 Hello, everybody, and welcome to Human Humane Architecture here on Think Tech, Hawaii. I am this program's co-host. I'm Pothodo Brown. I'm the bishop here in Oulu. And joining us all the way from Germany is the program's host, Martin Despang. And Martin is currently in Germany, but he'll be returning back to Honolulu very soon. And good afternoon to you, Martin, or should I say good morning? Because it's morning for you while it's afternoon in the air. Hey, Desoto, and everyone. And Martin took this picture that's behind us while driving around in Bavaria in Germany. And the crazy thing is that while it's in this typical alpine setting with the alpine buildings and the flower boxes and all of that stuff, right in the middle of the picture you see something very unusual. That's not unusual for Germany to see a Volkswagen van or a T2 as they call it. But what's on it's very unusual because it's got two Hawaiian hibiscus flowers as well as a Shaka sign on the driver's side door. And it just shows you how crazy the German people are because they love Hawaiian stuff. Do they not, Martin? That's how we are. And yes, that's what we do. And it even spells out above the sign, it even spells out hang loose. That's right. That's the lure of Hawaii around the world. That is, that is. And we're going to be seeing some other things that are similar to us here in Honolulu as we continue our journey. But we're going to be looking mostly at Europe today. And I think it's time for us to go to our first slide. And Martin has told me that in the upper corner of this picture you're going to see, first of all, the train system. And of course there are train systems throughout Europe that are very highly developed throughout a lot of other parts of the world, unlike here in the United States, although we are building our own trains here. And one of the things that's happening here in Honolulu that we're going to see is development around the train station. And in the upper picture you see a picture in Munich in which the train system there has got buildings right up next to it that have been built there. But today we're going to be taking a journey from Munich to Zurich, Switzerland. You can see the map that we're going to be looking at here. And we're not going to go on a train because actually the bus system functions even better for this trip, Martin has been talking to me. So you go on a comfortable double deck bus and when you buy your ticket, if you look in the lower right corner of the picture, you see that the bus company is telling you that you're paying an extra carbon tax fee, which is part of your transportation cost, and that purportedly is going to alleviate carbon footprint. And that Martin told me that this is a very economical way to do it for a group of four people. It only costs, what was it Martin? $100, $90, $80? Half of that, $50, which is hilarious, which is hilarious. So it's a little ironic disorder because on the left, as you said, this is a transit-oriented development station, as you said, with residential high-rises along it. And that's how people commute short distance from the outskirts to the city where they work. But then from Munich to Zurich, it's hard, or at least not economical, very attractive to go by train. So the buses have pretty much taken over. And so let's go on that little trip here. And again, we go to a place that a couple of shows ago at the very top ride, Jo and Clara, on their cross-cultural culinary conveying voyage have been driving through. And that's a little city called Essling in the outskirts of Zurich. So we want to take you there. So let's jump to the next slide and see what we have. And what we can learn from Zurich who has done this transit-oriented development a longer time ago already. Well, what we see here are the transportation modes that we have here on Oahu. And in the upper right corner, you can see our very familiar bus. We only have one electric bus. The rest of them are diesel. And so they are not as environmentally friendly as they could be. But we did once have a number of different train systems in the Hawaiian Islands. And we had the Oahu Railway, which ran from downtown Honolulu all the way up along the coastline to Kohoku. And there were train systems on the other island as well. One that you see on the bottom is one that used to be on the big island of Hawaii in the 1800s. We've lost all of those, and we now rely pretty much on motor vehicles to get us around. Next picture, and we're going to Zurich. Zurich, Switzerland. Zurich is located in a physical setting that's not dissimilar to that of Honolulu because it is between two mountain ranges. And if you look in the picture on the left, that is Lake Zurich. And the city of Zurich is at the very bottom in the lower left corner as you look at it here. Well, it's between the two mountain ranges, and it faces onto a body of water. And in the caricatures that we see on the right, the city of Honolulu is also bound by the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other side. So both of them have to be confined physically within a geographical space. How does Zurich deal with that? Well, let's go to our next picture. And we can see. Yeah, and while we do that, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I think there's two. Our crosswind poet and tourist expert, Suzanne, did a little homework for us as far as numbers. And there's two other striking similarities because people might say, hey, compare Zurich to Honolulu, where's the point? That's at the opposite ends of the world. And one is a tempered climate, and the other one is a tropical climate. But there's two striking similarities that that's the size of the city. They're almost, if you just look at the urban metropolitan area, both host half a million people. And if you look at tourist numbers, they also match the number of, they're attracting six million visitors a year. If you're just looking at the city, or in fact, at the island of Oahu, but most of the lodging is actually in Honolulu. So striking similarities that you wouldn't expect right at this level? Absolutely. But something else Martin pointed out to me, which is really telling, is that in Europe in general, prices are a good deal higher than what we're here in the United States, even in Oyi, which is much higher than what countries. And if you look at the price list in the upper left corner, which is of a drink list from a restaurant menu, the thing at the very bottom, Zuri Wasir is just faucet water in the town of Zurik, in the city of Zurik. And to order it in this restaurant, one glass of water coming out of the faucet is three euros, and to get a refill is one euro. Whereas we here expect free water when we go into a restaurant. So this is a very significant price difference that we're gonna run into in a little bit, but if you look in the picture below that, there's the carafe of the water that costs so much money. In the upper right corner, you see the diagram of how we get our water. The water comes from the sky, it falls as rain. It permeates through many layers of lava rock, and we end up with this very pure, very filtered water that we are accustomed to, for which we pay comparatively little in comparison. And Martin, what's the picture in the lower right about with we've got a building with a lot of rental bicycles in front of it? Yeah, well, just after all we're in architecture shows. So it gives you an idea about how architecture has to be in a temper climate. It gets very, very cold in winter. We're gonna get there in a minute. And so architecture wears like a puffy coat and with down in between. This is a double facade and so that tells you kind of what effort you have to go through that we don't have to do in Honolulu. Going back to the water, the water more specifically comes actually from the lake. So that lake is very clean as the ground water for the reasons you explained in the diagram shows that the very top right is in Honolulu and we give it for free. So again, we're giving suggestions. We're not saying you should charge necessarily for drinking water like the Swiss do. But again, maybe a little bit more awareness of the precious resources that we have that are so fresh and pure. There are these absurdities. There's the French table water in Volvic that even the name says that it comes from volcanic, it's filtered through volcanic stones somewhere there in France. And we import that and we got that all on the island. So I think we should brand and appreciate us a little bit better than we already and we do right now. Okay, let's move on and go do that, do a little train ride. And this is very interesting comparison that Mark came up with. He's pointing out that here in Honolulu, we don't have a lot of outdoor seating for restaurants and bars and we do see one example of what we do have in front of the Waikiki Circle Hotel in Waikiki at the top. But at the bottom, here's a picture in Zurich and it's in the winter or maybe early spring. It's freezing cold and yet people are sitting outside to have dinner or to have some kind of a meal. And as Martin just said, we don't appreciate what we have because we're so accustomed to it. If you go away from it, you go to other places, you have much better an appreciation of how lucky we are. Yeah, an appreciation down there. The gentleman at the very bottom left is Ali who's a dear friend of Suzanne and ours. And so this was on one of the many trips we actually did to their place. And so thanks for that and Ali took me there. And again, that was in March somehow and it wasn't below freezing anymore. And once it's a couple degrees above the freezing point, people want to get out. And as we said, in Honolulu, unfortunately, people want to get to the freezing cold inside, which is fossil fuel that you see. It's just sort of wrong, right? So as you said, appreciate it more. Right. Let's move on. Next slide. Well, something else that you see in Zurich, as you do see in Honolulu, is the show of wealth. And we do see exotic, expensive cars like these Lamborghinis, both in Zurich and here in Honolulu. Mostly we see the main example we see is the Ferrari that gets used in this TV show Hawaii fight, not Hawaii fight, but Magnum PI, the Reeve boot of Magnum PI. And that's what we see in the upper right hand corner. That's the famous red car. But both of these situations, we see the ostentatious display of wealth as both places have it. Well, they give us an indication about the affordability or the lack of it in both cities as far as dwelling space, right, and housing space. Let's move on to the next slide. So here we're seeing, again, examples of two types of transportation. Honolulu today just has the buses that you see in the upper left corner. We once did have a system of electric street cars. This was one in particular that was a very early one, the earliest. We also did have electric buses. And that's what you see in the picture below. This, of course, is in Zurich. These are buses. They run on rubber tires. They are not on track. But they still get electricity from the wires overhead. We had buses like that for about 20 years from 1937 to 1957. But we've dropped all of those now. We don't have an electric system anymore, except we will be getting one when our new one comes to us starting next year. Better get back to that fast, Brian. So let's move on here next image. So as we just showed you, Zurich, the city of Zurich, is located on Lake Zurich. And they use the lake for transportation as well. We formerly have had attempts at transportation using water. We had the super ferry that was supposed to go into our island that didn't last very long. We've also had ferries that have gone from, say, Eva to downtown Honolulu. None of them has ever been successful. But in Zurich, there are different types of boats. There are sightseeing boats. And then there's also a ferry that we see in the upper left-hand corner. And I can see that that one looks like it carries vehicles too, doesn't it, Martin? That's true. And that's the one that Ollie has to take because he works on the other side of the shore of the lake. So you can't or it's not possible for him to take the train that we're going to hop in a minute here. So he has to take that ferry and it works well for him. But again, we make people think, you know, why don't we use water as a means of transportation for, you know, severe traffic projects and problems, in fact, in Honolulu. And again, it's something, as you said, that we once had and maybe we should reconsider. So let's move on. Next, photograph. We also see here in the upper left-hand corner again, there's our little streetcar that used to be on Pacific Heights. But there also are other types of transportation like this. There are aerial tramways. And Martin, you said that that used to function, those two pictures that we see in the middle there. There used to be an aerial tramway like that in Zurich, is that right? Yeah, the top right one is one of the historic ones. So it went over the lake and the one next to it is a proposal to sort of reanimate that. And at the bottom, we can see these more funky streetcars that sort of, you know, have a track or a rope that pulls it up the hill at some more urban situation. Both are, you know, very, you know, scenic and sort of, you know, cute to kind of artifacts of technological transportation history. And again, think that Kauai board member, Nicole Hori, at the very top right, is opting to use that technology and that system to pretty much where our train system will most likely end at Alamoana connected to my workplace, to up at UH Benoan. And it's a very interesting proposal because the cost efficiency of that system is different than the rail is very, very well because you only need a pole every now and then and just cables in between. So yeah, so that's something again to look back into. And people are in fact, this is great. Yeah. So let's move on to the next slide. So we see in the picture on the left, we see the streetcar system in Zurich. And we see one of the stations. It's kind of an interesting Amoeba triangular shaped system structure there. That's a streetcar, kind of where the streetcar systems come together. And in the upper right, we see an old drawing of what streetcars used to look like when they were going into Waikiki raised on the tracks, raised on pilings over the swamp that used to be there as well as the Alawai Canal later on. And as Martin pointed out, it's a totally easy breezy car because it's completely open on both sides. Well, whether we attain that or not, it's something to consider because again, we don't have to air condition necessarily all the time. We certainly don't have to heat the way they do in Switzerland. But could we have more open cars? It would be nice if we did. Yeah. And as the combination of pictures shows, public transportation and its architecture could be sexy, can be sexy, can be attractive, can be appealing. So people would love to take it and get a kick out of it versus sitting in your individual closed up air conditioning car, which really doesn't make you feel the place as much as you do when you ride, especially this sort of openings of breezy public transportation. So another thing that we consider because the cars, we buy both for the buses and the rail there, like these invasive and closed ones, AC, and that's really sort of the downer. So let's move on to the next one. So this is the main station that we're going to get into for our trip that we're going to take very shortly in Zurich along the lake. In the upper right corner we see, as Martin pointed out, transit stations tend to have a lot of people coming and going. There's activity near them. And in the picture at the upper right you see what used to be called Pier 7 at Honolulu Harbor with the streetcar right there with a lot of people either getting on or getting off a ship. And there are horse drawn vehicles as well as probably some automobiles mixed into that. And in the upper left we see just a reference to the fact that Amsterdam is the most bicycle friendly city in Europe. But right below that we see here in Zurich right in front of the train station the different modes of transportation are visible. And look at this huge mass of bicycles because that's something that is used a great deal there even though the weather is cold and sometimes unpleasant. Exactly. So let's go inside that station and quick go to the next slide. Yep. This is in the upper right corner you see the architect who designed this station whose name I do not remember unfortunately at the moment but Martin will tell us. And there's been discussion about what is his name? It's Santiago Calatura and he's one of the examples that were shocking in my profession with that sometimes the engineers are the better architects. So he's the most exuberant example of that because he's trained as an engineer and retrained himself as an architect and he's very famous and well known. And this is one of his very first projects I think it's from the late 80s time that I and traffic here Rockwood don't like to recall because it's the peak of postmodernism. And within that one he did it up in a very sort of tectonic way sort of very skeletal and reminded you of Art Nouveau which is true that's his tradition. He is currently there they're thinking about adding on to this train station or redoing it and he claims his copyright as you perfectly said you know in Europe we have more than the United States that he has and you know he should be asked first and one of the things he's sort of asking people to do is to finish something that he already proposed for the initial phase which we see at the bottom left you see also how engaging the architecture is because you can see a kid here climbing you know the architecture and being also he suggests that that vegetation is climbing these bones the structural bones so that's something we continuously opt to to do in all of a route too where everything grows all the time 12 months of the year versus here a couple of months. So let's go keep on going next slide here. And I was told that I have to read this caption on this picture which says the lake view is for the privilege the lake view in Zurich is for the privilege and usually that would mean for people who have expensive homes that could look out over the lake but in this case it's kind of a joke because it's saying that when you get on this train you get even a better view of the lake than the people who live the rich people who live in the houses right next to the lake and this is the train this is the train trip we're about to take along the lake to go up to almost let's say a suburban area or a smaller towns near Zurich. And it's a little ironic because I put in the the tickets on the ride and while you know as we said going from Munich to Zurich with a bus takes about five hours costs 50 bucks only this train ride for the four of us like 17 station going out to the little outskirts of Derb's costs a total of 80 you know euros or you know dollars the equivalent of course in Swiss currency because they insist to have their own and not be part of the European Union as they always have been very special and that sort of makes it sort of you know you got to be privileged to ride the train although you used a nice term the comma I not rate because then we were saying how do people get around and Suzanne was saying the Swiss are very so public transport oriented and they get a heavy subsidization for that ticket so it's it's comma I not frankly and not so much tourist frankly I want to stay amongst themselves the Swiss so let's keep on going here you got to go a little faster let's do the train right now so this is we want to point out you know what happens along the rail and along the stations this is a train museum here that's very interesting and appealing next slide we're gonna we're gonna see a couple of typologies that we already know and I've been throwing in at the very top mostly examples from my post occupancy evaluation of what we have done all the sort of profane typologies that we need and this is a grocery store here so at the bottom you can see cargo steel shipping containers stacked and a scaffolding around it that in fact again like called Travis suggests this is supposed to be overgrown with lines ours at the top left I found it looks in a similar condition then the next slide I will show you how it looked initially so move on to the next slide because it had a facade out of a perforated screen a PVC perforated screen and screens is what we were talking about in the show about that is a very efficient and effective way to keep the sun out all the time there's a reference at the top right on the show and the membrane we have been using and that's unfortunately gone now as we saw on the previous slide here we see an office a little office building along the tracks here the station is covered with that climatically you know you're blocking out the sun for the winter so you don't get passive solar but in fact you get nice shading device for the summer and and what you can already see there is there's nice little you know jewels of architecture that aren't high architecture this isn't this isn't churches or banks but it's just simple buildings along the activities and events of people that that you need along the line you need grocery you need food and you need maybe office space and you certainly might want to maybe dwell all on that that's one of the ideas to have you know robust urban fabrics around the station so let's move on to the next and see what we all have on this line here so this is a utility station very profane building but using this sort of nice translucent material that reminded me of a of a light rail station we did that we see at the top left and as you said to Soto there's always sort of the combination of multi modes there's bicycling here along the train tracks next slide so there's a there's a station here with a bench that reminded me of the project began zooming in at the top right that we're talking about that we're opting for not having these stupid dividers it's supposed to keep homeless from sitting on the benches but have a full bench and you can see how it pays off how that station is you know very vividly populated and and being enjoyed by the travelers next slide and you have you have dwellings right next to the train station here and it has the vertical guard rails metal open breathable as we suggest for the buildings to be built in Honolulu as our permitting projects up there move to the next slide and we've also been talking about you know you probably will have you know cars for a little longer not as we were dreaming at the top right in the hopefully sometimes in the future as I'm dreaming where there are no cars anymore and everything is public transportation you can use the former parking garages to house the homeless but until then you have to put the cars somewhere and as we did at the treetop apartment building at the top left at the bottom does it in the same way there's a there's a full underground parking there and this is the entry canopy for that you can see there's no typology to profane for the Swiss or the Zürich people here to give it with architecture and that's certainly something we would recommend to do at the heart stations as well right the soil yes absolutely that's that's our dream we can go on to the next yeah we're fueling that dream here and you know there will be stations the more you go out west the past couple a there is there are stations where there's little to nothing around it and this is at the top right as an unbuilt proposal we did for a similar situation in Germany again it's a platform that's more on grade and here the platform is made of a ribbon of wood and the salt stripes so again there as we said there should be no typology should be true to profane to to make it really architecturally appealing next slide and there's there's there's rule stuff out there you know in both places we're urging to evolve the tradition of the vernacular not to sort of you know mummify it but to vividly evolve it and let it let it grow and so we're at the top right we're talking about evolving the all Hawaiian type of the of the holly the pitched roof holly and to to move that to the next stage when you have to build you know low because not in not all places you will build high at the very beginning start low and then you should you know evolve a tradition and not basically get stuck in it next slide yeah Martin we have come unfortunately to the end of our time for today um so we can go one more slide I know it went so fast because we had so much to talk about and this is the actually the end of the line for the train trip that you just took next to Lake Zurich and you pointed out that this rather grand station only serves a very small community of about 1700 people but it was built this size with the concept that the community will grow around it and we know that is going to be happening with our train system as well yeah as some of the stations as you said currently are kind of in the middle of nowhere but we're going to see that Honolulu and the urbanity or the urban part of Honolulu will gradually reach out to them as well so that's going to be a major factor in the growth of Honolulu in the future and maybe maybe while we phase out Haley can just please rush to the last images just one after the other one so we okay yeah Haley can we can we just quickly go through all of them until we get to the very last one exactly and so we're seeing we see other typologies we see other typologies that we need we saw a grocery store we saw a kindergarten we see sort of three to four story housing here we see uh sort of old buildings start from the 60s that you need to rejuvenate you see new stuff and and here the second to last one you just saw our hosts so we want to thank William Cordy and their kids that have hosted us and given us the chance to see what you can do along transit or in the development and then we can go back to the very last slide please it reminds us of you know that there are other places you know yeah that one there are other places that have rainbows this is on the way back on the bus ride back we see there's we drove by waterfalls we had a spectacular rainbow and these are things we think you know maybe we have in Hawaii we're the only ones who're having that in Hawaii but there are other places in the world who have that as well so I think we got to try a little harder to get our built environment up to pace to our so beautiful stunning natural environment and that would be our platoe to try really hard to do the best architecture in the world and our very special one of the best places in the world we have in Hawaii so though absolutely so that brings us to the end of this week's uh human humane architecture here in think tecawaii keep joining us for more episodes of this show and until next time thank you all for joining us aloha