 have you back for what happens to be our 245th episode of I think the wise human humane architecture. And you are about to be our 13,100 viewers. So we're happy to have you with us for that reason. And we is us at this time of the year is the end of the semester up at you age. So we sent me your host Martin Despeng back half round the world to see what's different there and compare it with you, DeSoto Brown and your Bishop Museum. Hi DeSoto. Hello everybody and Martin, you're certainly in an unusual setting. We haven't seen that before. And where are you halfway around the world? I'm halfway in between Honolulu and Germany. I used to in the past, take the easy way out where the most obvious I guess and do a stop at the most the closest, which is either San Francisco or LA. But this time I remember back in the days when I was still in the prairie or even in my desert days in Arizona. Since I'm mostly flying with United Airlines, their hub is guess where and that's where I am. Well that is back that that's that is Chicago, you are speaking to us live from Chicago. So I'm in Honolulu, you're in Chicago. And the reason well, there are various reasons for you to have stopped there. But one of the things that you and I have been discussing is the current group of new high rises that are going up in Honolulu. When we were looking into them, we discovered that a lot of them are originating with firms that are located in Chicago. So why not? Since there's a connection that way, you go and visit there and see what it's like. And that's what you're doing before you take off again for Germany. Just hours from now. Absolutely. And if you can maybe get me the full picture back up for one more time. Because I'm sitting here in the Kubrick loft. Who is my best buddy from my college days, Dank Kubrick, who ever since wanted to work for that other German who unfortunately left us about a year ago that we have been reporting on and will continue to do who is Hamoud Yan, who is one of the most established architects in this town, and also builds, you know, all over the world and also back where where he's from. So Dan, after when he first came here, he was on a small budget and needed to be off just off the state border in Munster, Indiana. And he was the state border ran through the street through the middle of the street. And he was on that side where things were cheaper than on the other side, which was the Illinois side. And then once he put in some years of working, he was able to move to the city. And this is this location here where he lives. This is a former I should be able to turn the camera around and we show this in one of the future shows. You will find this very interesting this Soto because this is a former warehouse, an industrial building, but a historic one. And it's made out of solid timber is something that the young generation is trying to rediscover with cross limited and cross nail timber. These are solid, really, really heavy. They look like redwood, really, really chunky, you know, posts and beams. So the whole structure is basically out of out of solid timber from back in the days. And everything is of course sprinkler, you know, to keep it sort of appropriately fire rated. And so yeah, so Dan is actually able to walk to his work. It takes him like 20 to 25 minutes. And we've been doing this together for the for the past two to three days. And this area is called the West Loop. So is the loop is the core of the city. And you recalled the Soto that when you were here in Chicago the last time, coming from using natural elements as the ocean, which there is the lake here, never mind. But there is no mountains. So all they basically use and have for orientation is the superimposed grid. That happens to be oriented north, south, east and west, right. So you found it funny that it always said like, okay, you got to go west, you got to go north. That's right. And even the and even the streets have that, you know, they have north numbers and south numbers and east and west numbers. So this is west of the loop. And it's an area that's very interesting. We can compare it to Kakaako. It used to be a former industrial area with a lot of, you know, this is the the Midwest is the meat part of the country. And so they have a lot of bless you, they have a lot of, you know, meat here, packing places. So this is the former kind of slaughterhouse meat area here that moved to elsewhere and left this just like Kakaako, which was industrial before and there was some fishing there, I guess as well, right? Yeah. And so that's that's the parallel that was fish because of the ocean here, I guess in the lake, they don't fish that much. But they have a lot of cattle here in the Midwest. And that wise was this area. It's now just like Kakaako being converted to a very vibrant, which Kakaako wants to be this one, he actually is there's one bar after the other one restaurant after the other. And there is new construction going on. When the light is with us here, you see just that the between the top guardrail and the lower one, there is streetlights. I don't know why they're still on here. Maybe that's also irritating the camera. And now we can see that they're still on and behind that, which the streetlights are blocking is basically a transit station. And that is a CTA transit station. The old the loop here, basically the elevated the L is a historic means of transportation. That's a train that's been running on these elevated steel tracks for more than 100 years. So while we talk about transit oriented development, which we get to in Honolulu being a new thing as far as, you know, public transportation, and rail transportation is all of a sudden serving areas more frequently and more intensively. That's been the case in this area here forever. So that that loop that train has been basically going through here forever. And wasn't really the only sort of instigation to make this year more attractive. It's basically urban renewal, its growth in the city. It's all of that that basically transforms this neighborhood. It is very nice, you know, it is very close and very close proximity, but has a different feel than in the high rise canyons. And that is what people are worried about in Kakaako, right? It used to be like that as well. It was like one to two story scale. This is happening here to Dennis worried he's getting actually a 20 to 30 story mid rise slash almost high rise just in front of him here. There's actually construction going on. So kind of the same worries, but still in a little different way. This here has more the feel that people would love to get in Kakaako. Anyways, yeah, let's go to the first slide to Soto, which basically puts pictures to what you had already told us here, right? This is basically the top part is and the three on the on the top right is Kakaako. This is by Howard Hughes. And it is the same architect Solomon Court will bewns who are from here from Chicago. That's why we sent me here and said it's attractive to have my pit stop here versus again in San Francisco and basically see where these architects come from literally and figuratively speaking. And the same architects have also been going to what gives the name to the area that we are continuing to talk about, which is the Alamoana area, because top left is they are the architects of the current owner of the Alamoana mall, which is Brookfield properties and they bought it from general growth properties before both sound very capitalist driven and they are and they are. That's true. And they're and they're mainlandish. And so they commissioned Solomon Court will bewns to do these part lane project, which is sort of like mid-rise or low to mid-rise. And as you said, they packed it on top of the existing Alamoana mall. And then they recently ventured out again into another neighborhood that is thriving. That is my Waikiki with the li lia that we've been reporting about. And Howard Hughes again, only commissioned a FEMA representative, Jeannie gang ones. So this is also representative for the unfortunate discrimination in our discipline and profession, because there's only one building by a woman and there is five buildings by these guys. So as we said, and we had two of our emerging talents last week joining in via via Facebook. There was nice Kim and Pia and I had a majority of female 10s in my studio, which I really enjoyed. So we need more of them also surviving all the way through and making it into the profession. While, you know, Jeannie has really sort of done only one in Honolulu so far. We reported her aqua tower from about the last time I've been here is shame on me a decade ago. And that's when the aqua tower was built. And ever since she's being a lot here doing a lot here, also including her very recent high rises, which ends up to be one of the tallest high rises even here in very tall building. Chicago here is my Lego Sears Tower, or this is already rebranded as Willie's Tower, as you can tell here. So the tower she did is not quite reaching the really tall, the Sears Tower has been, you know, for many times the tallest building in the United States in the world. It's not quite reaching that height, but it's getting pretty it's cutting pretty close. So we will do probably a couple of shows again, comparing some of the interesting things in this town that a large majority of the architects building now in Honolulu come from and kind of trying to understand more where they come from literally and figure will be speaking as far as their mindset. Again, just to put this in perspective, I've been updating you this sort of when I came here, it was nice. It was like in the mid 80s. Yesterday, it got significantly cooler. Today, I read 52 and it felt like 45. Tomorrow, they are prognosing 90s again. So this is roller coaster. This is what they call tempered. We feel more it's like tempered shirts or temperament, temperament that you said not to say moody, mood swings the weather has here. And we're saying, you know, as far as as a human body, you need to have different layers on that's actually how my mother because I'm going when I go to Munich, we're expecting we're the same here. We're expecting Suzanne says expect the same 90s there, which only lasts for a couple days and then it plunges again. So my parents, my mother taught me to layer like an onion and, you know, take off layers and and put layers back on at different times, even off the day or at least the day after the coming days. So let's go to the next slide here, which is I'm shooting lots of I have like hundreds if not thousands of pictures to share with you and the solo in the audience, some of them with the odd with you guys, the audience as well. But this is one from back then from 10 years ago when I was here and then drove me through the city. And you see this canyon there predominantly of dark color because the historic buildings out of stone clad with stone, and most of the even structurally stir atomic out of brick. The Menatnok building is the tallest brick building that has like six feet thick walls at the bottom and then papers up get smaller, the more the building goes up following gravity. And then to the left, you see the aftermath and the legacy of Mies van der Roa of a steel skeleton with a curtain wall, but his preferred color was also very dark anodized aluminum metal. So so the building that we see at the end of the canyon is how I so have a different right. Right. What is that one? Well, that one interestingly enough is a high rise prison. And we were just discussing how you were on a boat tour in Chicago and the tour guide was referring to brutalist architecture as being something where the architects intentionally made buildings look ugly. Well, that is obviously not what we agree with. And this does qualify as brutalism, but it actually is a rather attractive looking building. Now, it has these skinny, distinctive windows because it is a prison. So obviously you don't want ways for people to be able to break out. But the result, regardless of the need for building the building this way is, in fact, an attractive building. Now, one of the bad things that happens to brutalist buildings, as you and I have discussed, brutalist buildings are intended to be in their natural state. And usually that is concrete. Now, sometimes it's a dark concrete. Sometimes it's a light colored concrete depending on what goes into it. But we all too often see brutalist buildings being updated or freshened, quote unquote, by being painted. And painting concrete is a stupid thing to do, first of all, because you have to repaint it continuously after that. But second of all, you should be going with what the architect designed in the first place. This building, you tell me, is this its original color or has it been painted? Martin, you know, and you can tell us. Well, as you said, you know, depending on what you put in concrete, it gets its color. And usually the kind of the industrial color is gray because cement is gray. But then on our island, as we call it, Volcrete and the central plaza of the Pacific is the best example for that in downtown. They use the local basalt aggregates and the sand. They crush the aggregates down to sand, and both of that makes the concrete to appear rather dark. While here on the mainland, my the building that informed me the most through my emerging years in college in Nebraska, which is only nine hours drive away from here, you put in the cruise control and then you keep on rolling for nine hours. And that's this beautiful bank by I.M. Pei that we have a beautiful East West standard by him. And that building has been basically using sand from so this tan color sand from Texas that they basically pigment in there. And you remember in that show that we show quote here, I was sharing that me banking there, I was a witness of them making attempts for test pains of the counters, which I freaked out and some lady in there who used to turn out to have a saying somewhere in the building, then convinced whoever is in charge here not to do that. So yeah, as you said, you don't paint with someone goes through the the effort of pigmenting. And that's an extra effort because pigments cost depending on the color. You know, it costs more and it's more effort, but it pays off because you can then it substantially that color so you can you can, you know, power wash it or even sandblasted in intervals and never get down to some hidden, you know, cheaper surface, a surface below. And we compare compared to like the beauty industry or to cosmetics, right, who always want to sell their makeup, no matter what. But if you're having a healthy skin underneath that looks beautiful, why putting makeup on right? And that's how we compare it to these buildings. They're inherently naturally beautiful. And I saw that prison when before they painted it and it had some stains on it. Yes, but you could have just scaffolded it in power wash power washing would have been cheaper, way cheaper than painting it over. Because as you said, once painted, always painted. And that's what I always tell my clients never paint concrete. Unfortunately, they did here. I have to, you know, see how it's doing now. I don't know if I can still do that. I will have to see. But again, it's probably, you know, it's been 10 years. So it's dirty again. And and paint it over concrete looks dirty and nasty. While, you know, unpainted concrete get picks up patina, and basically gets more beautiful over time because the acidity in the air basically, you know, it's on the it's on the surface and makes it more grainy, makes more velvety, there's more kind of a shadow play on it. So again, clients and architects and owners don't paint your concrete. So what I found particularly surreal is that this color is even less sort of matching the original color underneath, but actually more what's going in front of that. And what is that? Yeah, so down at the bottom of this view, you can see a horizontal thing standing across over the street. That, in fact, is the L, the L, the term L stands for an abbreviation of elevated and it means the elevated train. The L is the train system that extends throughout the city of Chicago. And even though it's called the elevated, sometimes it's at grade and sometimes in fact, it's underground. It was originally developed as a series of disconnected different companies. But eventually it all got put together under one government authority called the Chicago Transit Authority. The L is a feature of Chicago. And in fact, the quote that's text, the text that's written on here says that in 2005, a number of people in Chicago voted it to be one of the seven natural wonders or not natural, but seven wonders of Chicago. Well, everybody depends on that very well. Everybody depends on it very much. And of course, as with all transit all transit systems, it also then related to how the city was developed and laid out. So it is a part of Chicago. It's been there for more than 100 years. Martin was just commenting on it's not very attractive in some places. It looks very rusty and worn out. And the sound of the steel wheels on the steel railings on a steel structure is sometimes excruciating, lead loud and offensive. But it is a part of Chicago and everybody accepts it and uses it. Yeah, absolutely. And after all, it comes across significantly lighter than all very, very heavy new rail. And let's look at that. Next slide. We see this. Oh, not yet. It's actually coming up in the in the one after that. But let's stay with this one here because here's some sort of similar light because of steel systems that we wanted to talk about. And this is where I'm going tonight. I'm jumping into my final plane, going back to Munich. And in the outskirts of Munich, there is this fascinating startup thing going on that's called the Autobahn and it's named after its prototyping location, which is Otto Brun, which is a fellow, you know, outskirt little town to the ones we live in back in Munich. And so what fascinated us about the system here is so though. Well, I'm still we're still I'm still finding out about this. And I mean, I'm I'm looking forward to you telling me more about this. This is a transit system. However, it runs almost more like an elevator because those individual little pods or units, which only accommodate a handful of people, maybe two people or maybe a little bit more, are called at your whim like you call an Uber or like you press a button for an elevator to come. The car comes, it descends down to the sidewalk on cables, you get into it and it goes back up. This is a continuously running system. So it doesn't run on a schedule. It's not like you have to get on a train that comes at a certain time. You call it when you want it to come. Now, one of the things that you just mentioned is this is a steel system. And so it is not concrete. So it's much later looking. And in fact, it is a much later system in all ways. I am going to be really curious how this works. And so you're going to be reporting on when it gets in into effect and what it's going to be like when it gets there. I will. And the other thing that we're going to talk about too, and if you look at the picture in the upper, the very top part of this slide, that's a picture you took in Portugal. And you can see, although it's hard to see here, there are two gondola cars that are on cables. And so the system we're talking about here, the auto bond spelled O-T-T-O bond, not A-U-T-O bond. That is kind of like a gondola system in that it's suspended and it hangs below rather than rides on top of. And there are other systems, including some historic ones like that, that also function in Germany. So again, this is something that the Cookey Germans invented and they've kept up with, that isn't being found in other places certainly not here in Oralulu. Yeah. And one is the show quote there until the ride in the in the middle. This is the Vupata suspended rail. And the one just above that, the show quote was in Madeira, Suzanne and I were having nice dinner in this, in this you know, old part of town. And all of a sudden there was this cabin flying over us. And that's in the other on the mainland Portugal, that's on the slide too, where we've been before, where again, on that river front and downtown Porto, there is that Gustav I fell almost like a bridge way back there in the distance. And so you can go up there in these in these gondolas from that, you know, from where the river is up to the up to the top there. So it is not just for tourists, right, it is actually for transportation. If you're old, right, and you live up there, you can or whatever it doesn't have to do with age, right, young people are sometimes tougher than young ones. But whoever things, you know, you need to you can't go there by feet. It basically helps you to go up there. So why are these you might think, OK, we're done with our heavy elephanty chunky rail. So why is this of relevance? Well, I'm still, you know, when I'm back, I'm still, you know, suicidal bicycling up University Avenue, which I don't think it was ever planned that the heavy rail goes that far. So that is still to come that my emerging generation and I can basically scoop through the canopies on the height of the canopies of the trees. And just like that picture, I think it's number six was me this spring. Whenever I hit the ski slopes, I was thinking a lot about and I'm sitting there in these in these in these cabins and the the blue is a lid. I don't know why that color this you could do this in clear and you probably should do it. But when people are worried in Hawaii, this is to cover yourself from snow, right? If you're sitting there in the ski lift and the blizzard comes through, you can stay warm. But that lid you could also do in Hawaii whenever it rains, right? You just pull down that lid, let it rain on you. You don't get soaked once it's sunny again, which is like a no time, right? You flip it back. So very, very kind of adoptable systems. But there's another reason that relates to the the areas where we're currently under, you know, investigating it. That has to do with a rail that the heavy rail maybe isn't so much done yet, as we would think and that gets us to the next slide and particularly the bottom images here. You sent me that article and what is it about? Well, it's about how the rail system, the planned the last two stops of the planned rail system currently have been cut. And that's because of funding shortfalls. So even though the rail at the moment theoretically is not going to get all the way to Alamoana Center and but we will see that is difficult because as we have been talking about there's a land boom, there's a building boom going on around Alamoana with a bunch of new high rises and that's predicated on the concept that that will be the terminus of the rail system. So whether the rail gets there or not actually is extremely relevant for us to be considering in terms of city development and where people are going to be living because if there's not a rail system there, that's going to make it different. Now there is talk that there will be funding found in order to complete the system all that distance but they are talking about cutting out one of the last stations, which would be the Kakaako station. Again, all of this will be relevant in the future as to how our city develops. Yeah, and the picture one there at the top left I took when I was there before I left last week and I there was a train driving by and I wasn't fast enough to snap a picture of it and then I waited and waited and waited and waited. No other train came and you explained to me why because it's still in the testing phase, right? Right, right. It's not a regular the train is not running yet with passengers. You were assuming that that was going to be another car going past with passengers and it's not doing exactly. And also we, you know, eventually going back to our shows of comparing automobiles and architecture. We see a car there that's inhabited. So this is a homeless shelter and how again our P.I. mobile, the pictures at the bottom relate to the architecture where you're continuing seeing popping up in the Alamoana area. We have to say for next week when we're continuing with this one here then reporting from you in Honolulu still and me back near Munich. And until then, please stay safe and particularly tropical versus tempered. I will. Cool. I try the same. Bye. Bye. And donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.