 I'm delighted to see you again. So this is our show, I think that Kawaii's Human Architecture, which happens to be our 256th show and you're around our 13,750th viewer. And I'm also very delighted to see you, the Soto Brownbag, hi to Soto. Good day to you, Martin. Good day to everybody who's watching us. All right, because it's been like two episodes where we were unavailable to do it together. That's right. Now we're back to the same place which positions us in the middle of everywhere slash nowhere, most remote from all other land masses in Honolulu, Hawaii. And you are in your Bishop Museum and I always give you a German word lesson of the week. So the one of this week is Mitbringse. What is that? That means something that you bring with you. And I'm assuming that that is comparable to the Japanese word, which is used here in conversation, omiyage, which means something that you bring home for another person as a souvenir of a trip. And there's no English word that's comparable to either of those. So we have to use foreign words in this case. Exactly. And I'm delighted to have our exotic escapism experts, Zana, with me and her sons, that you're gonna meet soon and then you re-bring you that. Okay, good. I gave you a little hint. It's basically helping you to stay warm in your, which makes you suffer because you're an advocate of easy breezy. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You're using straight winds for cooling, but in your museum that is not possible. Correct. And so I'm hoping, maybe that will keep my bald head warm or something like that. I think you're getting into the right direction. I think so. Maybe we see it soon on air for that reason. Yes, oh yes, I will. Soon as I receive it, I will show it off. All right, so let's get together soon. Let's get the first slide up, which is sharing with the audience that the two of us together with Don Hibbert, Bill Chapman, and also Bundes, who was visiting you as he just told me, we're working on the tour guides of our city, Honolulu, Hawaii for DoM publishers. And we've been referring, and we'll continue to refer to a couple of other books that Philip Moise has been giving us as references that we're browsing through and using it for orientation. And we want to make clear that obviously guides, as the name says, they're not dictators. They don't tell you what you all should buy into or like. It just gives you sort of an introduction to what's out there. But every author has to make a selection because there's no way that every building in each city could be in there. So we're at this tough point now that we have to, before we make decisions, we have to set up criteria, right? As to what should be in there. And Don came up with a great suggestion that we applauded. He says, it should be buildings that are culturally relevant or sensitive at least. So that might be one indication. And what might be very relevant these days of what buildings have to do in cities and our city is what the current news, Hawaiian news now is telling us. And what are we posting here as two recent news disorder? Well, two recent stories, which are very relevant for the types of stuff we talk about on the show. One is we are now the third most expensive city in the United States in which to rent. And obviously this continues to be a problem. We always have high prices here. We always have had high prices here and trying to keep things livable via price controls, housing that's constructed by the government, et cetera, is something that's always relevant. The other story is that all of these high rises that we look at all the time and that many of us live in are guzzlers of energy. And that's because they're not easy breezy. And that means that they are enclosed mostly glass boxes. And that means they have to be air conditioned and all of that air conditioning uses a lot of fossil fuel because we don't have a lot of other sources for energy here. So those again are two very relevant concerns for what we address on this program. Yeah, and we're very proud to show the preview of the cover of our book, which is carrying the color that is the favorite of our exotic escapism expert, Susanna. And why would that be relevant? She is so excited about it because it reminds me of a half of her life ago when she was an au pair here in Honolulu. And what impressed her the most that is resembled by this color, Susanna. Well, she loved the color of the ocean and that is due to, of course, we have many, there are many colors in the ocean. It's just like there are many colors in the sky and we often don't pay attention to all the variations that there are in the water and the air. But what we see here is an approximation of the beautiful color that you see in shallow water, particularly if it is a white sandy base underneath it, which is due to coral that has been crushed up to create sand. And so with the white sand on the bottom of the ocean and the shallow water, you get this beautiful greenish blue color along with many, many other colors, as I said. So it's very nice that we are acknowledging the shallow water around some of our island of Oahu that looks like this that surrounds the city that we are going to be examining in our guidebook. Yeah, and I just came from my morning swim and I have my green turtles, the Hawaiian green turtles, the honos in that water, and it's just awesome. And that's something a few places in the world have. And so we wish that architecture would be the same. It would just represent the absolute amazing specificity of this our place and we encourage architecture to do that more. And we will include buildings in the book that do that the most. That's what we're aiming for. And as this show is called Shoreline Skylines, as it's always, the whole is always the sum of its parts. And the parts of a skyline is skyscrapers. And so as we said, and how little we can't afford to stay low, we have to go high. We have to consolidate on the land and to stay on a small footprint. And so when we get, we see here in the show called on the top left, we ended last week, I ended on sharing Mies van der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive apartments. And let's go to the next slide and look into them a little bit further here. This is a picture I took of its base. It was built in the early fifties and then at the top left, Eric, if you can zoom into that one is one of his latest buildings in Chicago. That is the IBM tower. It was actually completed in 73 and Mies died in 69. We yet have to the solo reconvene to our automotive architecture comparison show. So this is a little bit reminding us of that one because I took these pictures when I saw these two cars in front of them. And while America is the inventor of that building type of tall buildings of high rises, it is also the inventor, maybe not the inventor because there has been, you know, about three Daimler and others who have invented cars as well. But America has sort of pop cultural rise to car more than any other country and nation in the world. And here is a fairly recent Cadillac limousine part, sedan part in front of the Chicago Apartments. And there is a Lincoln SUV parked in front of it. And they're all black. And it reminds me of my childhood dreams of Schrasenkreuzers and my black Lincoln town car that we've been talking about quite a bit in John F. Kennedy's town car before that continental here on Calacala Avenue. So America is obviously trying to still live up to that and seems to know what it was best at. But the cars don't look exactly the same anymore. They have transformed according to, mostly we're afraid to say no performance but customer taste. And in that case, the taste seems to be more sort of soft edged or curved at its corners. And so has architecture. And that gets us to the next slide. And I think if we were categorizing architecture again, high rises are really a symbol, some call it a fellow symbol of power of money. And that's dominated by the male. And it's certainly probably fair to say that Mies is a pretty good representative of that because he was a macho. He was a womanizer. He was all of that. And his buildings were very strong and powerful and yet rectilinear and boxy, which ironically, all of the things that have changed in our place here is totally different. Is still many buildings, if not the same most as we pointed out in the last I counted them 25 shows are doing kind of that same thing. But there was someone that we show called at the bottom right. Eric, if you can zoom into that, who was the rebel kid against Mies and he was one of his students. And that was Bertrand Goldberg. And what is his most famous building that we feature here, a show called Angus Soto? Well, this is a real landmark of Chicago and it's called Marina City. And it is two rounded towers. And we have some rounded buildings here in Honolulu as well from a similar time period. This was designed in 1959 and finally finished in 1963. And as you have pointed out, these were referred to as corn cobs, which is very appropriate because they do in fact look like corn crops. And corn is one of the major agricultural crops of the Midwest, so that's appropriate as well. These buildings we were discussing before the show were not luxury buildings. They were not high-end buildings. They were meant to be more for middle-class people, people who didn't necessarily have a lot of money. They were also intended for working people. And their situation is such that you can walk to, presumably you could live there, you could walk to your workplace, you could walk to purchase your food, you could walk to areas to eat food as well as get entertainment. So this was situated for people not necessarily to have to use their cars, even though we do have to point out that there's a substantial amount of parking building on the lower floor of each one of these. And because they're around each one of these, the apartments in there are pie-shaped slice of pie, either being a fruit pie or a pizza pie. So that does make them distinctive. And it also makes them rounded so that they are rather than being rectilinear sharp-edged boxes, they are rounded instead. And the round forms are something that we have seen beginning to come back via the work of one particular female architect as opposed to male architect. That's interesting. And very important of the analogy or the nickname of corn cup and its appropriation because we're talking genie gang is the female architect we continue to talk about. And to the left is her aqua tower that we now will next talk about. And she has built the koula in Kakaako for how it used and just recently, and we spent many, many shows and thinking and reflecting on that one. And interesting it is that again, Bertrand Goldberg was a child of the 60s. So that was even though he was reveling against the sharp edge and the boxiness of his master, he was still a modernist and modernism wasn't different than post-modernism, reducing something to the image of something like the corn cup, like it's aesthetics, but also the performative aspect of a plant. And this building is lanai all the way around. So each small studio has a lanai and then obviously right in all fairness, depending on the orientation, I would prefer the Southern orientation because then that lanai, as I know very well from my white kiki grand lanai here, which because unfortunately of the combustion engine, noise pollution of cars, lawn mowers. This morning is Kapilani Park, big tractor lawn mowing guy day. So I can't be outside, but otherwise I'm outside all the time because I can because the lanai above me, thanks to Ernest Har, the architect, shades me as sufficiently, not so much on the West, on the East, where the sun is very low. To the North, I could be okay here because it always keeps me cool because the sun is never there, but in Chicago, that would be bad because I'm missing out on solar again because the sun can also keep me from getting frozen in the winter time. So a South unit, I really prefer in Marina City, but in any case, all of them I would prefer and one of my colleagues here actually used to own one Carla Sarota in Chicago and on my way to work with Dan these few weeks ago, he told me about a friend of his who was able, and that's addressing our criteria of affordability. The units in there are still pretty affordable. They're like, she snapped one Dan told me for like 300,000 dollars. We did our realtor pages detective work, we saw one for $179,000, and that's pretty much a steal. You don't get anything, not even a hole in the wall here on our island anymore for that. So the building, again, we said it is vintage. It is not a collectible because it's collectible referring to cars, then they get crazily expensive, right? And you can't, and you can just put them somewhere away and look at them, not even drive them, collectors then own them and they become objects of speculation, right? It's not the case in Marina, in Marina city yet fortunately. So that being said, let's talk about the Gini Gang Aqua Tower a little bit more because we had already a lot. We also wanna refer to our fellow midwesterner Ron Lindgren, hi Ron, who we miss because he's very knowledgeable about this part of America because he grew up in there and he's very familiar to culture and climate. And he always give it good points because he was saying it is not just decorative. I mean, this Aqua effect is sort of one thing, but it is not just decorative. It is performative because it does what the solo? Well, it does two things. It provides first of all outdoor living space and in Chicago, obviously for a good part of the year, you cannot live outdoors, but in the time of the year that you can, it does provide that. Secondly, as you were just describing, it does provide sun shading. So depending on where the sun is and what the orientation of the building is, you will get sun shading. Now, we were just talking about affordability and before the show asked you and we don't know, neither of us knows, are the prices for the different units in this Aqua Tower different based on the footage or the size of the lanais because as you can see, every one of them is different on every floor because it's a rounded flowing surface really that's been sort of added to a plain rectilinear box. And since each one of those units has a different amount of exterior floor space, does that affect its price? And I would assume it does, but that is just something that's relevant when we talk about prices and affordability. Yeah, and talking the other ability thing is sustainability these days, right? More than ever. And just the show quotes on the right, just recall when Chicago was still my hub in and out during my Prairie and Desert days, I saw the building under construction and I took the chance to tour the office of Gini Gang with my desert student, Arizona University of Arizona. And I had just like an SOM, I had a German guy giving us the tour and I pulled him into a corner of the office and was whisperingly asking him the question if I overlooked, I couldn't see because I couldn't, I didn't have magnifying glasses if there was a line that indicates that they use diesel shock, which is this material that has lanais or balconies, of course, structurally connect, but more importantly, well, as importantly, firmly disconnect from the building. He whispered back and said, no, sorry, we didn't do that. And I booed that and I encouraged him to do that next time. There's again, again, that otherwise you had just have the cold creeping in there and he got condensation problems. You lose energy, even here in the tropics that the heat can creep in and that's not equally as problematic but still to be avoided. So that's one thing. And I guess when you said, you know, Jeanie Gang added to it, there's this rumor of that that was actually the case, that the building was already in the tradition, the museum tradition of square boxes by the developer architect Jim Lervenberg, who we called up there, who passed away two years ago and 20 in the okay age, well, no age is okay to die, but he was like mid-80s when he passed away. And somehow him and Jeanie Gang met him, the square boxy developer and she the one obviously in the tradition can't be neglected of the rebel kid Bertrand Goldberg after no one else basically went on the swooping sexy curvy trip after Goldberg, not so much all the boxes continued to be. Jeanie in 2009 basically kicked in and teamed up with Jim Lervenberg in doing the aqua tower that became, you know, very, very famous at that time. And Jeanie again, there is this discrimination of the female and the workforce and society in general and architecture in specific and it's dominated by guys and when, you know, Mies was a very stereotypical macho representative of that. And Jeanie is greatly sort of reveling against that and making herself a name and a reputation and someone who paved her way, we see on the next page. And that is Natalie de Blois who was a partner with the firm Skidwell Owings Merrill that we continue to talk about because that is a firm famously located in Chicago and headquartering there and then having branches all over the place. And their most iconic sort of coming out, hey, they work is what we see on the left which is the lever building. And so these synonyms, the icon of international style curtain wall, high rise, slick and sleek contrasting the historic buildings there. And just imagine, you remember DeSoto as a kid in the early fifties how basically amazingly refreshing that was. Natalie then was a partner together with Gordon Bunchef as the other elite designer on that building. And you see her on the top right with the O in the SOM name, Mr. Owings. And this picture is wrongly giving the impression that she's the boss and he is the one working under her. But in fact, what made her eventually leave the firm was her frustration that she still did not get the credits she would have deserved to really been having been an instrumental designer in the firm. And again, we still have that discrimination. I always, if I'm lucky, I have half of my emerging generation in my classes being female and then they get less and less and by the time they're professionals, then they only few of them and we really, really need to change that. And so here, Natalie is most notable if not her main building was the one at the bottom right that is the equitable building. And that is close to a building that we're gonna visit later in the show and that Plaza in front of that has been significantly altered. And she after that basically quit from the office because she was frustrated about discrimination. She went into coaching. She taught at the University of Austin, Texas to then return to Chicago towards the end of her life and lived there until the end of her life. And we caught there above Mr. Owings head and next to her that she was a founding member of the Chicago woman in architecture movement and organization and that's great. So that way she had paved the way for female emancipation in the discipline and profession of architecture and paved the way amongst others for Jeanne Gang who when we get to the next slide are looking at her most recent project and let's talk about that more. So in the last four minutes, however, we have we can just scratch the surface, but let's do that. Well, you pointed out that there is a strange architectural word you hadn't heard before nor have I, frustrum. And that refers to a pyramid that the top has been cut off of and this particular building uses repeated versions of that which actually in this case just look like bulging curves but the really notable part of this is towards the top there are two empty floors and that is something that was put there to reduce the wind resistance blowing against this building and because this is a skinny building this is something that's trendy right now in architecture. The amount of flexibility, the amount of resilience and the amount of resistance to the wind all required that this be done. So this is a unique thing that you don't see very frequently other buildings have done it, but it's very uncommon and it's something that's really notable in addition to the outward shape too. Yeah, and we should dive more into that next week when we have more time for that. And let's just look at this, you know the angle we took the picture of here they're trash dump trucks here at the bottom left as you can see as to serve like that big monster infrastructural monster of the city but in this sort of overview panoramic of the buildings almost not noticeable just the very thin line of it to the very right is that Mies van der Rohe building you build around the same time of the IBM building which he then didn't witness its completion because he had passed away. That's the building where that architectural center is in there that were recommended we should also have in Honolulu. And then you see all the other basically in the tradition in this tradition these square boxes and we see aqua tower sticking out in the second half to the right there in the back. And then we have what we just started to talk about which was formerly called the Wanda Vista Tower and which is with big key L architects together and that comes from the same background the L I think stands from Mr. Löwenberg and that's a firm that he sort of initiated to be together with another partner. And so it all ties back to I guess the perfect marriage and meeting point between Genie Gang and Jim Löwenberg in this area of development and then gave her the chance to design this building which again ending on that note of freeing the female architects from discrimination and putting them there where they belong. With this new building, Genie has rightly so earned herself the reputation to have designed the tallest building in the world designed by a woman. And that's certainly something notable and to be celebrated. Again, how us guys are trying to compete with that in Chicago and in the world. We have been talking about basically Adrian Smith with his tallest building in the world that I had just sent us this hilarious article from this one guy who said this should have never been built because it's pretty, you know, insane and empathetic in its concept to wanting to be a desert flower but not perform anywhere close as what the flower does. And that's all main criticism. Whenever architects, even Genie, we encourage her to do even better than she already does, tries pretty good to put performance, also environmental performance in the foreground of architectural gestalt and not the post-modern image of it. With that, we're at a point to make a cut and learn more about that crazy thing about a blow through floor and how that makes us jealous for us. And until then, please stay inclusively easy breezy, easy breezily inclusive. Bye-bye. See you later. 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 LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.