 Good to have you all back to Think Tech Hawaii's human human architecture. We're broadcasting live again this week from our opposite ends of the world. Yudhisoto back in Honolulu, Hawaii. Hey, Yudhisoto. How do you do? Hello, Martin and hello everybody else. I'm good and let's bring up the first slide to give you guys an idea of where I am and that's going to be the next slide, the first slide. So I'm back in my hometown of Hanover in Germany for a couple of days hosted by Lenny and Rima, who you see at the very bottom right. And also tomorrow we will move on to our Polynesian pop basement buddy, Stefan and Kirsten and Kru. And so Stefan had actually yesterday recommended to us to watch a documentation on TV by an originally French channel called RT and I got you excited about that one. We quote that at the very top left, right? What made you think of this photo? Well, I was kind of amused by this because it says that this program was referred to as or at least it was printed in the newspaper listing is Jimmy Carter, the rock and roll president. And I did not think of Jimmy Carter as being particularly a rock and roll kind of a guy. But I think what you were what this was pointing out and if I'm paraphrasing you correctly, Jimmy Carter was anxious for a lot of different people to be represented at the White House and he was anxious for people to be able to express themselves and work on their own without him necessarily imposing himself on them. And he had friends who were rock performers and he had a variety of people come to the White House and perform outside on the lawn. And there is a cover of the New Times magazine shown in the video, which you took a photo of, which shows him with some rock and roll stars of the 1970s. And so Jimmy Carter, we think is actually in very admirable character. He was, I think, unjustly maligned at the time as being weak and not very effectual. But in fact, he is a very strong humanitarian. Jimmy Carter continues to work behind the scenes being a humanitarian. He physically helps construct homes for people who need them. He is still doing that as a very elderly man now. And he's a good guy. And so we're talking about him as a representative of that particular time period in the 1970s after we got rich rid of Richard Nixon in 1974. That's going to be the subject of what we're talking about today. We're talking about Steve Awe. We're paying homage to Steve Awe, who is a local architect. And he was working very, very actively in the 70s. And some of his work is very much of the 1970s zeitgeist. That's a German word that we both like. So we're going to be using Jimmy Carter as a way to talk about Steve Awe. Absolutely. And not to forget, we're two weeks away from the presidential election. Rather than getting frustrated about what's currently going on again, here's an example that Europeans prefer to look back at the best practices of America. And Jimmy Carter, as you perfectly said, embodying that and representing that sort of humbleness and being more an orchestrator and not wanting to be the one up on stage, but let the people take the stage and be helping them to do so. So as you said, and we go to the next slide, what Jimmy Carter. And so here we see Steve Awe next to his partner in crime on the Victoria Ward team, Richard Lowe. And we've been reporting, we've been excited about Steve's work for quite a while. And these are four shows we did. And two of the projects are luckily still there. One is his own house that we'll revisit at the end of the show and in between here and there. And the other one is one of my mentees basically just gave me the good news. He found out online that he thinks, but Steakhouse being basically not a Steakhouse anymore. But he said a clinic moved in and that might be good news because then it will be saved. The two other projects here, Ward Warehouse and Ward Plaza, are unfortunately gone and we're very sad about that. And if we go to the next slide and here, we're seeing a project that we only very recently were made aware of that is actually very close to the two unfortunately torn down. And that is here on Ward Avenue and that's the HECO building. And it's mostly known or not really known because the project or the building that we see here is a building from the late 40s that is rather non-descript. Still a nice building, but rather non-descript. And so if we go to the next slide, we basically see and we all pull this from a PDF that's online, a request for proposal by HECO who wants to redevelop, what wants the site to be redeveloped and then actually move their stuff to another site. And again, you basically and I myself shame on us. We weren't fully aware of, you know, Steve, our authorship around and we can say behind this project here. But again, just like again with Jimmy Carter, who is not, you know, wanting to be on stage, he wanted to be people be up on stage. Steve intentionally very could have understatedly pushed his addition to the historic buildings back from the street frontage. And the only thing that raises, you know, it makes you aware of is this sort of retaining wall out of Brutalist vultry concrete that then wraps around and almost like a wayfinding device guides you into the building. And the picture at the bottom right basically shows you a little clue, a little hint that kind of hovering and can levering prospectively over that wall is about the only indication you pretty much have of the building. Yeah. And I think that that's very interestingly different from most Brutalist buildings because of course, as you said, this is a 1947 building, which is the one that's prominently up against Ward Avenue that everybody can see. But you don't see the retiring setback concrete Brutalist building, which is a part of it and was added many years later. But I think the other thing to bring up is in the aerial view of this site, you can see how large it is. You can also see that it's in an area that's increasingly urbanized and that is leading Hawaiian Electric to want to move away from the city to a place where they can have more room, presumably not pay as much land taxes. But also it's just to us because they are asking for proposals that this whole site could very well be redeveloped, which means that potentially that Brutalist building is threatened, which is something that we would prefer not happen. But let's keep going and keep talking about the rest of it. Yeah. And that's the next slide that is taken intentionally by the photographer to highlight the building, which you usually wouldn't precede that way, as we said. It's kind of intentionally pushed to the back, understatedly standing in the second row. And the RFQ basically labels this here as being opportunities. On the top right, we see our crew from Doca Momo basically having selected it for an initiative, which is an international initiative that's called 70s turning 50. So now all these buildings are from now on, at least potentially being qualified to be on the historic register, right? And so Doca Momo basically did a survey and a poll and a competition. And Steve's building basically made it on a, I think, was like a top 10 list. And also they did more research and found out that, in fact, it's a collaboration between Steve and another famous architect from that era, was Pietro Bellucci, who was a Portland based modernist, but also or even more known as having been the Dean of the Michigan Institute of Technology, MIT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, of course, that our friend Ron is an alum from and went to that school and many others. So that was a collaboration. That collaboration seemed to have been more of mutual nature than these days where there's a mainland architect and the local contact architect served more as kind of a minion to it. This year seemed to have been again more sort of an eye to eye collaboration on that one. And again, why do we say what you already rightly said up front? And the sort of why is this a keeper? Because next slide, it reminds us what's going on next door. And that's the Blaisdale we've been reporting about periodically. And what they want to tear down is what we see at the bottom right, which is the, which used to be and it's got altered in the early 90s already. Got her metasized, but that was a very beautiful, tropical, exotic kind of inverted mushroom pillar, like a nervy inspired kind of structure that this sort of proposal that the governor basically launched, excuse me, the mayor launched Mayor Caldwell basically suggests to be replaced with what comes across as rather unproportionately out of scale, large and clumsy. And it's by the architectural front of Snow Hedda that I had the chance to meet one of their founding principals, Craig Dikers, who you see at the very top left. And you wanted to see a house in Omaha, Nebraska, which highly informed them. That's by the 70s local agirro and Neil Astley, who you see at the top right next to that one. So again, people like Craig, you know, are aware of the power and the importance of these kind of silent, quiet masters of that, maybe the last era of authenticity and in culture and society and architecture embodying that. Next slide, right? Yeah, yeah. So we again, we have been you have been personally sitting, you know, over decades in Steve's work in Warth Warehouse, right? Oh, yes. And enjoying it as being so humane and humid and humane and human as the nature and the title of the show is. You have been kindly helping out our German American Chamber of Commerce exchange for many years. And here I had been sitting down with these people from Mercedes Benz Energy, who again, where did I meet them in Warth Warehouse? Because it's the best place to meet people from where I'm from, because that's the most tropical, exotical place you were able to think of. And it's unfortunately gone. But luckily, there is other pieces by Steve that because Steve is so shy and humble, he rarely shares. And recently and came out when Bundit was sharing a discussion he had with Steve about his own house that we'll get to. And basically Steve said, well, for a while, my own house served as what we call home office in these, which we do a lot these days, have to do a lot. And they were designing the project that you see at the very top right, which is something when exotic as capism expert Suzanne was lastly with us. The project drew us magnetically without us knowing here again about the author. So it's not like, OK, this is a Steve Owl. You must see me, right? It's like, this is a great project. It makes sense. It's appealing. It's appropriate for the place and the climate and the people. And so now I found out is why it drew me because again, Steve has been conceiving it, right? So there's more out there. Yeah. And the thing that also struck me about seeing this in photographs is that it's on a site very similar to his own house. And it was we're about to see that's a very steep hill that he built on. And as I just said to you, in many other in many other situations, people would consider it undevelopable because of how steep it was. But Steve built a very vertical skinny structure on it. Well, that's the way this condo group looks to in an area not too far away from where Steve built his house. So it's appropriate that he was working on this particular complex in his own home because it's rather similar to his own home. Yeah. And in this wide range of diversity of typologies that Steve has been doing were now in the one of dwelling. And Steve actually then was, you know, intending to go even higher. And let's go to the next slide and look at some of his visions for that Victoria Ward area, which is now known as Kakaako, right? Yeah. Well, this was what we're seeing here is, first of all, we have the sad loss of the ward warehouse and one photograph. But we also can see that there were plans. There have been other plans for this area. When Ward Warehouse was destroyed, we were not particularly enthusiastic about what was proposed to take the place on that site of two large Howard Hughes condos. That entire complex of the two big buildings got dropped after a great deal of money had been spent on it. So we were sort of heartened by that. And then unfortunately, what is now being proposed for development and in fact, that development is getting started is really something not that much different. It's another big hermetic high rise. So we lost Ward Warehouse and we're not really gaining something that anywhere brings back anything that was comparable to what that originally was. But Steve was involved in a project in the 1970s, which I think is going to be in our next slide if we want to go to that. And this is a really interesting situation. In the late 1970s, there was a grand proposal for the mass development redevelopment of Kakaako. And this was going to be sort of a new urban area. And the Victoria Ward property was going to participate in that and work along with what I believe the city or the state, the city probably were looking towards. And we see here a bunch of renderings of the buildings that might have been built on the Victoria Ward property. Which again, are high rises, of course, as you can tell. But unlike the modern day ones, they were not hermetically sealed. They were a situation of stacked lawn eyes. That's what we like to see where the open air is available to people because they've got lawn eyes, they've got sliding doors, they have windows, and it's not a glass box where you can't open the windows. That's what was proposed back 40 years ago. And unfortunately, it did not come to pass in the way it was planned at that time. Yeah, but there's still some lots to develop by hard use. So our message is, okay, build one of Steve's and Rich's primitives. They're basically skinny towers, right? And they're doing, even in their kind of floor plan gesture, they're doing what you should do in the tropics is spread out. And let's get as much of the trade winds to you to cool you. So, and you pointed out that in the picture on the bottom left, you can also see what luckily actually hard use has done as the only thing from the proposal is to keep the architect of your youth of growing up as a post IBM building. And it also is showing, it's one of the predecessors of, or one of the examples found objects on that side, which is Yamazaki's and Erfrid Yi's 1315 Alamona Boulevard that we did a show about. So this is really the kind of the development of a genetic code, pretty much in the kind of the Kevin Lynchy ideal of basically a horizontal forest, a greenscape, and then out of that, these kind of easy breezy kind of artificial trees kind of grow out of in a very beautiful way. So again, while unfortunately, some of these invasive species towers have been planted already, and all we're suggesting provocatively is knock out their glass and easy breezy them, but that's again us. But hopefully more realistically, how I'd use, watch us listen to this and reach out and dig out these plans and basically consider to finally build one of these very tropical, exotic creatures here, as they were suggesting. And again, has had Steve expertise in that? Yes, let's go to the next slide, because as you pointed out before, his own house pretty much is that in sort of a bonsai version, right? Yeah, and what you see here is elements that we saw in Ward Warehouse, the large exposed beams, the use of the use of the natural wood texture and the natural wood coloring, and you said, and I never got to visit this house, but you did, and you've got to take these pictures there. It was really like one big tall stairway, because it was on this extremely steep hillside, and there are, you can see a shot of the of the stairway without any railings on it, but you pointed out that his children managed to grow up in that house without falling off the stairway when there weren't any railings. And lots of grandchildren as well. Oh, that's right, that's right, that's right. And as you said, the house is sort of a one big stairway, a big tall stairway with landings that form the rooms really. And on one side, you're up against the slope of the mountain, so you look at the greenery. And then on the other side, you look out at this magnificent vista, looking over the ocean towards the small islands offshore. Yeah, so it's pretty much like a tree with a staircase being the vertical circulation being the trunk, and then these landings and the livable spaces around that are branches that just branch off that major trunk in the middle. A very beautiful, very appropriate interpretation of nature. And this is his wonderful wife Irene there in the kitchen with some of our Doko Momo members visiting these many years ago. And then go to the next slide. We see again, then also, so it's facing the mountains, Malca, and it's also facing Makai. So you also have these spectacular like dematerialized views of that most beautiful part of the island with these natural features there. And in the best sense of an inside out design approach, not designing an object that you squeeze the function in like the Frank Gehrys do it, right? This is pretty much designed around human activity and event, like, you know, the monkey climbing up the tree. And that basically then formalizes itself just like a tree. A tree isn't designed as an object. A tree is a beautifully most sophisticated and brilliantly developed organism that then just looks the way it has to look as it functions. Yeah. And I think, as you just said, it's not a matter of the architect saying this is what the exterior is going to look like and will sort of fit the humans inside. It's here's where the humans need to live. Now we'll build around that given the circumstances of the site itself. Yeah, absolutely. And we move on to the next slide here. We're seeing Steve sitting again in one of the branches here. And you can see he's part of that slope and he's being part of that mountain. And you see on that small image there how it basically nests in that heavily wooded area there. And that's in Lanekai where you find otherwise a lot of pathetic McMansions with sort of invasive species styles and basically leveled sites. And as you said to Soda, you know, he first of all, as we know from him, he didn't have the means to basically level the site and do heavy landscaping and movement of soil. But more importantly, his attitude was very much like in the sense of the Pritzker Prize winner Glenn Merkert from Australia who said touch the earth lightly and have the smallest possible footprint as to not interfere more with the beauty of the natural environment than you would need to and then complement it with something architecturally that's as logic as nature is. So very beautifully achieved that very high goal. Right, and made of wood so that it fits with a natural leafy vegetated site. Absolutely. So next slide and second to last one, we have to come to the end of the show. But this is us as Dokomomo part of our team here being mesmerized by Steve and Irene here telling us these stories. And again, they're as you can see in their attitude and their gestures and what they're wearing, they're very relaxed. They're very much like Jimmy again coming back to the beginning, very much in peace and in balance with themselves and true humanists. And you see that again, you can literally see that that's how he was doing as architecture, not as a sculptor, but as a humanist and trying to create spaces and places that we're serving people. And we're not talking about rich people. All his projects are very civic projects, very public projects. And even his residential projects are not again. So again, very much like Jimmy in many ways who you refer to still to these days working for Habitat for Humanity and doing houses for people who are in need. So phasing out last slide, we want to point out having been talking about Bunda Karnista Khan. He's currently the curator of an exhibit in the gallery of the School of Architecture. And this is a poster that advertises his efforts. And not only can you see projects there and pictures that we haven't been able to pick up on. And we want to leave this up to basically to Bunda to come on a show in the near future and talk about all that. But you also have a bunch of interviews, short clips that basically Bunda has been recording and doing with several people who are feeling very strongly in the most positive way about Steve and again, want to all thank him as we want to do for what he has given to us on our islands and being this really perfect embodiment of human humane for our built environment, trying to be as close in compliance with the beauty and the perfection of our exquisite natural environment. So thank you, Steve, for that. Yeah, and I wanted to also just say too that looking at this, this, the thing that we're looking at here about this exhibit or this virtual exhibit is it makes me want to find out more about Steve because we know some of his high profile work, but I don't have any good sense of how much he worked on over his entire career or what those buildings are, what they looked like. And at the top of the pictures on the right column, you can see a picture of him in the 1960s with a bunch of other people sitting in front of Ilani Palace. And that made me think, well, what about the rest of his career and who else did he work with, etc. So I look forward personally to finding out more about what he achieved and what he did during his lifetime. Absolutely. So be excited about that one. And until then, thank you, Steve, for all the inspiration and motivation, much appreciated, all the best. And yeah, see you all back in the near future for finding out more about this modern master of humanity. Thank you. Bye-bye.