 The wise human human architecture here to our concluding episode of our total volume of nine about the COVID coronavirus combating complicit courtyard catch, I guess we could say with all these seas. And so in these days of lockdowns. We have been dreaming about these spaces because inside is not working so well anymore and outsides, if people don't stay far enough away from us either so these sort of indoor outdoor spaces in places we've been getting excited about it we've been revisiting. So we're broadcasting life again from opposite ends of the world, maybe still back in Germany, and in Long Beach, California, we have our mid century master of courtyards, Ron Lindgren back Iran. Hello Martin, it's been a pleasure to have seen all eight of the previous courtyard covena programs. Well, and you've been an integral and very helpful part of them so thank you for that one. So let's contemplate while phasing out and bring up the first slide here I want to quickly update you on the situation here. Our Chancellor Angela Merkel has just been issued a what she calls a lockdown light, which will still be tired enough for us. And so, back in my hometown, I've been doing basically evidence based design lifecycle assessment. This is a work that I've always been doing, but this year I've been taking my otherwise pretty much locked in their in their in their rooms, emerging generation out there and children around. This is a typology here which will stay open because it's considered to be essential business. This is a local grocery facility just down the street from my son Lenny who was hosting me. Behind this, this this awning there which is helping to keep it cool in the summer and all the glazing help to heat it with a sun in the winter time there's a courtyard that's open to the sky and we always encourage the clients to potentially grow some of their produce out there on their own roof as a suggestion for post pandemic productions and the next slide is the other typology are original initiating typology of public transportation. Lenny we see on his bicycle there. We spotted this very nice Mercedes Benz dealer run that we thought get you excited because it seems like you guys could have been designing that one of your German projects. Very nice mid century piece. And you see our tram station projects we did for the x point 2000 again I was walking the emerging generation up close to check it out. Public transportation isn't as much of a virus spreader as we think, because people are pretty much practicing the distancing and wearing masks, different than when they're just private and they're just, you know, letting all go and just forget about any of the measures we should take these days. So, let's get to the next slide because then I was telling Lenny about a, a childhood memory of when one of my jobs to in college was the emergency newspaper delivery guy whenever someone got sick I got up and and ventured out to neighborhoods that I hadn't been before. And so I remember this one here and last week we were remembering our good colleague and friend and hero, Steve owl who has just passed away. And so it reminded me of another fine character of my culture who we just lost his name was always dying he was a cartoonist. And he was famous for these mice here that you see at the very, at the very top. And so we drove by Lenny Citron we drove by we also spotted this this our feet are our for no for that they were making from the mid 60s early 60s till to late 90s so for almost 30 years. So, it's prime time was in the 70s and so we can only imagine was this house but we shine, who is a brutalist courtyard house, again, in temperate climate. That's how you grew up run and the cold heartland I mean not, you know, emotionally cold but climatically cold heartland. And so similar here and what we're saying, you know you like that a lot we were talking before the show because you said this is a exquisite example of the kind of, you know, evolution of your guys case study houses back in California in in the 50s and 60s where you kept the houses brother opaque to the street. There's only this mousehole slip that you can get and you were saying wow it seems really nice and attracted back there like a little oasis courtyard paradise. So we're saying, if you can do this in cold Germany, we should be able to do this in California and in Hawaii more right. I agree. And so let's move on to the next slide. And this is we're missing the soda today but for good reason don't worry because he has to give a tour at his work and this is his workplace the Bishop Museum and places that you run had said, you know, although you've been there multiple times you haven't discovered them so they must be somewhere hidden that discrete. So these are the courtyards that the soda can share from his very personal, everyday life work experience. And the next slide is the what he, when we started to to be get ourselves excited about courtyards this is what he first thought of and these are the images he provided beginning, and these are additional institutional courtyards of museums and and what are your thoughts about museum courtyards, Ron. Yeah, even though I didn't have the pleasure never had the pleasure of seeing what's at the Bishop Museum as far as courtyards. The Honolulu Fine Arts Academy is certainly one of my favorite places, because for me at least, it solves that general problem that the public has with being just burnt out museum fatigue, but here you you look at the art. You're ready to leave. You don't need to you glance out in these beautiful courtyards, get refreshed and go on to the next masterpiece in the museum. Wonderful space. Especially in COVID times, they're especially convenient right because you might not, you know, be able to be inside as much as you, you didn't even want to begin with as you were sharing but probably not even less and courtyards that you breathe again literally and figure speaking. So, let's go to the next slide and have you run sort of recap. One of your most famous courtyards and this show we want to conclude because we said, you know, in Hawaii and probably anywhere else we got to keep the country country and make the city a city. So, guys, and you in particular as well with his projects have been doing urban courtyards. Let's recap your masterpiece helical Lonnie a little bit to that regard. Yeah, the privilege I had to work on the holiday colony. I really consider the thing that I'm most proud of, but in designing the holiday hotel my Japanese client only had one one sentence program requirement, besides the number of guest rooms. The first was that I would create a luxurious elegant and quiet sanctuary in the heart of busy high rise white key key. So my first response was almost knee jerk and that I said, Well, let's wall off white key with some single ordered guest room buildings on the three perimeters leaving the fourth perimeter open to the ocean. So for the first and unfortunately the last time in my architectural career. I wasn't just designing a building in space, but I was creating spaces with buildings. And of course those spaces were courtyards. And if you look up at the upper left. This is a view of one of the two courtyards as seen from the hotel's vehicle entry, which is the Port Couchere. So from the Port Couchere you step out of your car go up a few steps and suddenly you're looking out over an expansive lawn a swimming pool terrace and the open ocean beyond. And then on the upper right is the second courtyard. Now that one happens to be the hotel's pedestrian entrance, which I created as an open air tile roof pavilion. And the lawns in the view are extending to what is the hotel's prime jewel. And that is CW Dickies 1932 louis house, which we completely renovated and remodeled. And that too was the only time in my career where I got to to take on the challenge and the merit of historic preservation. We want to move to the next slide. Yeah, let's move to the next slide please. The next slide at the lower right is showing the site plan for the hotel and the two courtyards are identified. And again, those courtyards are facing out to the south and to the open ocean that swimming pool courtyard shows up on the upper on the lower left. And Kelly's worst desired swimming pool designs, which are always oval. And then my happy contribution is up on the on the upper right, because most of the public circulation at the ground level of the hotel is in is in covered porticoes as shown here. And they were designed to simulate the sort of measured measured cadence of walking through gardens, or alongside a closer courtyard courtyard courtyard courtyard courtyard. What an opportunity at the Holly colony. And the next slide. Here's where Martin you'll probably want to jump in to at the lower right. The hotel did have a few Juliet balconies in other words the kind you step out and catch a breath of air, or the window cleaner steps out and cleans the windows. But what it's really showing is that instead of muscle draperies and the tropics that we use sliding wood doors with operable wood louvers, and they're a fine tropical alternative to you know musty curtains. And every guest room might have had a Juliet balcony but if it did, it would also have had a full size outdoor room a full manai. And that's where the hotel encouraged the guest to indulge in room service meals. When when the hotel service breakfast to these guests at a luxury hotel. This is incredible source of hotel profit at the lower left. We're showing the orchards restaurant which is located in the louvers house, and right at the most desirable designing locations of the dining locations. That is those with the best diamondhead view or the ocean view. We built additional designing dining spaces with informal waterproof fabric roofs as you see, and they were stretched over minimal steel frames. This was a wonderfully informal way to have those outer dining areas at the upper left Martin you might remember that on a very early morning. You took a picture down lures road to show what is one of my proudest proudest design moments at the Holly colony. That's the fact when a visitor first sees the hotel at the southern end of lures road, where it makes a T intersection with clear road. The initial experience is memorably low key and surprisingly residential. All that the first timer sees is open sky above an elegant Hawaiian home, sheltered beneath the Dickey roof. That same picture in the upper left is a waterfall feature that I developed. As you walk up the steps to the entry pavilion for pedestrians, and it's a waterfall that completely wipes out any noise that comes from the street. Right. This is, this is a sort of painful photo for me because we all know that in the planned upcoming renovation of the hotel, which is going to happen sometime during the pandemic lockdown. I'm really hoping that original features aren't lost. And here I'm standing in front of outdoor drapery and some beautiful custom lighting fixtures. And they add such a fine residential character to the experience of the hotel as the Holly colony that I hope in the remodeling that that isn't lost. Absolutely. And thanks for sharing, you know, walking us through this slide here just making us aware of reminding us that good architecture gets better the closer you get to it. So, you know, not just the macro of a courtyard form and performance is important, but it's detailing and it's fine grained and you guys that you masterfully did. And since the show wants to, if anything, encourage the audience to discover more along the same subjects, Ron, we got us, you know, back and forth excited about another courtyard master, who is Joseph Eichler. And you in particular went out and bought books and did some more studying and and through the next couple of slides and let's go to the next one. Yeah, in the spirit of humane and healthy architecture that incorporates courtyards our main topic for the last nine weeks. I believe that another topic from a previous program deserves greater scrutiny. And as you are saying, I'm speaking of the many tracked housing courtyard homes that Joseph Eichler built at the age of 45. Eichler began an entirely new career. He ultimately built 11,000 homes in track subdivisions in the San Francisco Bay region. This was the mid century modern era of the 50s and 60s. He, he actually managed and that's his why he's such a hero to me. He delivered affordable mass produced houses that retain the look and the feel of much more expensive custom homes for middle class buyers who couldn't themselves afford the personal service of architects. And so the homes were distinctive for being consistently very modern and appearance that innovative features and affordable construction techniques. For example, in the slides, you can see there that exposed posts and beam construction was used. That allowed for a very quick erection and flat plan flexibility indoors, and a sort of clear stripped down order to both the exterior and the interior spaces. The early industrial process of mass construction was created in which each house site was the stationary assembly line. 12 building crews, each with a different construction specialty arrived at the site at set times from the beginning to the remarkably rapid completion of each house. And so, standard construction details, for example, for doors or windows and roofs were used no matter what type of house was being built. Some building materials were prefabricated, such as the Philippine mahogany plywood panels, which covered almost all interior walls slab on grade foundation contained radiant heat potting in the concrete. And frankly, that was a largely post war innovation. But a greatest interest to us is the fact that open interior planning was paired with indoor outdoor relationships through entire walls of glass. The most salient and popular feature of these homes was the inclusion of a private outdoor atrium. Now atrium actually originally just meant a central hall in an ancient Roman house, but for Eichler's sales marketing team, it was a fancy word for, you guessed it, courtyard. Though many Eichler homes were flat roofed, the most popular models incorporated sheltering gabled roofs and a comforting evocation of the traditional house form. People were just comfortable with that. And Eichler relied completely on architects Robert Anson and a Quincy Jones of for the home designs and for the site planning for all of his modern housing tracks. And also very unusual for the time, landscape architects developed the properties fully from lot line to lot line, because usually the developer left the ground around the house to weeds and the imagination of the new owners. Now, each new housing tract and their individual home designs were constantly studied so that they could be improved upon from the lessons learned from what they perceived as successes and failures. This included the very careful study of post owner evaluations as to livability and consumer satisfaction. Next slide please. In the upper left, next to Martin's bare face is Joseph Eichler himself. Besides pioneering new home construction techniques, Eichler was the very first speculative post war developer to incorporate real community planning methods into his subdivisions. Generally, other people of his ilk building subdivisions would simply strive to jam as many one eighth or one quarter acre home sites onto a property, as was possible. But I clear correctly felt and I quote him, fostering social coherence and buyer satisfaction meant reforming the land use and physical planning of suburban residential landscapes. In his developments, there was a higher density of housing than usual, and this freed up some open spaces for communal use. Also homes were often planning clusters so they could preserve some shared open space for common facilities right in the center of the housing track. Now, these amenities included things like shared landscapes of a wooded park, recreation center buildings and nursery school, tennis courts and a swimming pool. Importantly, a feeling of community spirit would grow up around the idea of shared owner investment. Now that might seem old hat but at the time that was a very new idea in the 50s and 60s shared owner investment and where you live. If you look at the lower left. He also used unusual roadway and cul-de-sac arrangements. And they were provided. One of the most unusual, which was actually built was this concentric ring pattern. And it conveyed to residents a sense of sharing in a larger whole and other words your house was part of the circle or part of the art of. It also slowed traffic down considerably, and that greatly increased children's safety when just playing outdoors or walking home from school, like the two kids there on the lower right. All power lines were buried below grade, and that also was a relatively new practice for beautifying housing tracks. Next slide please. The vast majority of housing tracks had no, or I should say, Eichler's modern housing tracks did not have racial covenants. But the vast majority of those people who were mass housing merchant builders and their banks and lenders, they wanted, I quote, homogenous, stable neighborhoods which would hold their property values. These very fine sounding words are actually racial dog whistles, which mean, of course, simply that no people of colors or Jews would be allowed to live there. For Eichler, his anti-discriminatory stance wasn't really a personal crusade, but just part of his congressional business practice. That liberal practice included the hiring of handicapped workers when possible, and also employing furloughed convicts as day laborers and apprentice carpenters. In summary, Joseph Eichler, someone I'm ashamed to say that I knew nearly nothing about, goes from zero to hero for me, having built neighborhoods that brought the look and spirit of the case study houses to affordable track developments. Next slide please, and that yours. Well, it's ours and you said you don't recall that space and it might have been around when or not anymore when you were working in the heart of our city in Honolulu. So, this gets us back to the urban because we want to encourage courtyards to be implemented also in the heart of the city. This wasn't what it's now Kakaako, and this is by Hogan and Chapman, mostly known for their fine pen and building on Kapiolani Boulevard. So on the right side, which you remember, as you said you had one of your consultants having in his office in there. That was Steve ours very fine word Plaza that unfortunately was torn down fairly fairly recently. So these are great. One of my one of it's not a failure but when I had meetings with my electrical consultant who had an office there I think on the second floor. I always got there early so early that I could sit in that courtyard and decompress and enjoy the wonderful space before I went up to sometimes very contentious meetings with consultants. No, you're right. And so having to speed up and conclude here, let's go to the next slide. Once again, I almost forgot a courtyard we've been doing for mentally disabled children, actually a multitude of different courtyards, open ones to the sky, covered ones with a new innovative material of ETFE, or another one with that same material on the on the right that's open to the end so the kids, as you can see they're bundled up and cold climate could still enjoy the outdoors. So that in mind. Next slide. I'm remembering Steve out for many things, but as well for what he had proposed for Kaka Akka which you can call pretty much stack line eyes of courtyard T character. And that reminded us very much of the proposal run you guys have been done and you've been sharing which we see at the bottom right which were high rise stack line eyes for Singapore right. So by the similar similarity of Steve house plan for that stack line eyes housing, as it related to the plan of one of the penthouse units at the Singapore condominium that we built very similar and having many different prospects, a lot of light and air coming in from all directions. And you said so nicely, yet you built, you should have built and one should build this like they should build the Steve out towers, at least one of them and we're saying you know how would you should do that but also come here to school. The other large landowner on the island they should do one of these as a tribute to to Steve. Let's go to the next slide Ron and and you recap. Pretty much how you took that original mid century case study house courtyard theme of Ed and France and how you basically evolve that through your body of work which we see on. These quick. Yeah, the fact is that the success of projects that came out of the killings worth office. They had a single common feature, and that was the use of courtyards, but the fact is that memorable hotel courtyards could be of several different types. For example at the bottom right is the Ilani hotel, where the courtyard is a very vertiginous 17 story atrium to the lower left is Larry strippers designed for a lobby atrium which was open to the sky. We discussed this sadly because the original tropical experience there that you see in the very far left was an evocation of a Hawaiian paradise, but it's been lost in a recent urban gentrification up at the upper left. You see the 1967 call apartments, and there the courtyards that were only 30 foot wide between four foot high apartments or condominiums. The privacy was provided only by the fact that those courtyards were filled with tall dense tropical planet or landscape. And you can see the color hilton off in the distance from our good friend and very fine photographers apartment, Andrea Britsie. And last at the upper right is another type of courtyard we really haven't discussed. That's a motor courtyard. This, this was a model view of the couple obey hotel, which does not exist anymore, but to create a memorable arrival experience there a very large. Exactly square motor court was built with an open portico structure that went all the way around it, and was hung with flowering and scented vines of. I was a project architect on that hotel and I miss it dearly. Next slide. We do to run and let's tear down what they replaced it with and rebuild yours. So having to phase out here I just want to quickly share where this could you know where this tradition could evolve, and how your guys, you know legacy could live on through the emerging generation. This here is again referring to at the very bottom left. Starting with add you know he made this brilliant courtyard proposal for indigenous Latin American. You know, people that also wasn't built. And in that tradition we developed along the same lines the basically clustered cargo courtyard cabanas where you use cargo steel you stack them on top of each other. Always leaving the void of the by one and one free methodology. Next slide is what we call the stratosphere line grow where you take two shipping containers space them out that they form a square and then while going building up you rotate that always shifting them 90 degrees so not only do you create a central courtyard but you also creating lani courtyards in between that utilize the roof of your neighbor below. And last but not at all these at the very last picture here. This is primitive a one, which is pretty much an extruded donut and has this very long linear courtyard that what you see behind me that little surreal picture looks pretty psychedelic Halloween coming up. We're suggesting to every so three to four floors to knit in the stainless steel mesh that that would, you know function as a trampoline for for the kids and and provides safety and a lot of fun. So what we're trying to say Ron is that again there's a rich tradition of courtyards around the world, Roman, the Greek, the Egyptian, the Chinese you name them and the American very recently as you have been masterly manifesting. And we we urge the emerging generation to pick it up from there and come up with their very own courtyard theme interpretations, which again seems so timely and in the claws of covert to be in these beautiful places that you outdoors, they're easy breezy and easy breezy. So we say that's the way to go and create more shows for your own make volume 1112 and so on about courtyards. And until then, run, stay, you know pray for next week election day. Also stay cool literally and figuratively because the wildfires have been picked up so in all of that, keep up your great sanity and safety. And I'll see you soon for another show, as you know we won't let you off the hook. So there are more to come in the future. Thanks for the good wishes. Bye now. All right, bye bye.