 Hello everyone and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Human Humane Architecture. Normally this program is hosted by Martin Desbang. Martin is currently on sabbatical from his job at UH Manoa, back home in Germany. And he's studying all the different kinds of stuff. This week he happens to be, however, on a short ski vacation. I'll talk more about that in just a second. But in the meantime, behind me you see a poke restaurant. And you might look at this picture behind me and say, well that's just some poke restaurant probably in Honolulu someplace, right? No, this poke restaurant is in the German city of Munich. Martin took this picture in Munich. It looks pretty peculiar because not only is Hawaiian food popular in Munich, as you can see by this picture, but the signs are all in English as well. It's very confusing. Why are we showing you this? We're showing you that Hawaii is international. And we're also showing you that there is a connection between Germany and Hawaii, which I'm going to get to in just a second. And let's go to our first slide. Now this is not Martin in this particular slide, but it does show you what Martin is currently doing. Martin took this picture near where he is currently living, and this is a light rail system that he uses every day. And there's a man with skis standing there in the snow. Personally, I would much rather be here in Honolulu than skiing anywhere because I don't like snow and I don't like cold weather. But let's continue on from what Martin's doing to talk about what I'm going to talk about today. So next slide. We are going to be talking about an event that happened last year. This was a symposium that was held here in Honolulu from representatives from different companies from Germany who were involved in mostly innovative energy techniques as well as housing and other types of inventions, etc. And via the German Chamber of Commerce branch, which is in California, some of those representatives from German companies came here to Honolulu for a symposium to present what products that they are currently offering. And if I'm looking at the slide right now, I can see that I did a slide presentation for this particular group. In fact, I did it twice. And the subject was innovation and technological inventions here in the Hawaiian Islands. And there's more to that subject than you might think. And we can go back to the 19th century to see some innovative things. And let's go to the next slide. And this is a picture of King Kalakaua. King Kalakaua reigned from 1874 till his death in January of 1891. And Kalakaua was an extremely interesting man, very multifaceted in a number of ways. On one hand, he was very into the preservation of traditional Hawaiian beliefs and activities. So one of the things he did was to publicly have the hula performed at Yomani Palace for different events during his reign. And that was a big step because the hula formerly had been suppressed, particularly because of the influence of missionaries who thought that it was too openly suggestive or sexual. But at the same time that Kalakaua was preserving Hawaiian culture, he was also a very forward-thinking man who was very international. He was the first ruling monarch to travel all the way around the world. And he also loved technology and modern inventions. And Yomani Palace, which is also here in this picture next to me, it was built by Kalakaua as the royal palace in Honolulu, and it was completed in the early 1880s. And it had running water, and it had a telephone system, and it also had electricity a little bit later on. And it had electricity before the White House in Washington D.C. had electricity. That's how ahead of his time Kalakaua was. Next, let's look at some of the things that Kalakaua himself, being technologically advanced and interested, proposed as inventions. Now, he created and kept and still, we still have today, some scrapbooks during his lifetime, and he kept a variety of things like clippings about new inventions. But he also drew pictures of things he wanted to invent. So this is Kalakaua's fish ram. It's like a torpedo. It's a weapon. And again, this is from the 1870s or 1880s. He drew this picture. It's something that looks like a fish, and so somebody on a ship would look down and see what they thought was a fish. And it was actually something coming up to ram into or explode an enemy ship. Well, pretty innovative. Next picture, another one of Kalakaua's inventions. This is the torpedo-proof vessel. So this vessel, which has, as you can see the Hawaiian flag flying on the stern, is torpedo-proof, so it's armored, so you can't blow it up. But it also can shoot torpedoes through a port right in the very front. So if you look on the left side, that part that's sticking out of the prow, can shoot torpedoes. Obviously, these are somewhat fantasies, but it shows you that Kalakaua was, again, ahead of his time in thinking outside the box as to how the modern world could function. Next. Well, Hawaii was not confined to innovation just the 19th century, because in the 20th century, two major crops were, for many years, the foundations of our local economy. And the first was the sugar industry. The sugar industry had really taken off starting in the 1870s, and by the 1900s was the biggest employer. It was the reason many people are here in Hawaii today, because our ancestors came to work for the sugar plantations. There were people from many different countries that came here for that reason. And because the sugar industry was so well developed, and because it was basically American style, again, there was a lot of technological innovation. In this photograph, you see this entirely newly created machine, which is there to help harvest sugarcane. And that was something that was constantly being worked on and improved so that you didn't have to use as many people hand cutting stuff in the field. The more you mechanize, the more efficient you would be, and you cut your costs. Well, here's one of those inventions. Next. And the sugar industry also extended into not just innovation of machines, but they had a particular... They had the industry as a whole supported an organization called the Hawaii Sugar Planners Association, or HSPA. And the HSPA facility, which was located in Makiki here in Honolulu, not only did testing of different types of sugar varieties to make them more productive, but they also were innovative in finding natural methods of pest control. Now, they didn't invent it. That had been started in the 19th century. But in the 20th century, they were instrumental in bringing in specifically... introducing, for example, a particular insect that could prey on another insect that was damaging sugarcane. Well, one of their miscalculations, some of them were very successful. One of their miscalculations, unfortunately, which is kind of what you... Well, in any case, without getting too much into it, they introduced also the bufo toad, which was supposed to help keep insects under control for sugarcane. There's no more sugarcane anymore, but there still are bufo toads. They're poisonous. It wasn't a good thing. However, next slide. Pineapple industry was also very important here, too. It was the second after the sugar industry. And just as with sugar, in this same American style of innovation, a number of different types of machines were invented to, again, make things more productive, cut costs. The picture that you see here is from the 1950s, and it shows a potential machine to plant the tops of pineapples, because the tops of pineapples, once they're cut off, are stuck in the ground to grow new pineapple plants. And so this was a way to make that, rather than hand done by hand by individual men, you could do it by machine. Next. But the machine in the pineapple industry, it really made a huge difference was this one. It's called the Genaka machine. That's spelled G-I-N-A-C-A. Pineapples are kind of a funny shape, and they also have a very difficult, rough, scaly exterior. They also have a central core, which is inedible. So they required a lot of trimming before they could be put into cans. And the canning industry, which is really what made pineapple, the pineapple industry so successful here, which they started in the 1900s, required things to be a certain size to fit into cans. The Genaka machine was this incredibly clever thing. It cut off the exterior of the pineapple, it cut out the core of the pineapple, and it left you with these nice uniform round slices that could then go into cans. That's what made the sugar industry popular. Or possible, really, to the extent that it was. Next picture. And here is the dull pineapple cannery in Honolulu, which, in its time, was the largest fruit cannery in the world. They were very proud to be able to say that. And as you can see in this picture, there are scores of Genaka machines stretching off into the far horizon that shows you how big this operation was. And to think that the biggest fruit cannery in the world was here on the island of Oahu is quite an amazing thing. And this picture was probably taken in the 1930s. Next picture. Something else that wasn't invented here, but which was Hawaii was a very early adopter of, was aviation. And the reason is, of course, the Hawaiian islands consist of separate islands. And up until the 1940s, one of the ways that you could travel into Ireland, well, up until, let's say, 1927, the only way you could go into Ireland was by ship. And ship travel was uncomfortable because the channels between the Hawaiian islands can be very rough. So as soon as commercial aviation began to really become possible in the late 1920s, inter-island airways was formed, and that became Hawaiian Airlines in 1941. And during World War II, the inter-island ships went out of business or stopped functioning. And so since then, it's really the only way you can travel is by air, meaning that people here are far more accustomed to air travel than lots of other people in the world. Secondly, Hawaii was one of the very early places that international or long distance air travel, regularly scheduled air travel, occurred. And that's when Pan American Airways began flying here for the first time in 1936. And at the time that that got started, the distance between Hawaii and the West Coast was the longest anywhere in the world that any plane at that time could fly in one trip. So again, we're ahead of the game and ahead of lots of other parts of the world in our adoption of aviation. Next. Well, this is something that you wouldn't know about, but I'm about to tell you. The very first aluminum beer can anywhere in the world was used here in Hawaii for primo beer. And there had been canned beer before that, but they were in steel cans. Aluminum, this was an innovative process in which there was kind of a slug, a cylinder of aluminum, which got punched by a specific machine to make it into a canned shape and then it was capped. This didn't get used for very long, but the aluminum, the innovation of aluminum for beer is something that really got started here. And if you look in the upper part of this slide, you'll see that there's a picture of a guy who is a musician in Germany. And this is to let you know another connection between Hawaii and Germany is one of the very popular beer drinking songs in Germany is called, in Hawaii there is no beer. And obviously that's not true because I just showed you there's beer in abundance. Next. Okay, another innovative use of aluminum was this structure, which used to stand at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki. And when it was built in 1957, the hotel was actually owned by a man named Henry J. Kaiser. And Kaiser, also as part of his business empire, owned a major production company of aluminum, Kaiser aluminum. So this geodesic dome, which was designed by Buckminster Fuller, who's the famous guy who created the geodesic dome, was built within just a period of two days. And it got a tremendous amount of publicity because it was so easy to do. They just bolted these pre-made sort of five-sided pieces together, gradually raised the whole structure up, and then you had this nice dome. It looked incredibly futuristic. It was made of this wonderful lightweight material, got a tremendous amount of publicity, as I said, for doing this. It was used as an auditorium and a meeting room. And unfortunately, this very innovative structure has been gone, demolished, since 1999. And that's a plea for people to be aware of saving some of our architectural treasures. And this is one that we've lost. Next. Another innovative building was this one. It still is standing today, but it's not quite as innovative as it was. This is the Alamoana building, which is part of the Alamoana shopping center, and it opened in 1961. And you can see in the upper picture that's looking from Alamoana center at the building. Well, the building... the innovative part of this building, there were two very main innovative parts. The first was that it had these vertical sort of shutters or louvers on the entire exterior of the building. And they changed position vertically during the day, according to the position of the sun, so that they were shading the inside of the building. And that meant that you used less energy and less air conditioning. That's something that was very much ahead of its time in terms of energy saving. Back in the 1960s, nobody really cared about that. Energy was cheap. Hawaiian Electric encouraged you to use more electricity, in fact. Unfortunately, the system of louvers is not in place anymore. The concrete abutments upon which they were set gradually deteriorated to the point where they weren't safe anymore. They wouldn't move, they stopped moving, and so they were all removed, and they're no longer there. However, next picture. The other innovative part of the building was this. This is the La Ronde rotating restaurant. This is the first rotating restaurant anywhere in the world in 1961. And it took an hour to do a full rotation, and you could go up there and have drinks and have dinner and look out at the view of Honolulu, and it was absolutely marvelous. And the second, the man who designed it was also the man who designed the more famous Space Needle rotating restaurant in Seattle, which opened in 1962 for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. Well, La Ronde, the unit is still there, but it stopped rotating a long time ago because it broke and they couldn't fix it. And it no longer has any tenants in it, so it's just empty. Well, the thing that's changed a great deal also is if you look at the picture looking out from La Ronde and you can see Diamond Head in that photograph, today you cannot see Diamond Head. It's been completely obscured by high-rises. So going to La Ronde now would not be the experience it was in 1961, but then what is? Okay, next picture. Something that is traditional to Hawaiian culture, which is now worldwide, because we're talking about Hawaii as an influencer, is surfing. Surfing reached its highest level of development here in the Hawaiian Islands. By the time Westerners came here in the late 1700s, Hawaiians had refined surfing in terms of board design, in technology, numbers of different types of boards, different techniques. All of that stuff was at its very highest peak, invented by Hawaiian culture and ancient Hawaiians and still practiced today. But this has spread throughout the entire world and not only is it a sport throughout the entire world, but it's also an economic force because there are contests at which people earn money and there is surfing merchandise that people earn money from. So that's all thanks to the Hawaiian culture and the Hawaiian Islands. Next. Okay, back to this particular symposium. And here you can see pictures of the symposium taking place in Jefferson Hall on the East-West Center campus. And it was the clean energy. It was the second Germany-Hawaii Clean Energy Symposium Renewals in Energy Efficiency in Buildings. So not only was it talking about energy generating, but it was also talking about architecture and construction. Next picture. So let's look back at where our friend Martin Dispan came from. And in the picture on the top, looking at the top row of photographs, you can first see on the left an aerial view of the neighborhood where Martin grew up. Martin grew up in an old, obviously it's part of Europe, in a series of a city where there's not a regular rectangular grid, because it grew before that time. But it did have a density of inhabitation, meaning that there was a residential part of it, but also the commercial activity was integrated with it. So you could walk to where you wanted to go. You could walk to buy your food, et cetera. Martin lived on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, and they did get to use the roof of their building. As you can see in the next picture, Martin is in there with his sister during the brief German summer to enjoy how wonderful it was outdoors. He also was able to, in a time of less legal considerations, be able to go to a public park and build things, build with wood that was lying around, just saw it, nail it up with other kids. That's what got him started in architecture. It's not something you'd be likely to do today. Martin always had the dream that he would come to the United States. He did do so. He's now a citizen of both Germany and America. But he was always influenced by a lot of American aspects in Germany, and always fascinated by it. Let's go to our next picture. Well, Martin is an architect. His family also has an architectural firm, and so that's why he goes back to Germany to interact with his family, as well as see how the family business is doing. And also, as I said, he's now currently on his sabbatical. The pictures here are some of the buildings that Despange Architects has constructed. So there are commercial buildings, there are school buildings. And Martin is very aware of things like energy efficiency, the way he has to think in Germany versus the way you'd have to think here is very different, because here we need to deal with heat and humidity. In Germany, most of the time, they have to deal with cold. So in some cases, they want to open up as much as possible to take in solar energy. In other cases like here, we don't want to be doing that, we want to be controlling energy, how much energy is coming into some place or into a building. Next picture. And here is, again, Despange Architecture. This is some of the literature about some of the buildings that Martin's company or Martin's family's company has built. Next picture. And Martin, as you know, if you're a regular viewer of ThinkTech, is a professor of architecture at UH Monoan. And some of the projects that his students have done are things that we regularly talk about here on ThinkTech. This particular structure here is something I particularly like. It's entirely open. To use Martin's phrase, it's easy breezy. It is a set of open rectangular concrete elements, units, you might say, that are stacked up. And not only does it allow free circulation, it allows you to use the spaces that are in that concrete wall. And while here it isn't specified exactly what you could do with that, this is something that is making use of the weather that Martin coming from Germany is very aware of and is very appreciative of because it's so different from where he came from. He's very into making use of that for comfortable use of architecture. Next picture. And this is something, again, another one of these potentially innovative discussions. This structure, again, now look at the structure that you can see on the table as a model. It's elevated up off the ground so that you've got air circulation underneath it. You've got air circulation all around it. You can build things that, again, can be passively cooled by moving air. We have trade winds here. We can make use of those things. This is the type of thing that Martin wants his students to be aware of and when they go out in the world to design, to be thinking in those terms as well. Next. Okay. One of the things that came up at this German, Hawaii German symposium was the reuse of shipping containers. And in fact, there was a company that just focused on that. So you can see there's a shipping container. Well, there are innumerable shipping containers in use all over the world. And when they go out of use, what do you do with them? Well, a lot of people have suggested that they be used for dwellings. They be used for developments for people to live in. And these developments can be anything from upscale if you chose to, to being things that could house homeless people. So in some of the work that Martin's students did, there was discussion as to how to stack up these shipping containers, particularly for homeless people to create not only individual living spaces, but enclosed outdoor spaces that could also be used as well. And one of the companies, as I said from Germany, is actually working on that as well. Next picture. Pardon me. Well, here is a caricature of the island of Oahu, but it shows us in our location in the middle of the Pacific. And it shows something very important, which is that the city of Hortelulu is bounded by two geographical, topographical physical constraints. On one hand, we have the Koalao mountain range, and on the other hand, we have the ocean. And that means that everything that we design has to fit into that. Hortelulu is a very densely populated urban area, and so we have to be aware of that and work within those constraints. Next. Well, one of the ways that this has been brought up in Martin's classes is by trying to look at how nature does this. And you see these pictures of natural environments. You see the thicket of the how tree at the top, and you see the bamboo forest at the bottom. And you see how nature deals with these constraints and how plants form themselves into these colonies. Martin says, let's try to work with architecture in the same way. Next picture. And here's one of the ways you can do that. This is an innovative idea as to a development in downtown Honolulu in which these tall, skinny structures are put together quite closely, not wide apart. So it's kind of like those thickets or forests that you just saw pictures of. And also, they have open space. These are high rises which are open to the elements and have plants growing in them as well so that you're making use of the natural environment that we have here. Next picture. Well, two of the big projects that Martin's classes have done are called Primitiva. And this is Primitiva number one. It's a cylindrical building, and it has a central core that's steel girders. And then a lot of the exterior is open. And not only does that allow the air to move through, but it also is designed to be a community composed of people of all different ages. So you don't just have the old people in one place. You've got everybody together, and you try to put it together so that a lot of their needs are provided in there as well. So you can buy food in there. There can be a market in there. Just the way Martin grew up in a neighborhood where things were like that. Next picture. And Primitiva 2 is not a cylindrical building. It's a rectangular building. But again, it's open. It has exterior staircases that are not enclosed. It has curtain walls or exterior walls, which aren't really walls, but they're sheets of moving water. And again, you've got plants growing in there. You've got different types of people living in there. You're open to the outside elements. And in theory, you don't need to be using a lot of energy because you're not enclosing yourself in a glass box that gets hot and has to be air conditioned. Next picture. Well, also, this comes back to what we were talking about earlier about the shipping containers. And again, here is a way to stack shipping containers into an integrated development where you're making use of something that already exists, but you're turning it into something more innovative and more useful that, again, we're not throwing these things away and we're making use of them to build places for people to live, which we need. Next picture. Well, one of the things that Martin did was to have an interview. During this symposium, there was an interview that was done with Martin, that's Martin on the left, with some of the German representatives who were present. And that's available to be viewed on OC-16 as I remember, possibly here. It's also here on ThinkTech too. So if you want more information on the symposium, you can watch that. Next picture. And again, to just sum things up, here are some of the pictures of the innovations that have occurred here in the Hawaiian Islands over the past 100 or more than 100 years. So keep in mind, this is not just a backwater in the middle of nowhere. We actually are an innovative place. And next picture. And finally, folks, we've done lots of ThinkTech shows. ThinkTech is a hotbed of discussions of innovation and lots of other things that are useful, interesting and informative. So you can look back at other ThinkTech shows, like you see here on this slide here, or look at other ThinkTech shows. I mean, not just ThinkTech shows, but human-humane architecture shows, in addition to other ThinkTech shows. And that brings us to the end of this program. Thank you for watching, everybody. And oh, wait a minute, there's our poke bowl to get us back to Germany, and again to show the integration between Germany and Hawaii, which is one of the things that we talk about here. Anyway, thank you for joining us, and we will see you another time on ThinkTech Hawaii. We'll be back next week with a show for the Doko Momo group, which I'll be talking about mid-century architectural things. But until I see you next time, everybody, aloha.