 Welcome back to our 273rd show of think-tok-wise human-humane architecture. And thanks to you, Eric, because we can't see it anymore. The accumulated viewer you are is the 14,720 seconds. So we is our now co-host by now, who used to be a guest, who's going to give us the boost of his Boston-Banish firm, this is Matt Noblett. Hi, Matt. Hey, Martin. And it's me, Martin de Spang, in his Waikiki Grand. And our third leg is joining us soon, who is de Soto Brown, who is on the way to his bishop museum. So we're going to start out without him and get the first slide up. And as we had promised, Matt, we're going to talk about of your by now large, pretty large body of work. We both decided to zoom in and focus on two exemplary projects. One, we just finished last show, which is the Gensheim building. And now we're actually going to Harvard. You take us there for one of your very recent projects. But again, we want to put it into the context of climate and culture. And this slide here, you had been labeling as comfort. So tell us what's behind the images, what kind of messages behind the images we see. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things that has always interested us and interested me personally was the way in which the introduction of mechanical cooling systems in the first part of the 20th century radically changed the way that we think about forming buildings and occupying buildings. And in some cases, the really interesting examples are often the buildings that sort of straddle that gap that were built pre-air conditioning. And then we're largely inhabited post-air conditioning. And the flat iron building in New York City is just kind of an iconic example, something that everybody sort of recognizes and has in their mind what it looks like. And it's probably more something like what you see in the right-hand image here. But if you look at the left-hand image, and in fact, if you can sort of zoom in on the facade a little bit of the building in the black-and-white photograph, you actually see that each of these windows had little fabric awnings that projected out over them. And they were not there simply for the decoration of the outside of the building. They actually were integral to the thermal performance of the building. They shaded the glass from the direct sunlight because what happens is when direct sun hits glass, very much like what you experience in a greenhouse, the ultraviolet razor trapped behind the glass and they continue to heat up the interior of the building, that heat can escape. And so you end up exceeding what is sort of a comfortable environment to occupy. So you see here that people sort of intuitively understood how to design. I mean, I think there's an architectural intention there, but it also is very much in line with the functioning of the building, the proper functioning of the building. Eventually, cooling was introduced into this building and this more contemporary photograph on the right shows that as those, what I assume happened was they probably deteriorated to some point and people said, let's no point in putting them back at this point. We can stay cool inside this building without them. They're no more, but that comes at a very high cost to the environment. It comes at a relatively high dollar cost as well, but energy continues to be somewhat cheap in the US. So people aren't as sensitive to it, but it comes at a very high cost to our planet. Absolutely. And you guys might now think, okay, what in the world does this have to do with us in beautiful Hawaii where there's always summer and you're freezing over there in Boston and I go back to Munich in one and a half weeks, but we here in Hawaii don't have these issues. But the two top pictures there show an example of us here of our heritage. And that is the Royal Hawaiian, the second after the Moana surf rider that the Soto is the utmost expert on. If you go in there, you will see that most of the images there are from his employer, the Bishop Museum, but there's also a large body of work from his private, the Soto Brown collection. And the second one in Waikiki here in our hood where it basically was otherwise palm grove was the Royal Hawaiian. And the Royal Hawaiian was built in 1927. And it's basically an imported style of architecture, which is the word that I otherwise try to avoid, but architectural historians use it for some valid reason. And it's the same because it's a tectonical system that was foreign to Hawaii, right? Whether we're building basically with sticks and latching and thatching, here all of a sudden, stereotomics were introduced to the island because this is a masonry building and everything was shipped in, which is a problem that we continue to have. But besides that, it borrows from a culture somewhere in the Arab world with a style. And they have not on similar climatic conditions, right? And they kept the fenestrations rather small. So the percentage of holds in the wall in that stereotomic wall are rather small. And then they're covered with that kind of same awning. So the same kind of strategy, again, in that same era. And the picture on the right is what I wanted to Soto to talk about. But this is a former colleague and buddy Jim, who worked with him on in the Bishop Museum. There's a little very, very sort of antique coming across shop in there that I always wanted to go and Sammy basically went in there and asked this guy whose name is Jim for postcard and we started to talk. And he pulled up this one of these books by the Soto that had the Soto had signed, which the Soto didn't remember when we sent it to him. But the point is more, there's something else in the image, Matt, that we see there that has another sort of similarity in connotation about climate control in the most natural way, right? Yeah, I assume you're talking about the the hats on the wall. Exactly. Exactly. And especially us three bald guys, you know, we need them essentially because we don't have any of that naturally grown sun protection anymore on our heads. But it's a very simple device that again, with, you know, do with very little, you know, you achieve achieve a lot. So according to my theory or thought that I think the two of the worst things, I think the worst things that happened to us here in Hawaii is when it's actually one thing, but then it's embodied through two. And they seem to be in correlation with each other. And that is the combustion engine in form of moving people around and keeping keep people cool in buildings. And that gets us to the next slide. Because this is exactly what's described here in the text. And I let you talk about the slide because it's yours. But I found it interesting that even in the text, they describe that relationship that they say in order to not hear the explosions of these moving things, we need to basically keep the windows closed and get ourselves artificially ventilated. And that's pretty absurd, right? But it was the argument. Well, this was I mean, some time around the, you know, say 1920, the technology or the sort of the early 20s, the technology for mechanically cooling something at the scale of a building really became conceivable, you know, and commercialized to us to a scale that it could that you could literally mechanically cool a building of this size. This happens to be one of I don't know if it is really the first they claimed it was the first building in Texas that was fully cooled. And what this really began was a sort of a long process of defining interior conditions of comfort that were uniform across, you know, in the beginning regions, ultimately the entire US and then eventually as those kind of standards were adopted internationally really across the globe. So this, this, the sort of the promise of the cooling, the of the cooling regime was that you could effectively deliver the same interior conditions, temperature, environmental conditions anywhere in the world that you wanted. And of course, that was really a regime that was only enabled by the presence of cheap energy, right? That's the air conditioning accounts for a significant part of the carbon emissions of our society today globally. And I think one wonders, you know, pre 1928, when people had to actually form their buildings in a way to make them comfortable because they didn't have these technical means to do so. What was different? Were people different? Was physics different? I had this really interesting discussion with a neighbor of yours and I'm talking your home here in Kailua because yesterday on the beach, I started to talk with some ladies and one of them actually is and said, you got to come to my home. I need to show you. So she has this sort of 1920s home that she, you know, started to add on and add on to and you would be very proud of her. And I think we should actually do a show with her because she as a non trained and disciplined and proficient person did it so perfectly about cross ventilation and I see everything like the 101 of biochlamatic design in the tropics. She just got right. And she started to be philosophical about what you just did as well. And she was tracing back to the Carnegie's, to the Rockefellers and they teamed up with hers and basically said, how can we make this the most profitable for us? And oil seemed to be, you pointed out to these days, right? Where fossil energy is way too cheap still as one of the reasons that keep us back. And not to ever excuse this here, but when I'm reading here, refrigerated air in summer and warmed air in winter. Again, if you're having one system anyway, and then you can switch seasonally and you have a very, you know, much more clever way that we will continue to talk about, which is thermally activated surfaces where you do the same, where you have hoses go through concrete, and then you flush a liquid through that goes into the ground and the always stable temperature there is then, you know, in the different seasons doing one or the other. Just to remind us here in Hawaii, there is no such thing as winter, at least not the one we're talking about, right? So it's even more absurd again here to if you already have a heating system, that's what I try to say, you know, to say, okay, if I can use this for cooling, that's sort of tempting, right? But that condition we even never had. So let's go to the next slide and show a slide that came to your mind when you think about our climate here and your summers over there in Boston and anywhere else in the 60% other temperate world climates. Yeah, I mean, this is just for me really one of the kind of beautiful examples of climate responsive design that's right here. And it's actually on the other side of the river from where I am right now in Cambridge, the Peabody Terrace housing graduate housing complex at Harvard University. It was not a particularly beloved building at the time it was built because of its height and its size relative to the sort of smaller homes that sort of populate that area. But it is actually quite an intelligent building. It has internal to the building are elevators that skip every other floor, which allows you to have apartments that go all the way through the depth of the building. So it's a relatively thin building from this facade that we see here to the back of that. And all of the apartments can therefore be cross ventilated. So all the windows at these balconies open up, and you can open up the windows at the back of the building and you get fresh air moving through the entire depth of the building. And then on the outside, the architect Jose Luis Mounted these manually adjustable sunshades that are kind of this is kind of bristle a metal bristle a that's mounted on the front of the concrete building. And users can simply step out onto their balcony and rotate those to be in the closed position or the open position, depending on what kind of environment they need to, you know, whether they're trying to block the sun out or whether they want to be able to see, you know, up and down the river to the different views or block out glare. So it's really a it's a good example here in a colder weather climate of again, a very similar thing that we're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I'm hopefully I'm pronouncing her name right. The lady I got to know yesterday from your Hawaii Hood in Kailua, Susan Shanahan, she would love this. I have a descendant to her because she explained to me, she as the expert explained her house. And she said, you know, I have opening at the bottom and at the top, we talked about this about asking for this is someone again, not with a training in our discipline, the profession who totally gets it right. So this is kind of ironic, right, that in in in Boston in cold Boston, where the advantages you just described of the building at this moment of the year, you can't even take advantage of, right? But would it be in Hawaii? That would be the case all year round. So I mean, even today, like today, it works fine. It would work fine. It's quite warm here, actually. It works fine. Yeah. And you can obviously adjust the louvers in a way that you embrace the sun and then you get passive solar, right? So, yeah, it works in both climates. But for us, it would like the work the way you described, like all year round, right? And getting to the next slide gets us to the next slide, because it's not like that ever since 1928, everyone was getting hooked and addicted to the to the drug of fossil fuel. And as the examples from the past, because actually, until that was fully embraced, took many more decades, you could probably fairly say when the, you know, Ronnie the cowboy, you know, who was doing commercials, Ronnie Reagan for general electric, he got literally bribed by the fossil industry and became one of their actors, literally, figuratively speaking. So really, not until the 80s, it really got like fully embraced. And this is way earlier. This is the Soto's childhood. This is our favorite building, at least what it was. This is the Alamona building that was not designed by banish architect, although it could have been, because you are, which I appreciate, not a not a commercially driven practice, but a culturally ambitious. And the architect of this building was actually the most commercial architect of its time, John Graham. He built shopping malls and commercial stuff all over. But even he did a building very much, this could be by cert or it's in this tradition, right? Because it had louvers. And these louvers were, which then became, I guess it's destiny, because that's they used as an excuse to take them off in the 90s, these horrible days where we had to go through architectural education as we keep reminding each other. Until then, from its beginning, it had these louvers and there were gold anodized on one side and dull aluminum on the other. And then they basically moved with the sun. So this became a beautiful, because that's a point, we often talk about the performance of the building in a physical way, but you kindly frequently remind us off that we have to talk about the performance of beauty just as well. And at the same time, and there's actually this, should be this, and there is inherently the potential of a reciprocal relationship between the two, because this building here trying to keep the people in the building cool. And by that, it basically became this beautiful, biochlametic, kinetic sculpture that looked different at every time of the day, because it was just moving and engaging with the elements. Of course, again, in a mechanical way, yes, but that has a lot to do with what you guys do. You say we just put as much of technology in there that's still to be operated by the human being and the human being is in charge of it versus the other way around, which we often say these autistic buildings where just the AC blows. The human being doesn't even have the technology the fossil took over and its occupants becomes a slave of that whole system that Ishii created, right? Okay, so a next keyword is integration that gets us to the next slide. And yeah, explain us at least the parts that you contributed to the slide. And then I will talk about the one that DeSoto and I threw in there as well. Well, I think these kind of keywords spring from this talk I gave at the university last month or now two months ago, which really talked about climate as a driving factor behind design, understanding where you're building, then it talked about comfort, understanding the kind of conditions of comfort and how you deal with people's expectations and how you talk about their ability to positively influence their environment by, for example, how they dress or how they adjust parts of the building to suit their needs. And then integration really becomes about once you've kind of packaged, once you've understood those two first two things, how do you bring them together and then carefully apply technology to solve the parts that are left in the design problem. So the idea here is not to sort of continually layer on technology, just bolting new gadgets onto the outside of the building to solve discrete problems, but really think about the problems through all of these important layers to come up with the most efficient solution that you can possibly come up with. Yeah. And the show quote at the top right shows your business partner and founder of the firm Stefan Behnich here bundled up in the tempered. And then you choose that picture of that lady, I assume it's a colleague of yours as well. Is that right? In fact, his wife. Oh, it's his wife that I yet have to get to know. So even better. So thank you. Yes. So and that picture shows her in climate more like ours here all year round. And that's also why we choose this project that you will share with us for many more slides for many more shows, because we think it has something else that the Gensheim building didn't have to that extent that you pushed yourself kind of the next level and that plays into the one on the bottom left is the show, the longest show in the making of the Soto and myself that maybe might be the most relevant because it's comparing skins. The first one that we're born with and the second one that we put on over that and the third one only the third one is the one that we create around that which we call facades or thresholds building thresholds. And we look into you know the relationship of the two the working title is address code address codes. Because again what we wear you know should have an implication on how we as a society decide how these fenestrations should be. And you know this is this is an opening funny slide that shows both of us in our childhoods and how we were dressed you know me with this funny cow like Holstein cow codes you know at a trip to one of the the the regional ski areas in northern Germany in the hearts. But it also shows me with my sister on the back of my dad's on our roof terrace in the summer with with being naked and the Soto is pointing out saying hey wasn't it you you know howly white guys who and specifically the Germans who got so overly obsessed with nakedness and with nudity. And you know obviously in a bad way the Nazis got into that in this sort of obscured way but in a better way the modern master is the Bauhaus and I argue with that you know Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau or the Fagos Verke and near closer to my hometown in Hanover where your north LB is is very much the attempt to be as naked as you can because that skin is absolutely as dematerialized as it could have been and as was at that time which was amazing again we're talking like close to that 100 years ago right by the way that the year 27 around that time was the Fagos Verke by by by by Gropius right so yeah that's I guess what all our contributions to this slide is about these kind of three skins. So let's use the last four minutes to jump at least into the very macro of that project that we're going to show for many more episodes and that gets us to the next slide which shows it to us in its plan diagram location side location explain us please. Yeah so this was a really it was the first of all it's actually the largest project that our office ever participated in it was the this was like these are some competition drawings from what was at the time an international design competition for a new science campus on at Harvard University here in in Cambridge basically the idea being that the land to the south of the Charles River which you see kind of meandering through the middle of the picture on the left had been over the 90s consolidated by Harvard as the site of a kind of potential almost doubling of their existing campus in Cambridge so the idea you know at the time was to really build the campus of the future find ways to enroll many many more students at Harvard provide more specialized facilities and to drive that campus forward with a concept of science and particularly in this case it was was life sciences so where this kind of orange dot is on the lower part of the of the slide on the on the left that was sort of the the middle point of the site and we were asked to develop a variety of future development scenarios around that orange dot that would ultimately lead up lead up to about three million square feet of research and laboratory facilities with the first portion being the first the initial one million square feet. Yeah and I want to with a two remaining minutes something that you said in such a sort of as if it would be natural and a no brainer but in America that culture is very rare that is the culture of architectural competitions mostly it's like you know if anything it's like a couple of firms that get invited and they all submit proposals and decline picks the one that he she likes the most right but that culture that is so inherent to the history of your firm back to Stefan's father Günter with the olympics in in 72 that was a competition you guys never stopped although you know you made your name so it could have easily said okay now we made it now we wait to be invited by these clients and then we have a better chance because it's only going to be a few of us competing against each other no you continue to stay true to that tradition of the firm always competing with hundreds or thousands of people the Nord LV in my hometown is another example that I shared in my introductory the very first show that I was working for my professor at that time and we were competing and and you guys won rightly so I said then I will continue to stay in forever so I think there's there's really this this amazing sort of ethics in your guys firm to say and again we're not privileged right we're not we're not exclusive we're including we want to basically get this project by having been chosen as the best by a non-biased anonymous jury that does not know it is us right because we want to be judged upon that the project is really the best project and I really commend you guys for that and this is something that America has to learn a lot from and it's a very it is a valuable process in the sense that you it's important to know you know who you're working with and how you could work with them but it's equally important to have an idea what might this what might this be right I mean I think we've gotten away from the culture of select of thinking about what the most appropriate or the best design for a given project is and more a little bit about you know how do we are can we be buddies with these people and can we have dinner with them after meetings and so forth which doesn't necessarily lead to the best outcome for a given site now it's it's a good closing note and I would just add to that I think it's it's a win-win situation it's it's it's the client gets the best out of it and you as an architect it puts you in the better position because again it's not like you sucked up and now you have to like bag or something you can always say no this was this was chosen by you as a client trusted your esteemed jury that you put in place so you wanted this right and so we have to follow through with what do you want it not what I want because you bought into not even knowing who I was so great let's get that message out to America to do this more and the architects not being afraid because if you have the best concept you get chosen as you guys tradition shows very well so that is it for today time wise we're gonna continue with this and show in images how the you know the the situation the location looked like and how you guys approached it conceptually so looking much forward to that and until then still stay easy breezy breezy easy no matter where you are in whatever way you need to do this at this time of the year all right and we will have to sort of back with us next week that's the most to look forward to all right see you next week bye mad thank you 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 and linked in and donate to us at think tech hawaii dot com mahalo