 Welcome you all back to another episode of Human Crimean Architecture here from our coastal cosmopolitan city of Honolulu, Hawaii. And if we can get the first picture up, which is also introducing my co-host, DeSoto. Hi DeSoto. Hello Martin and hello everybody who happens to be watching. And we're gonna look into what today, what do we see? Well we're gonna start out with making some comparisons between yours and my respective cultures. And so we're making reference to German culture and Hawaiian culture. And on the left side of the screen you see this kooky thing which is a envelope that once contained what are called genuine Hawaiian ukulele strings made in Germany. So I don't know how that genuine Hawaiian gets in there, but as we've talked about these these two cultures do have some intermingling. And there's also the fascination that people in a culture have for another culture that they're not part of. So I was always fascinated by Volkswagen's and so I had a Volkswagen Beetle. And you can see me in my Volkswagen Beetle and you can see the fate of my Volkswagen Beetle after it flipped on the freeway in 1978. But we also see a Volkswagen van parked at Kapiolani Park surrounded by hula dancers. So there are those two German and Hawaiian connections right there. Absolutely. And through these objects we're actually able since post-contact to sort of get an appetite for each other even more above and beyond imagination, through tangibility, through things, right? Absolutely. And as we were talking about if you've gone back a hundred years, people in Germany who are fascinated by the Hawaiian islands would never have been able to get here back in those days. But nowadays there is much more of an international connection as we will see as we continue. And never mind it might be slowed down because of the coronavirus. But regardless you see this little map up there that shows you how quick you can actually get from this one side of the world to the other one a minimum of two planes. You go from one from here to the mainland on the west coast and then one more you end up in Frankfurt or in Munich. So let's go to the next slide to talk about how culture informs climate and vice versa. These are images from the top row is you and your skins. You're and we're going to do a show about that topic that's the one we work on for the longest and the bottom is me. And in the middle is the reason why we're both here because some now six years ago I was fairly new to the island. I read in the newspaper on the title page that they're going to air condition all the schools. And I just had to get into no hard wick, our co-green colleague, show colleague. And he said you want to discuss this on camera and I said sure and the rest is history. And so you know here we are as kids and you know within the realm of pedagogues this sort of phase of before school so preschool is the most important right. This is where the foundations for what you become later on as a human being are laid. That's right that's right and we see that you in Germany were in the snow and I had a brief period in the snow as well but most of the time I was in the tropics. But you only had a short period of time in the tropics or a warm time of year in Germany in the temperate climate because as you were just saying to me 60 of the civilizations in the world and the population live in temperate zones 40 in the warm tropical zones. So those two different types of climates really speak to how architecture works and how architects and the people who live in buildings respond to those and that's what we're going to be talking about how your family firm in Germany dealt with the different climates that are necessary and how the schools for example you were talking about preschools how those work when you're dealing with those climates. Absolutely and the bottom right you can see at that short window of season of summer you know two to three months we up on our rented roof terrace here and this is the family firm you see our Father Günther at the bottom riding you see my sister Cynthia you see myself that's how it all started let's go to the next slide and share you know again what we're just talking about if you talk to pedagogues again this is the time that's most influential and we were just talking that while I experienced Sesame Street you were a little too old and the generations today they don't even know that anymore all they know is the iPads and they can watch whatever but then there is a sort of anti-phenomenon of nature deprivation and then the question is how do we move on from there and so next slide we've been talking about this you know here and there making a reference but now we actually want to offer that if some people watching are interested to actually take them there and this would be a trip in the third week of January next year in 21 it includes Martin Luther King days actually would only have to be away for four working days would be an intensive week and what would we visit? Well you would be visiting if I understand correctly the various buildings that have been built by your family firm to spang architectures or architects and we're going to be looking at three of those buildings today they're specifically schools or preschools and you pointed out and I can see what you mean those three skinny pictures at the top of the screen the red the yellow and the black resemble the colors that are used on the German flag except they're in the wrong or the different order and for this particular trip when you said it's going to be in January I said but January is so cold and you pointed out that actually this is a good thing for people from here to go and experience the cold and the snow of that time period to see how these buildings respond to that because that's really crucial in their energy usage. Yeah and next slide here which is the first project we did just before the millennium my oldest son was was basically born already so that informed me as a father to design this typology for my son not directly he went to another preschool but for for peers and so this show here is different than the previous shows we're not going to explain what we see but we actually get you excited about wondering what it is and we're going to talk about for whom this all might be interesting and we're thinking it should be above and beyond architects this here obviously is a model we made and there is a north error at the very bottom right so orientation is really a key and has you know an impact and otherwise we will tell you on the side why the building is positioned the way you see it indicated here and let's move on to the next slide what else do we see well we're seeing a steel structure that's being built but we see very clearly that there's an orientation in the way that the roof is tilted and it's open on one side and obviously i don't know exactly what this building is going to look like when it's finished because i've been there but i know that that's going to be something that is going to be very pertinent and one of the things that we're going to see again and again in this discussion is the necessity for at the certain times of year gathering as much solar energy as possible during the winter capturing that inside to help warm you up and then during the summer there are going to be reasons that it isn't quite as bright on that side but you want to also insulate from the cold wind that's going to be blowing usually from certain directions and we're going to see more of that as we go on and this picture here is it could get structural engineers excited right so why and so in the department of engineering the the civil engineers right so why do you use a certain system here so we will then tell you guys about that when we're there and next slide is how that that got infilled so this is for material scientists or for artists how the surface is you know what what are they meaning what is their sort of strategic implementation in the project next slide you know for cold people this is interesting because that was built at a time when they were discussing either the federal government or the state weren't obligated to adopt what here is the American Disability Act ADA so it opened the opportunity to have this sort of two story experiences in the kindergarten without having to build an elevator and obviously the the cons of that are you know obvious but what could be the pros of that and we would find out when we visited yeah and you know i also will say too as you just mentioned not only are the aesthetics of these materials important but how they perform is important too yeah so you want something that looks appealing you want something that people want to be in as a building but you also are always considering what is this going to do in terms of heating cooling the comfort and the livability of what this is one other aspect is and that's even another code is acoustics because you got this little young screaming voices you know and so you got to keep that within moderation so we will tell you actually interesting details and the top right so what informed that acoustical ceiling there it's not off the shelf that's customized but everything within a very kind of restricted budget because these are public projects yeah and i can also point out too that there are codes for fire and there are codes for evacuation those things come into play too particularly for schools yeah so you as an architect had to take all that into account and we will share that it could be very instructive for potential emerging people so next slide here is this this i was i'm introducing three terms with this slide that you got very excited about and they're they're called ebd evidence-based design lca life cycle assessment and poe post occupancy evaluation and that's terms that americans came up with and basically all means you look at how buildings perform after they have been constructed we're gonna look at that and and what did they do to this wall that gets you excited well i thought this is pretty amusing because as i was saying earlier we've got this connection of germany and the hawaiian islands in various unexpected ways and this is a a mural that was painted on the walls quite sometime after this building was built and this isn't part of the preschool it's part of an area of the of the complex for older kids but it has hawaiian or tropical themes painted on it and it's called the island and so it in addition to the fantasy things of the of the monkey with the key to get into the treasure chest there's also a volcanic island in the background like the hawaiian islands and it's got palm trees and it's got a sunset and all this other stuff germans longing for the tropics the south seas and the hawaiian islands so for that to show up in germany is always very interesting and amusing to me and as you pointed out nobody knew at the time but you as one of the architects we're going to go from germany to a tropical island no yeah so next slide um is the final one of this one uh we actually call this building type what you call the the next stage in sort of the process in schooling the kindergarten we call these preschool ones kindergarten and either way they're close enough but the term that you adopted kindergarten is a german word that you literally adopted so it means you give equal emphasis to the outdoors and the indoors and here's a picture from that sort of official website from the organization that runs the kindergarten we also going to deliver a couple of readings here about peer reuse of the projects don't worry as you said you know several are in english but some are german so we don't require to speak german because i'm going to translate but you could look into one or the other one and spice it up and you know if i can just point out something too when i was in elementary school um i went to classrooms i attended classrooms that were very similar in construction to this that you built but the ones that i was in were from the 1950s and they had a very similar structure and they also each classroom had its own little garden or yard behind it and this was part of a complex that's located at punoho school which has now been demolished but it precedes yours by quite some time but it's got a lot of similarities thank you i take this as a big compliment next slide um again this one was built before the millennium uh we germans weren't quite as strict on uh energy uh performing building performance but by the time we're building this next one here that was 10 years after germans had mandated for many of the municipalities to make these public buildings off the grid we're using the toughest um energy efficiency standard in the world the pacifist standard it means 15 kilowatt hours per square meter per year which for non-scientists means the size of a hairdryer so almost nothing for heating and cooling so this is what you know fascinates you that buildings have to get by in the winter and freaking cold which we might face when we go there in January and how do they do that and we find out once we are there you know real time and experiencing it with all our senses and move on to the next slide um again we we're talking about structure each of these buildings has a different structure intentionally what you know we as as it should be you you basically evaluate what you have done before and then you think you should do it better so this became a light wood frame uh system here all prefabricated and craned in as you can see at this point it's it's a beefed up balloon frame american system that's actually insulated with shredded newspapers with cellar loads and and when i looked at this picture i asked you is there any steel structure inside that and you just said no there isn't i was misled a little bit because there's a girder across the top which is purely there for being able to lift this prefab wall structure in place and something else i think i should bring up which i mentioned to you earlier i asked you about on the six based on the success or the construction of that first school building your firm was then asked to do two more and so that is something that you got into as a little sort of specialty and those are the buildings that we're looking at today that's true next slide shows us the enclosure as you you know again different to here the north side gets hit by the brisk you know winter winds so you got to keep it rather opaque and rather closed you have to work all these systems in so we will deliberate on that and investigate in that let's go to the next slide and then to the other side to the south you open it to the max but have to put glazed in different than here because you can't have that heat escape but it's basically as we talked the educational process it's obviously also for the interest of interest for the department of education for example for the college of education for educators because how does it inform how does sort of space like that inform the upbringing of of kids and in this case i've been sharing with you that the kids actually go home and educate their parents so a reverse way and it usually is because they point out to that most likely what a radiant furnace they have in front of the window and ask their parents what is that and the parents say well it's a furnace and they said well we don't need that and why don't they well two things one because you've got these big open windows to gather the sunlight when it's coming through and you also have all the people inside it because all of us human beings are always giving off heat so we heat our environment as well as the sun heating our environment so you can capture all that heat and one thing that also really strikes me is the difference between classrooms of the early 20th century versus something like this classrooms traditionally were always closed off you didn't want kids looking outside being distracted and of course they didn't have the capacity technologically to do that so you had small windows because everybody's got to be focused on learning and the teacher this is a different situation in which as you were saying you want the outside to be part of the learning experience yeah and there are certain things we can where we travel we can literally sort of adopt and use for us for example here that the green that's on the trees which over there is deciduous so it's only on there in the summertime but here it's on the trees all the time you can really use that as effective shading right yes to keep the space cool which we need all the time because the big problem is that schools tend to overheat so use the natural the best sort of shading and the cheapest is trees and next slide we also then will visit it from the inside obviously and we'll look again how does it wear and tear how does it work how are the surfaces basically a background a backdrop for what should be the emphasis on the daily basis which is the expression of the children and here is two visitors that we're going to explain who they were in a little bit and in the middle is the director of the school Mrs. Savitsa so she will be with us and explain it from her point of view which might be slightly different than ours yeah actually yeah of course next slide is the final one so this is a condition here again that we never have here where the leaves are off the tree we will find that condition over there maybe we find snow which we see in a little bit with the last project and you see how that sort of sun is basically helping or majorly sort of heating the building in the in the winter time again a couple of readings assigned at the very top and we move on to the next slide the third project is some years after that where we're asked to do another a passive house building for one of Germany's oldest universities in Göttingen and this project we've been sort of referencing to here and there and shows this is sort of sculptured out of the topography of that specific almost botanical arboreum garden of the university and next slide it's showing us again another tectonic again for the structural engineers for the civil engineers first was in steel second one was in wood frame this is in prefab concrete or prefabricated direct similarity to great specific rock and mountain precast we have here on the island which we always say for the projects we imagine and envision they would provide the technology right yeah yeah so next slide we will bring plans so we will we can read you know and learn about the comprehensiveness of all the parts and pieces and components and how they all come together and the different disciplines as we've been talking of we want this to be interdisciplinary break outside of our architectural ivory tower and and simulate and tour as we as you want would work on these projects as we worked on this project because we needed a structural engineer we needed a mechanical engineer we had a passive house consultant we had a landscape architect so we're going to talk about these sort of collaborative nature of these interdisciplinary interactions that only if you do that you can achieve results like that you know and i think the other thing that we can mention is you just said earlier how does it actually work in practice because talking to the the head of the school is going to tell you you know this works well this doesn't we need more space here we need more storage space this whatever those things are that's where you're going to hear despite just your concepts beforehand yeah what did it actually turn into exactly yeah next slide and that's the condition we might hit right because in January there's no winter this year but there might be one and so we will see i mean you said you know the kids can only use their outdoor classroom a little bit but they do when they go out but then when it gets to cold they go inside so the picture on the left is when we had three weeks of lizards and no sun so how in the world can you make this happen that without heating or with only natural heating as the 40 kids being little furnaces and then the sun that isn't even there for three weeks how can that happen that you get it that cozy and comfortably behind like this little cuddling corner they created themselves with these cushions right and i think too that again technologically one of the ways you do that is by having multiple panes of glass yeah we don't really have to do that here but in cold climates you need the insulation of of air between two panes or three sometimes pieces of glass and that's one of the ways you can have snow on the outside but not be frozen on the inside and the condition we always have next slide we have there too we want to experience that at that time we have to come at another time we're experiencing that where the same structure has to keep out the sun but to keep the view as achieved in this case next slide um there is a landscape arc aspect here as well in a very particular way what's that one well this building although it immediately apparent is actually built partly underground so it was built on a hill it's built on a slope it's gone it's sort of carved out of the hill and then it's got a berm on top of it with a totally green roof and we talk about green roofs as being something that we desire because you've got plants living on the roof that are transpiring and doing good things well that's what this building is it's almost entirely a green roofed building so that way again this should appeal to the landscape architects we have a new landscape program so they can see firsthand this is an intensive green roof that's different to an extensive and we will make that comparison of that distinction and next slide um again we have tested this this is uh Chris Chiqueta who had we had him on a show that was called Jungleism some uh many shows ago and and Siraj Sharif here who were coming on their initiative when they were doing the Copenhagen and they said Martin we want to finally see what you've been talking about here and then we want to check it out so here's Mr. Savitsa the director so again that was fun and they liked it so we thought we offer this in a more formal way next slide and we will move on to the the big city one over and that is Hamburg it's only an hour train right away and there's a lot to learn from there we did a show in the in a preview we did one episode in the previous show that was called urban transcendence and we call this one here Hamburg's Harbour City Germany's Kakaako or you know or similar and and there's a peer from my prairie days in Nebraska Annetta who did the same exchange I did a year after me and she's been part of that development and there's a lot to learn from there what to do better and you know as far as school there's a very urban school we know that the Department of Education want to implement something like that now do an urban school in Kakaako so this is a place where we can learn from that because it's already been implemented you see that big cruise ship there we did one show about we called it horizontal high rises right and now they're you know in the spotlight of the corona containing quarantining you know this is the the new the the the redux of the Queen Mary that goes straight to a New York City and they're always docks there and what impact that has on that building next to it we will then talk about what we're there amongst other things right yeah and there's a very interesting story as to how many cities in the world which are port cities have had to redevelop large areas because once container shipping came in their previous dock facilities became obsolete so all of those areas are ripe for redevelopment and they're being redeveloped in a lot of different places yeah and last slide here what is the final deliverable of the course well one of the final deliverables is going to be if i'm correct a think tech show or at least a think tech like show and it's going to do a video production is that right that's what what our you know founding uncle j encouraged us he said why don't you let the students do one of course we will tutor them and train them because we've been doing it for a while so that would be then very attractive maybe to the College of Communication of Journalism oh yeah how do you sort of wrap up things and basically portray and communicate the learning outcome of this week to then be always and forever YouTube and available and you can show and share to your peers and later on to your children and grandchildren so with that hopefully we get you excited to join us it's going to happen in January again next year sign up early first come first serve and we will offer if you can't make it for this one maybe for you know filled up already we're going to have some alternatives for you we're going to have four more study trips planned for different typologies that our firm has case studied so stay tuned for that we're going to talk about them next in the next three shows so hopefully you the solo then will join us for one on the other and i think i'll go to one of the ones that's happening in a warmer time all right here than january oh we can do april because april is probably okay likely and yeah that's a that's a show that you will like as well that has a lot to do and we don't tell you guys yet you gotta tune in again so until then hope we see you again and stay tropically exotic and also temporarily interested because again um saying that some of our brightest emerging talents might not want to or can stay on the island they might need to work somewhere else and as you pointed out 60 of the world climates and culture are likewise the one we're going to talk about so this might help you out in your career anyways so i'll see you next week for another episode of human human architecture and we give you a little hint we're going to continue a little bit in this sort of realm and talk about extended education and until then bye