 are a show, think take a life, human humane architecture that happens to be our 264th show and you are about to be our 14,266th viewer. Thank you for that. Today we want to talk about something utterly important always but increasingly which is democracy and what does democracy have to do with architecture a lot actually it should however me in the academia I was once told you shouldn't talk about politics but what else can you talk about because aren't politics what we agree on as rules and regulations and ethics as a society we have to talk about it so if we can get the first slide up how do we connect architecture to politics democracy on our island here the one that reminds me the most of it from experience having him on on a review which is who you see at the very top left a former governor Abercrombie Neil Abercrombie and he is the one that I associate the most with democracy because he came to the review very prepared with his book that he did his PhD on and that's Lily Mumford with her Honolulu that he brought with him and he got as close to proposing which was highly controversial a super tall tower taller than the 400 feet cap that we have on towers and in the review he suggested someone that I can see why suggesting as an architect who is rental piano who after all is one of the most biochlametically concerned and engaged architect just like his former partner Norman Foster well that is history and although we are electing a new governor in the future Abercrombie is not running but we will see what happens and it's important let's go to the next stage because politics on a world stage we're an unprecedented times right now with the Ukraine war and as if we would have known a year before the Ukraine war started with the show quotes at the bottom and the top right we're addressing that issue with an article that was called hoser for Putin and that was pricks wolf pricks who we talked about the ethical breach of who do you work for and more recently very top left is one of our most engaged and successfully operating architects of these days another European fellow European this is the arcade angles you see standing to the Brazilian president Bolsonaro who also hasn't treated democracy as much as he should have been and you hopefully watched that the election was and shockingly he still won too many votes so for the final results we need to wait until the end of this month and keep the fingers crossed because when it was in these leaders we give the hands of our future the rainforest the tropical rainforest of the amazon has a huge impact and he has been cutting it down like no one else before so saying that at the very bottom right by the way going back to to pricks and Putin pricks has been building this rather pretentious episode of and i thought infotainment center for bnw in unix and that's next to one of the modern marvels not just of architecture but as a representation of democracy in my home culture in country of germany which gets to the next slide please that is what the article at the bottom which my father gave me from his newspaper and dressed in germanese and i don't want you to make you learn german here on your own so i translated for you the title is your toothpicks over a pantyhose over toothpicks and this is the olympics in 72 that we had in germany which was overshadowed by the terrible terrorist attack of the israelian athletes but we didn't let it or the world didn't let it overshadow because the architecture of that was so powerful who be remembered as a demonstration of democracy at the top right you see from this past month a fifties anniversary exhibit in the main capital in downtown of germany top left you see our guest larry medlin who we had in many shows who was a collaborator with a great fry auto and he said fry is the name that his mother gave to him because it means free and he wanted him to be free as a pulse for emerging generations and fry auto was the engineer on that project next slide the architect was going to banish and about that architect and the office and his firm and the legacy and the continuation of that firm we want to talk about gunter and the other gunter my father gunter are both from sex to me and my father didn't have to go to the military but gunter had and there's more than rumor the story is that he happened to be in a submarine and the submarine he said impressed him or had an impact on him so much that he said if I ever get out of that confined compressed contained suffocating space I was trapped in I will make sure and no one will ever be again and that's why freedom uh not just as a living model but as an architectural agenda became his mission for his lifetime which he very successfully basically executed at the very bottom left is a museum he did in the outskirts of munich at the strong magazine and it has something that mostly museums don't have but any building in a white here should have is lanai it's very lanai heavy so next slide my first sort of personal interaction was when I was at my emerging generation that now working with me was still in school and I worked for my professor and there was a competition I'm invited limited competition for the most iconic building in my hometown which is the state bank and you had big names participates mario botas swiss architect helmut yon who I bless him recently got run over by two cars I am reporting from the big island here which we have the iron man going on so everyone drives safe out there direct to that regard and you know that was the beginning of the the 90s and everything the computer was new so we all tried to do the most fancy renderings and try to create squeeze that pretty big program into into everything and so we all had to come up with powers and we all use the computers as to look make look everything very professional and clean not so much one submission that was rather freestyle hand drawn the lines didn't meet at the corner of let's say you know a 90 degree angle that continued very provocatively and there was no tower and I X this out here because the only drawing I found online is this one here so there was no tower so we all thought what is that but we all knew who is that because that was the signature style and continues to be of think of banish and his office or as multiple offices which is split into shortly after that so it took quite a while for the client to decide and I had the chance to have heard winter one and only time in my life and we'll never forget in this amazing talk that he gave to the players in the city and he did not mention that project in one single word but he mentioned all the opportunities and also missed opportunities clients with similar projects had you know taken advantage of or not and it didn't take long after that when the city and the client public client sort of decided to build it that was going to then get up in age and wasn't doing so well anymore and passed away not that long after that so I'm very happy I have that amazing experience to having had him you know make his case in a very understated yet very very powerful way later on by the way at power we appeared and also attended a that gets us to the next slide I attended a lecture of his structural engineer at school at my at my alma mater in Hanover Germany where he was saying how hard it was to work with winter because winter always said well a column can't be you know thicker than eight centimeters and he said everyone said why is that and he said well that's the distance between the eyes of a human being and we should never clog and block things again because of his agenda of democracy there also he had to add a large glass sculpture to the top of the building at a point when the building was already under construction because ginger was trying to oppose and superior a rather reactionary town hall building that the people had decided to build in the early last century or the last millennium in my hometown so this slide here is also very important because the office believes in inclusivity and they believe that even if the the the typology is very very enclosed and exclusive as the bank is on the money you're allowed to go in there you fought that and you said no it needs to be open to the public so this is here at the top right you see Lenny and me having a lunch in our favorite sushi restaurant where you can get all you can eat a floor still like 15 euros or 15 bucks so rather inclusive for people to go there at the bottom right in middle this is a one of our most traditional sunday evening crime time crime scene tv shows that the building played the major role in at one point so a very iconic building a very powerful building a very ecologically successful building and a very public building and although it's modern architecture that not everyone might buy into but what the building does how the building performs many people can agree that's the right way to go and next slide so it rightly so made it into this world encyclopedia of architecture here which our firm has the honor to be next to them so their bank high-end high-tech and our little kindergarten first passes off kindergarten for a hometown in low-end and low-tech both on the opposite ends but of this on the same side of architecture of the 21st century which needs to be post fossil the two gentlemen down there the one on the left is our dear collaborator martin spade who was in charge of the structural engineering and the biochromatics and the guy on the right side is martin shula who i once when i was on another jury there was a guy sitting in the back and looking for the casual so we didn't know who he was looked like a custodian and that is martin shula he's a mechanical engineer and the most progressive mechanical engineer in the world that now all architects want to work that if they want to make a building that is net zero and actually net plus so he works with architects on that and started out with banish as to begin with and trans solar and his firm is called was involved in that in that project by that time stefan banish good to banish son early had started after initially not wanting to get into that business and he studied philosophy and then later on changed his mind luckily rightly so we can tell now and joined the firm but ran a separate branch so next slide that branch that he ran made in project do many many projects and he was they did collaboration so he was involved in the north LB as well and obviously when his father wasn't doing so well he was representing the firm when they pulled us as the ones who had gotten the highest award on a state level for our little community grocery store that was the precursor of the kindergarten and many thought why would you give the highest award to a box where you can wear a shell underwear in six packs and so they pulled us out on a public panel discussion with one lady that we know very well because we've been talking about her quite a lot and she's quite in the spotlight now as the president commission president of the european union or the la funda line by that time she was our state minister slash secretary of cultural and family affairs and she was the one giving the award so talking inclusivity Stefan at that time already for a while you know one of the most busy and arguably here the most relevant german architect here basically came and spend an afternoon with our client and when it was time to go on the panel discussion he basically said okay i spend the time with clients that i could have never worked for they run one dollar stores or one euro stores as to make a living and and he said these guys these poor guys whose budgets of the whole project was what i had for the facade and he said that's why i appreciate what we were doing and we obviously appreciate what Stefan was doing for us and then the rest is that i went after that to go back to the u.s and coach and next slide and by that time Stefan had been doing their not their first but their most iconic project in the u.s on the east coast in boston and that's the gen sign building and this is once again a sort of a short high rise in a similar climate to the one in germany but yet different in detail again applying the same principles of making a livable organism a building that breathes a building that has like natural systems as the body has of natural daylight of heating and cooling everything being as natural as you can be it yet architecture being architecture nature being nature next slide i teamed up with the a is that's the american institute organization of architectural students and at some point we were thinking who we get as a guest speaker and we were thinking of banish and so we picked up the phone i wanted to use my connection to the man over fade and atlas and ask for the project architect was and i was told it was another martin martin hotly you see on the left and i was told by juta and juta was as you think of a huge successful architectural office she's the secretary there is no such thing banish has the utmost horizontal basic democratic organization where everyone picks in the picks up the phone at some point so they just don't have that vertical hierarchy to have a horizontal hierarchy and she said well i i talked to martin and he did but he said well before you really want to get me on board why don't you come and look at our most at my most current project which was in hamburg which is a big city over from hand over and they built the only lever headquarters which is a big multinational organization corporate of nature and once again he wanted to democratize that the architectural detail is here what we have been experimenting with some years ago for that school for mentally disabled children which you see at the top in the middle which we did a show about and he pushed it to the next level and used that as a single layer on the trail if you want to know why you got to go back and watch the show awking um um you know being a good educator not just to your clients but also to the emerging generation gets us to the next slide uh because into banish had taught at a school in germany and darmstadt and for that reason when i went to school you know that was the school to go if you if you really made it i didn't go there uh you went there and so i got to know that school years later when i was invited by one of the founding members that martin is as well that's the german uh uh sustainability uh chamber or council the deutscher gesellschaften nachhause gestauen and manfred hegger uh one of their presidents who unfortunately passed away too early in his life a few years ago one something with his emerging generation twice consecutively which is an american student uh competition which is the solar decathlon you see at the bottom here our school's contributions from some years ago spearheaded by professor rockwood traffic here rockwood and at the top you see the two solar decalons by the darmstadt school of architecture which again are banish taught from the mid six east to the mid eighties next slide we return to our predominant typology here us being squeezed in between two month rages high rises and this is martin stopping by in the prairie in lingon braskan my home away from home where i talk went back to to teach and so you see him at the top right without quick with a fantastic project in downtown about skating orientation rides first and foremost and the project the other three slides is the project next to the unilever building in hamburg which is the marco poodle tower which again you see what it has it has lanais all the way around in chili cold and pretty soon and deep problems because of fruiting gas not available hamburg germany next slide uh this is what all the buildings here should have and we think in chicago should have as we're currently investigating the tool and comparing and alluding to the little show quote at the top right getting us to the next slide we've been proposing for quite a while one of the most attractive fenestration uh products which is the good old jealousy that's our local thing that the german company who always made it had optimized uh to triple pane glass uh passive house uh absolutely top notch uh so you're not losing any energy so if you're doing split system a c you at least a few times you use it you don't lose it and then you open them up all the time next slide jealousies are a banish legacy this is uh proof of evidence of when i revisited one of his other most iconic projects that have to do a lot with the core of democracy uh and you see the jealousies and next slide uh that is the project and that is why we paired it to our capital this is the capital the national capital of germany at that time in bond before their unification and it's basically roof architecture with spaces underneath flowing through and his agenda was that you as a citizen could just like you can do in the chambers here by the way you can walk by press your nose at the glass and watch the ones you elected down there because you know there are no dictators there basically collaborators who you elect to run things so so far about roof architecture but what about some of the horizontal fenestration wrapping wall architecture next slide if you do it here as soto and i talked many years ago on this show on here you should do it and always shading yourself so here's the kashi anbi's king center that has a glass facade behind but it's shaded and wrapped all the way around with this metal mesh next slide that here it is again and again a prime example of the kashi anbi's work uh next slide this is the sunset tower just on the opposite side of elamona mall on edkinson drive the the plinth part has the same thing next slide and as we discovered in the show here it's a theme that carries through and architect mid-century have embraced and have used as to naturally cool buildings by not letting them go overheated by not letting the sun get to the glass behind next slide just one more example about the ingenuity of different ways and you know different iterations different variations you can find to achieve that so next slide another building in honolulu you know that doesn't right no it's not in honolulu yet but it should be right because it seems like you know the light is nicely filtered there's still daylight coming through but just as much as not to overheat and how does that make it look from the outside because varnish this is a varnish building varnish always does it as to design from inside out versus outside in how does that then look from the outside next slide this is it it has a similar to anbi a metal screen wrapped around it that keeps it cool next slide and that screen is very carefully calibrated and next and final slide is zooming in and what that is and why that is you will hear next week when we have its creator on the show who is Matt no black who is varnish partner in his american offices of boston messachusetts on the east coast so hopefully with a cheerleading about the context of the firm and their utterly important most democratic approach of planet and people friendliness i leave you with that so hopefully having gotten you excited about meeting matt next week on the show and until then please stay easy breezy breezy easy bye bye thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com mahalo