvis and his so-called girlfriend, whose name is supposedly Miley Duvall. And they hang out at Hanama Bay in the course of this film. And entirely fictitious, Elvis lives there for a time in a coconut shack, which is constructed by him and his Beach Boy friends. Well, in reality in 1961, it was no such thing like that there at all. But they did film a number of scenes there. And the other thing about Blue Hawaii, which is kind of wonderful for us, is you do get to see some of the architecture of the time in color on the big screen. You definitely, for example, frequently see in Shots of Foto Lulu, the Alamoana building, which was brand new at that time. And it had no other buildings around it. So it really stood out. And it has La Ronde on the top, the rotating restaurant. And it is a building we like because it was so innovative for its time. And you also get to see the Cocoa Palms Resort Hotel on Kauai. That was also a new and modern thing at the time that this film was made as well. Yeah, we see these two projects show quoted in the center there of this slide here. So these are the projects. And these projects are, they're not, they're, of course, you would say, you know, interpretive. They don't have anything to do with indigenous means and methods and practices. But the, on the very left, this is the marketplace, international marketplace, which architecture by Pete Wimberley, and also the one at the very right of these three is the Cocoa Palms, which you said this is also by Pete Wimberley. So these are buildings that try to basically be an interpretation of the vernacular and do it sort of here and now in modern times and some a little bit more romantic about the pre-contact architecture, but the Alamoana building in a very, very modern way that we once said, you know, could have been by the office of Banish in the approach they did it. So let's go to the next slide because we have to fly then and basically miss all this one here luckily. But tell us a little bit about the craziness of whether that was going on in your area around the Christmas times, Matt. Well, we had in the span of about 36 hours, we had a swing of about 51 degrees in temperature. The days leading up to Christmas and over the Christmas holiday was around 11 degrees Fahrenheit here. And then it warmed up on Monday and Tuesday to I think it was in the mid to high fifties at that point. So but we were really just experiencing kind of the tail end of a storm that really was catastrophic in a lot of parts of the country, Buffalo, Western New York and other areas in the Midwest, tremendous amounts of snow and obviously that beat havoc with air travel as well. As we see here in some ways, there's one picture of the very bottom right that you both and I do got a kick out of it because that thing that you also just experienced in your youth when you live there out there in that area in the cold and you promise yourself you never want to go back to there. But some of your family are, you know, might think about that a little differently. What is that? What is this about? The photograph we just saw is snow, real snow from the top of Mauna Kea. And on Christmas morning, my niece's husband, they live obviously on Hawaii Island, he drove up to the top of Mauna Kea, he filled his trip pickup truck bed with real snow, drove it back down, threw it on the ground and his two kids and neighborhood kids got to play with snow. Like they were having a white Christmas. Well, that's as much snow as I prefer to deal with if I have to deal with snow at all. But as it happened, we also happened to have had a significant storm here for us that dropped a lot of snow on the top of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. And I read that at one point, the snow plow on Mauna Kea plowing the road to the summit encountered drifts as deep as 10 feet. So that's a goodly amount of snow here in the tropics. So sometimes the winter comes to the tropics like tropics come to the winter land of Germany. But in that case, it's artificial, not real. Okay, there you go. And from the second skin of your folks there, we can see that the ambient temperature that actually makes the snow melt pretty fast, right, is still the endless summer one. While again, in these temperate climates that you are building mats, buildings have to do it all. They got to keep you warm in this brutal wintertime and they got to keep you cool in the summertime. And once again, you choke what at the top ride, your very sort of inaugural project there, the gensheim building that we covered in the last couple of shows, is doing that fairly sufficiently in all seasons in a biochromatic way in a post-fossil way. This was the first lead platinum building, right in America. Yeah, first lead commercial lead platinum or building of its size in North America. And yeah, I mean, I think that part of the art of that kind of design lies in realizing that not necessarily, you know, in the winter, you don't have to replicate summer conditions. And in the summer, you don't necessarily have to replicate winter conditions. That's just what everybody's gotten accustomed to, right, that interior temperature should be stabilized to a degree that no place on earth ever experiences. And so part of I think our approach is to get people, is to sort of reintroduce people to the idea that even interior climates can vary quite broadly. And you don't need to expend enormous amounts of energy to create kind of fake environments, right, that people don't really need. Absolutely. And we see maybe probably coincidentally on this compilation of images here, we see a lot of transportation going on, obviously, challenged in on icy roads where, you know, trucks get off the road and cars and then, you know, talking trucks, trucking the snow down from Onakea, your folks did, or you see that guy down there on skis at Times Square, which this is. So talking transportation, as we talked in the last show, Honolulu, as we said, doesn't have any of these conditions. So bicycling is actually might be the preferred means of transportation, which should be fostered more. And that gets us to the next slide. And we talked there, I just put it in words that Ben is his name, which I was missing out and blanking on last time, who's the guy at Makali Bicycle at the repair shop, who goes back way with Jay as together having been bicycle pioneers. And this is that what you recommended to us, Matt, and there's some snapshots here from that show in Germany that this colleague of ours here does on that tandem where you sit next to each other. And we, again, we said, you know, this is the longest German lesson for you to solo because it's all in German. But anyways, it's worth watching, as we said. And at the bottom right is us in our second PI mobile that you kindly host also the solo things for that. And Matt, you said, you guys should actually be on that tandem and do your shows, right? And how great would it be you bicycle to Kakaako and then the camera could go up just to the, you know, build environment you should talk about? I think it would be fantastic. Assuming you survive, assuming you survive. Yeah, yeah, there is that. There's there's some danger involved in this thing. It's not just fun. So yeah, we will pass this continue to pass this on to Jay and probably back to Ben. He can build such a vehicle here replicating. Okay, that being said, in the six minutes left, let's still go back to the to Harvard and your building. He designed there for the engineering school and go to the next slide and just quickly refresh our memories about the context where it is in, you know, this is this is a home game for you guys because Harvard in your town. So quickly explain us here the positioning of the project. Yeah, so this was this was a piece of land or a collection of lands that Harvard has acquired over many years since the 90s. In the lower left hand side part of the slide here, you can see the old Harvard stadium that kind of U shaped building and all the buildings to the to the northeast of that that's the Harvard Business School. But most of the other parts of what's inside this dotted red line had been acquired with the intention of expanding the campus on the south side of the Charles River, which is the big blue stripe going through the slide. And so in in 2006, we were invited to and ultimately won an international design competition for what was to be the first set of constructions on this piece of land, one of the pieces the primary pieces of land that that had been acquired as part of this overall effort to expand Harvard's campus. Yeah. And if you go back to the previous shows, you explain more in depth and in detail how you approach the side. But let's jump to the next slide right away, which seems to be maybe getting ahead of the game, but I don't think so. It's actually pretty much the order you had them in already for your presentation at our School of Architecture, which we always remind the the emerging generation to take an inside out designed approach versus like a mobile zarts and postmodern as the latest and outside imminent approach where you create a form and then you sort of smash function and people in there. As you always, you know, say rightly so, of course, then, you know, the building, you know, will take on an appearance and aesthetics and in best case, the pleasant one, but it's not designed that way around to make something pretty from the outside and then you kind of again shove shove it out and push something in. So that's why we want to jump right into the building here and experience it in its heart and core. So explain us more. Well, yeah, so I mean, I think this is what you're seeing in this slide is two two images of really the same space. But it's really it's it's really an important space for the building because what it does is kind of carves out a zone in the middle of the building where through this large glass wall that has daylight enhancing light shelves on the outside, we can really bring daylight deep into the building. So this atrium space, which kind of organizes all the program around it, allows daylight to be more broadly distributed throughout the building to make sure that the deeper spaces, particularly research spaces, which tend to be very deep floor plate spaces where people are working all the time and really should have access to daylight, if not to the views outdoors, need what this space brings in. So the space functions as a kind of a community center for the whole building. People, you know, know where they are because they can find this space and they can see across it and they know what's happening on other floors in the building and they can jump on these stairs or these bridges to get to those places. But at the same time, it's also serving a very performance kind of function in terms of ensuring that people have equitable access to sort of natural phenomenon. Absolutely. And, you know, with the background of the first two slides, explaining our different climates and climate changes and things, again, imagine this in there's probably going to be more cold to come before, you know, summer again. So there's a lot of snow piling up outside and a lot of subzero temperatures, but it's going to feel pleasant in the building without the expense of fossil fuel. The building is mainly biochromatically powered and for us probably more interesting to see the right when it becomes summer, which we have all the time. The building is going to stay cool the same way, again, without creating artificially chilled spaces by burning fossil fuel. So, but all that I guess the beauty is that, you know, there isn't anyone with a with a finger up and, you know, staying standing there and preaching, right, that all the time it comes, it's natural around you. I mean, you just you just feel it, right? You see the people, they're comfortable in the address, you know, one of the things that's always one of the things that I always find interesting is when I'm showing people this building in the different spaces, how many of them who are not architects or designers, even necessarily just say, it just feels good in here, like I it's a place I want to be. I see professors who are not necessarily part of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences working in the atrium, making the trip over from Cambridge and one of them I was, I know him and I spoke with him briefly and he said, he's like, you know, I just come over here because I just like being here. It's a nice space and it's comfortable and it's well-lit and I can't find anything like it elsewhere in Cambridge. You know, the other thing that this comes to mind when I look at this and again, I'm a layperson, I'm not an architect or designer, but this is a very modern up-to-date building, but it does incorporate to me what seems like a very old concept of a courtyard because buildings for many, for millennia, have been built with courtyards in different societies and different cultures throughout the world in which you open up a central part of the building and in doing so to the open air, obviously, you have light and you have air circulation and you're closer to nature. Now, obviously, in a traditional courtyard building, you don't have the protection of walls or a ceiling over it, you just open, but I think this does seem to be not unlike that concept. It's really not unlike that at all. And I think the only thing you could say is it's been adapted for a cold weather climate, which is to say it's using glass and roof to make that a year-round experience, the kind of winter garden concept. Okay, that had to be the final note because we're at the end of another exciting 28 minutes, so we will dive more deeply into how this building does it and all its whistles and bells and little secrets that you will share with us that we're looking forward to. So, see you next week for that and until then, you guys all stay Tropically Exotic, Exotically Tropical wherever you are. I will.