 warm welcome back to think tech wise human human architecture. This is our 276th episode and Eric, our producer, thinks Eric always has the number which accumulated viewer you are. So thanks for being with us again and us is our triumvirate here of the three bald guys our most, well, we can't say most remote because we're all over the place but we have our banished Boston booster Metlo Blatt back and we have the Soto Brown back in his Bishop Museum and we have me Martin de Spang back in Munich, Germany. And in this episode, which is the Boston banished boost volume 13, we will commemorate the longevity of human life and its connections between the three locations of us looking forward to. Hey guys, so the Soto, we leave this appropriately up to you to talk about the longevity of human life in Honolulu, Hawaii, which we know statistically is the place that people get the oldest, live the longest because we have the best conditions of climate and culture where climate is the closest to our natural thermal comfort. Absolutely, and that does have relevance to the discussion of buildings and architecture as we will soon be discovering, but in this screen we're looking at a glamor photo of my mother which was taken in 1940 when she was 19 years old. Well, my mother just passed away last week at the age of 102, which is astonishing. She was born in 1920 and she managed to survive into 2023. So that's a pretty astonishing lifespan. And during that time, of course she saw great many things change, great many things happen. She lived through World War II here in the Hawaiian islands which was quite astonishing. She was on the island of Oahu on December 7th, 1941 to witness the Japanese attack as was my father and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, except for one. So she saw a lot. She lived through some interesting times. She lived for much of her life in an Asapoff-designed house that's relevant for us as well. So we're commemorating my mother and thank you for letting me do that, Martin. And now we can go back to our regularly scheduled programming. Yeah, and if I do the math, so that must have been this picture, a beautiful picture that must have been the year before the attack, right? Because that was in 1940 and 1941. That's right, that's right. And she saw it last time in 48. The house was built and but commissioned by other clients but you moved in in 51. Correct, they moved in. I hadn't been born yet. I was gonna say, but then like a third of the next decade you moved in because they, you know, made you see the light of the world. That's right, so that's where I lived for, and I've spent my entire life in and out of that house. Absolutely, and your mother is remembered for many things, obviously, by many people. And just as an example, the two show quotes at the bottom, one is at the very bottom, just between us there, that's Anne Modonaga. And when we were visiting her and they're still living in our beloved Kahala apartments which the countdown is on when it falls back to Kamehameha school because it leads hold and we're holding our breath and hoping for the best of it. And we were talking and she talked about your mother and she said, oh, I know Miss Brown as a fabulous shopper in Honolulu. So that's one of the many things she's known for. And she appeared in our show with an image. Actually, she was actually one of our most loyal viewers as well but the audience hardly ever heard that but when you were getting ready for the show in your house, she was participating and sometimes after that. But she only appeared other than here with this beautiful picture in one show that's the show quote in the middle right. And that was when we were reporting about the renovation of the part of our beloved Royal Hawaiian shopping center when she was shopping there with her sister who we see here as well, Ryan. Yeah, that's probably about when she was about 100 years old in her wheelchair. She was being wheeled around to look at things. She wasn't buying anything anymore but she still liked to look at things. Yeah, she was running strong up till the very end. That's right, she was. Let's try to cut the curve too, as you said, to our topic but let's take one more image, your slide, next slide, and do that and this is about the skins or our longest in the production making shows of a dress code, a dress code meaning building code and the relationship of the first human skin that we're born with. The second one that as we just said and this picture shows from your mom and her glamour time, the second skin is very important as well to human beings and then we have the third one which is our thresholds and closures of buildings, facades. And the show post top right is what we started out with last time when Semi and I were before we were coming back and now we have quite the challenge to re-adapt to the cold although met we have although, you know, far apart we have similar weird seasonally untypical warm climate conditions but we still have to try to get a depth to that in a way and some other young man here in the back in the temperate which we see at the bottom right the dream of the tropics and dream of America because the two boxes there is a product we just talked before the show about America at its best and in some parts not being there anymore but there's always signs of hope for me that was the company Nixon and the choice of their name is kind of odd because as far as human representatives the name Nixon is not the most beloved commemorated at least by some people but they named it after that and they serve, you know, accessories company and they make watches and they're a great example of still holding up the good old American principle of innovation and so these are two boxes that used to contain watches in there but he has a picture there standing in by the way an IKEA shelf system there and that is very familiar to you to Soto that picture. Yeah, actually that interestingly enough is if a culturally very inappropriate photograph which you would not guess right at the beginning to just look at it that looks like a young hula dancer who is just sitting there on something well, she's sitting on a drum she is sitting on a pahu and that is actually a terrible thing to do a pahu is considered to be something that almost has a soul and the top of it, the drum head is considered to be like the head of a person so you do not sit ever on a pahu but this is someone who was just posed in a photo studio and the photographer in the 1890s said oh, sit on this with no top on and you'll look really sexy and so it looks like, you know it's this wonderful cultural picture and it's actually a very erroneous cultural picture which most people don't know. It's for sharing and letting us know but also one has to say it is depicting actually the way people and that women were dressed not long ago before that, before contact, right? And when white people told the indigenous people not just in Hawaii and not to dress like that anymore and think about it between the beautiful picture of your mom and this one here is only three decades, 30 years, right? Yeah, that is true. That is true. And then on the other side, not just of this slide but the world and the other climates we're having this brand new out article from scientists who went to where I'm from in the north of Germany and discovered when humans were taking on a second skin that is actually the first skin of animal life which is a bear fur and that's quite interesting. I was thinking and doing some research on that. You know, what did you do to stay warm in the freaking cold back in the days, right? And we all know somehow vaguely we have these pictures of when we all had hair I mean, not just on the head that we don't have anymore but in general, right? All over the body. And at some point we and our ancestors long, long ago discovered fire as to stay warm. And I was finding out that, you know scientists are not quite clear there's a span from 200,000 years to 800,000 years and there are some findings 500,000 years ago when that fire was invented but it took until 6,000 years ago when petroleum which is petrified plants and animals, micro-animal organisms were discovered. And then it took another, you know it was 1,000 years ago only when basically the internal combustion engine was first, you know, sketched out but not until almost only 150 years ago it was fully commercialized. So that's like a micro baby step in the whole span of history that is now getting us all into trouble, right? This very short time we had been so abusive with fossil fuel than never before, right? So that's really interesting. And you DeSoto again, you're it's almost like I feel with all respect that thematically you seem to be more although officially you're a host but it seems to be like you're a guest because you might be the most remote from the building we're reporting about but you aren't because going back to your childhood you were in Massachusetts and in Boston and went to elementary school, right? Yes, I certainly did. And I experienced that. Exactly. And let's go to the next slide which is getting us back to the building here for Harvard that Matt, you and your firm did. And another connection is I think that word explicit that we should that your father has also something to do with Harvard, right? And in fact, with the department that Matt told me reminded us is right next to this one here which is the engineering school, right? Right and there, well, no, not the engineering school but he went to the business school. So that's why I spent my first grade year in Boston because my father was attending the Harvard Business School and the whole family went there too for him to do that. And so that was my first experience with bitter cold lots of snow and the whole nine yards. I was not wearing a bare skin. I was at that point clad in not so much synthetics yet because there weren't as many synthetics. There weren't puffy jackets made of synthetics at that point, but I have experienced that. So I do know what it's like. I did it again some years later when I was a teenager. So yes, I know what that is like even though I'm a pampered tropical person who is too delicate to deal with cold at this point. And yeah, sorry for the confusion but that's what I meant to say. The Matt just told me that the business school is right next to the engineering school. So they're neighbors, right? And again, what you and your father had to do and what you always have to do Matt in the winter when it's not unusually warm like now when I have to do in Munich, this is what buildings have to do as well or they should do just as well, right? They shouldn't basically do that. And they should perform in a way that when the climate is as we call temperate which is always a little confusing because increasingly in climate change we shouldn't get temperamented because it jumped from the very cold to the very hot and back and almost like skips on the moderate parts in between but buildings basically have to do and just like we human beings we then take off layers and we put on layers and how then buildings should do that could do that. We're in the midst of again reminding us thanks to Matt. So here is the project again the new engineering school for Harvard and let's go back in and you explain us not just its layout but also again it's sort of cocooning and it's conditioning of comfort level. Yeah, so I mean, as you mentioned it's the, this is the ground floor plan of the engineering school. So it's all of the spaces that are directly at the street level and it's very large building. It's about 500 feet long and so you start to see in the way that the spaces, these chunks of rooms are kind of broken up the desire to break the massing down and create multiple points of entry to this public zone that kind of connects all of these different spaces at the ground level. And so this happens to be sort of the most public floor of the building naturally because of its position next to the street and the public realm but also because it services all of the undergraduate functions that the building provides. So the sort of classrooms you can see on the left-hand part of the slide here there's kind of a cluster of classrooms, flat floor classrooms and slope floor classrooms and seminar rooms and then along in the spaces that kind of line the street to the top of the slide are also, they're all sort of, let's say engineering focused kind of making spaces for student activity. So there's a lot of student activity that's placed very visibly on the street level and facing towards the public part of the campus. The whole building then kind of wraps around an outdoor courtyard which is in the bottom part of the slide and is landscaped in a variety of different ways. The center portion is a kind of a manicured, more of a manicured lawn for events and graduations and things like that. And then ringing that main space is a bioswale that treats and filters all of the storm water that falls on the site and then collects it for reuse inside of the building. There's a term and architectural theory that especially the work of Stefan Venich and you guys have been sort of labeled with and that is, and the work of, the late work of Gunther too and probably as from the beginning, that is organic, right? And obviously sort of post-modern terms that got misunderstood as just formal, right? That things are not rectangular and straight. But let's talk a little bit about that. Talking about the human body, it reminds me almost as if the sort of, what's basically here rendered in grayish, brownish is basically seems to be like come across as organs functionally. And then the circulation in between continued to stretch the sort of metaphors to the medical realm, which we found out that both, you know, Stefan Venich, the youngest son and mine are in that realm of the medical realm as well on a personal, you know, traditionally corridors can almost be like, you know, cartily clogged. But it seems like that what's rendered in yellow is basically infusing and aerating, you know, as you said, already flushing with light and fresh air and with, you know, with frequency and, you know, people, right? Is that sort of fair to say or discuss? Yeah, no, definitely. I think, I mean, there's no reason why that the two walls of any corridor space have to be parallel to one another. And I think particularly given the kind of the ebb and flow of traffic and the way that people move through the building, it kind of creates this opportunity for those spaces to be variable and to use the kind of eddies of space that get created when two walls kind of, you know, radically diverge from each other is a place where people could naturally kind of occupy a certain area of floor. So you sort of, you can see through the drawings of the furniture and these plans, kind of the areas where that space opens up to its greatest extent and allows people to sort of linger and sit down and kind of really occupy some of these areas in a way that's different from the way that you would occupy the more programmatic usable spaces that are in the, as you said, in the gray areas. Matt, I have a question and I don't want to put you on the spot or anything, but for the progression from the thought and then the drawing and then the actual building when it's in use is a long one. And there are many changes that are made in the construction of and when this building was completed, are there things, and again, I don't want to put you on the spot, but are there things that work better than others that you can point out that once people were actually in it and doing things, you realized, oh, maybe it would have been better if we did it this way because people don't want to walk around there, they want to walk to that. That's a really great question, DeSoto. And I mean, you're absolutely right. I think any building is really just a record of the state of the art five years before it opens, right? Because once we draw these things and then they have to basically go into this construction process and the design of the building freezes during that period. I mean, we make changes a little bit a long way, but the basics are there, but industry doesn't stop and innovation doesn't stop our kind of normal patterns of life and thinking about how we occupy space, they evolve constantly. I think, I mean, if we're good at what we do and we're successful, we don't over prescribe what the architecture should or shouldn't do. We try to create the opportunity for life to happen and for people to, let's say this contrary to the way architecture is represented typically particularly through images and photographs, that's not the way life is lived, right? Every chair is not placed in exactly the right place and every towel is not hanging perfectly on the towel rod. You have to create, and I think part of our job is to create spaces that can react and live with the people and with generations of people as they occupy the building. So the notion behind one of the big ideas behind this building is a kind of flexibility and not only spatial flexibility, but also in terms of technical means and uses of this building. So as research needs change and as these kind of things evolve, the building can be reconfigured and re-outfit in a pretty broad range of ways. I suspect that your own family house is a good, would be an interesting study in the way that architecture of a given moment can also evolve, right? And with people's living patterns and of the Asipoff buildings that I've been in, they all strike me as entirely appropriate places to live in 2023 as much as they were probably in 1965 when they were built or whenever. Yeah, and I think that one thing that just came to my mind too was when you talk about changes in technology, one of the things that I've been noticing is that there was a time of expansion when all the banks, every place, certainly in the United States in growing communities, were opening branch banks all over the place because you physically had to go to the building to do your banking transactions. And now that has contracted tremendously because we do everything electronically and these bank buildings which were so significant in a lot of different neighborhoods are closing. So it was this huge investment on the part of the banks to build all these structures and now they are abandoning them in some cases actually selling them off completely and losing the land as well. Nobody could have anticipated that 50 years ago and yet now it's a thing. So this is a change that affects architecture. It is, and I mean the most recent example that is the post pandemic world of, and this building is in fact a great example of that. I mean, I think in this building we have something around the order of 280 offices, individual person offices built that can be subdivided for offices for two people or three people or four people. But since even though Harvard has gone completely back on campus with teaching and research and so forth, the utilization of these spaces is not what it had been anticipated to be even two years ago because people have become so used to remote working or continue to fear whether it's corona or other viruses being in constant close contact to other people. So even within the time it took from when this building opened until today, it's there's been dramatic changes that call into question a whole bunch of decisions that were made eight or 10 years ago. Right, right. Well, and then maybe continuing this discussion get the next slide up, but I would say what was following or what is following corona is the energy crisis around the geopolitical messed up around here next to Ukraine and Russia and things, right? So that's another thing, right? If you're basically building a possible building, right that needs to be conditioned. When people are not there, the building still needs to be pumped in oil, right? It needs to be kept cool and warm because otherwise things basically dilapidate, right? So you're making a huge loss because all your revenue goes away because the tenants might move out and you still have to basically do the providing, you know, to the cooling and the heating in a thoughtful way, while in a bio-plomatic way, you're way better off because you still have to keep, you know, the faucets running, which reminds me of one of our most scandalous German projects that Stefan talks about in the Velo interview there, which is our main Berlin airport, which for several reasons was not going into, you know, being used for too long and people had to just, you know, there was staff there that had to constantly open and close the faucets and keep the other things running. So it's not like you can't keep a building entirely, but again, in much of a less extent, right? So really, I mean, this all pays off your, you know, philosophy in a multitudinal way. We're already cutting close to being done for today again in two minutes, but so we're gonna probably pick up here, but let's quickly talk about this because this goes back to that in the building, as we remember from the last slide, there are these hubs and they're basically almost naturally organically formed where the corridor walls basically open up, right? Then they naturally form these hubs, these cluster hubs and they become these spaces. They're both circulation and communication as we can imagine here. And there's other pictures where there's people and they can easily imagine how that here is. And I just want to quickly explain what the show called is in there because that's a material that Yuta Soto and I are very fond of because it's a Garrail infill that's called, what's it called? From Carl Stahl. Yeah, Stahl Nets. Yeah, Stahl Nets and the X10 is the product name. And that's one that we once had a sample here that we're stretching that you're using here for the inside. We're saying we would love to see this being the mandated, almost not really, we don't want to mandate anything really, but if you would mandate something as for Garrail than Honolulu, we want to see that because it is letting the breeze through. And it's not requiring any maintenance of glass washing and it's also not keeping you hot behind. So it's good in many ways. And so that's a material, again, because you have to make decisions on architecture again on all levels from the macro to the micro and obviously all the systems and material choice. So that I think is worth to pick up again from here next week that you explain us a little bit more what's behind hidden sort of information behind what we see here and we're eager to hear from you. Okay, so that thing said, hopefully see you back next week. And until then, please stay bravely biochromatic. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. 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