 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Thanks for being with us again here on our exotic, easy, emerging islands of Hawaii. And we're broadcasting her life from Honolulu, our capital. And DeSoto and Martin are on our relentless search that we don't want to give up on seeing if this built environment can't be as generous and gentle as the natural environment truly is. And that was the case some not that long ago, a mid-century, so we're going to keep revisiting that and then going from there and learning for the future from where it has. So the next picture is reconnecting us to the last show that we had because we're reflecting on way out west that Makaha development and what to do and that conflict today that you probably have bigger problems than having the poorest of the poor, poor in there, and so revisiting that, I'm always also very close to that subject because some of my emerging mentees who can't afford to live in town, they live out there and they have to leave at 3 a.m. in the morning to hit the traffic, to be in school by 4 and then to sleep again under their table. So maybe they live at the condominiums out there because they're cheaper out there because you have to drive, there's a price tag for that. Absolutely. And the other show we want to remember is David Leang here, one of our emerging talons who was sharing with us how his grandmother lives. That's right. Her grandmother lives in Easy Breezy Social Mid-Century Housing. Correct. That works very well. That works very well. Exactly. So why don't we talk about the young ones, the emerging ones, and where do they live? That's right. If they are UH students, UH Manoa. Exactly. I do. That's true. That's true. And we already had pointed out where they might end up, and we said hopefully not, and this is this building that you see right next to me there. There you go. And so if we can get the next picture, we were talking about their promises on the construction fence and I was saying, does this even deserve to carry the name Holly because that's something that's pretty loaded with culture. Exactly. It doesn't mean the Hawaiian word for not only house, but in a general sense building. Exactly. And does it deserve to be used the other warrior and chief and things I'm sorry I still can't even pronounce, right? Perfectly. All right. So but maybe we're just like being suspicious and maybe mean or something. So we said, let's see, maybe have some core values that we might not have discovered. So let's go and next picture. And examine this building. Check it out more. So here it is. I pulled this from the website of developer brand new opening pretty soon. And you can see that the picture on the top is once again how it will look like then pretty soon when it's finished. And just on the way here, I looked at a building that ends up looking similar. And this is the affordable housing by Howard Hughes on Ward Avenue, which we said it wants to look interesting and sort of dynamic, not just be completely smooth and on exactly without any kind of differentiation on its facade. But but it's actually just a masquerade, right? Because the function behind that does not support that dynamism. Because if we go and the same so it's a masquerade or a makeup and a little bit I've you know hardly seen students like that and I'm close to them. So I know. Those are models. That's why. Those are not those are not real students. All right. Those are paid models. I'm sorry to disillusion you. All right. I keep on looking. All right. So next picture we go even more inside. So the next picture please is a floor plan. Well sometime we'll get to that next picture. But one thing I wanted to say was and this is something that you and I just discussed before this. This is not a University of Hawaii sponsored building. This building is in fact a private development that is being aimed at students. But it is not built by the it's not developed by the state. It's not developed by it's just a private development that it's near the U of H and so it's for students. And we have that nice term for that off campus but it's right off the edge because campus pretty much starts pretty soon to that. So this is how they will live and check out the price tags at the very bottom. This is pretty steep and check out what you get. I mean this looks to me like could be anywhere. It's a hotel room boarding house or something like that where you can it's like a combination of a hotel and a condominium. So you were saying these are like in the realm of 1800 a month? Absolutely. And the next picture if you you know mingle you can basically get it for a little cheaper right you know but at the end not much. And then if you're really privileged you get a corner room and then you get two windows. Two windows. How fancy is that? That's very nice. Uh huh. I think so. Well fortunately I don't have to live there. So next picture is going to show the what we call the Emanities. Yes that's right. So we're in Hawaii so we don't have to work outside because it's always snowy here and rainy and too hot like in Arizona where I used to be. So we just work out inside indoors and then we go to the roof terrace but most likely only if I have this key card it gives me access right. So the bum on the street you know cannot or maybe the students whose parents are not rich enough they've probably got to stay outside or they probably can bring a guest right. But this is very much the way a lot of buildings are now and we know that that's been a considering that's been a subject of discussion and some controversy as well. Absolutely so talking controversies next picture is us examining the architectural skin of that hermetic organism and it reminds me and hi mom when she back in temperate climate told me to layer and today's a little that's why you wear a jacket it's a little chilly outside but one screen that you wear does it right and you don't need to have multiple layers in Germany however you have to wear as you were saying you wear a t-shirt you wear a shirt you wear a sweater you wear a jacket you wear all these layers because of colds. And that's what this building is wearing here you can see all these layers they're building up and up and another analogy because you set the models and they were so nicely visagist and all there's multiple layers of makeup that's exactly right as well so as you can tell next picture we don't really like that too much so let's do something that we maybe you could actually do this because the building tectonically is like the Kirby Z the domino house it's like Pilates as he called the pillars the posts the columns and then he put floor slabs and this is what our most activist journalist Kurt Sennmann calls La Naye so we can reverse this process and at some point just like you put off your makeup you know in the evening or at the rest of your life where you decide you don't want to fake yourself I just want to come across real self being exactly being appreciated for what you truly are with your values and so and and I can point out to that by touching over here by touching these these walls right here the point is that those those exterior walls are not load bearing no they are a skin on the outside okay by taking them off as you're saying the building is still intact the building is not going to collapse so come on strip them off the salt you can do that that's what we're doing that's what we're doing I can do that yeah you can do we have this the first time so we got to still play with it right we've done in these two pictures exactly going from more exterior to less and let's do the next picture which also does that from the other side this looks from down the ocean from Makai and the same thing we wish it would undress and get off all these layers to the next picture eventually look obviously higher because that was an early stage but this is what you know Kurt calls the stack lanai it protects you from the sun from the rain what else do you need a little layer a little jacket a little screen in your set David Rockwood has done a fantastic show about the multitude of possibilities of screen that we can make on the island the whole thing or we can do next picture we can revisit a project that we continue to present right and and this is this is about that we here intentionally keep the personal space confined right but multifunctional yes because once again if you're in Hawaii don't want to be stuck in your in your hotel room I'm already saying in your dorm room all the time and the next picture is what is happening there well what we've got going on as you were pointing out that the print the personal spaces are small and the larger spaces or the public spaces are bigger so there's more interaction and what you said too is that there's not only interaction the freedom of that movement but that's also where you've got a restaurant you've got a farmers market yeah you've got stuff going on so there are reasons to go out and not be necessarily all inside and here we even have that on the floors and I could not find an entire floor plan of that invasive Holly thing because what do they want to show they want to show the minimum width hermetic dark right stuff you don't exist they don't matter are just a hallway exactly it's the individual spaces exactly on the other hand emphasizes big open spaces versus smaller private spaces and we call these here the the communal spaces which are even sort of injected into each floor plan right and then even more you already mentioned it next picture here is basically the public spaces correct in the market in the restaurant and whatever else and they're splendid and they're basically inclusive they're for everyone right that's how we dream it but let's wake up again let's go to the next picture this is what we have come to confront and you made an interesting observation about that already pretty narrow street that you're basically frequenting quite off exactly and I often drive on that street which is on to the side of this new Holly Mahana and you see that in the large picture the problem is that that street is already inadequate for the traffic that's on it and it doesn't look as though that new building is making more room for cars normally we don't like to make room for cars but in this case because it's going to be a lot more traffic generated by the residents in that building I am thinking that that's going to be a problem however alright beyond my touch I think we're at the point where half of the show we got to bring some hope back you know yeah so let's do that and we actually do this already with a little picture on the right side that you saw the previous page is we're actually looking back at you age we're actually going on campus now yeah and from your exquisite archives you provided this here right from an era where you look like I look like that so there's that there's that little picture in the upper left corner that's me at the age of seven with our 1960 Plymouth we lived on the mainland for one year so that's me in the snow I don't like snow but at the same time this is a few years after that this is what the University of Hawaii had begun to look like with an increased level of buildings and this aerial picture is from the middle 1960s and we're going to be talking about the area where I can put my hand right now which is kind of over here which is where the dorms are yeah and if you go a little further reach out a little further right there go further if you got to reach out all the way with your hand to the building behind yeah we're still practical down below that's right the building right next to me here mm-hmm where my fist is is for your hall okay let's get the next let's get the next picture our next picture is of for your hall and that was a women's dorm this is seen from East West Road in 1961 mm-hmm that was built as a women's dorm in 1952 mm-hmm and several things that we're going to talk about but as you were pointing out to me on this side of the building there are some eyebrows as you said yeah which provides some level of shade but this is the side of the building that doesn't get as much sun exactly and so what they do have on this side is more wind and rain coming down from the Kuala Lumpur Monoah Valley and some say that's why whoever created us gave us these eyebrows because it rains or we sweat sweat it's not gonna drip in our eye it's gonna go around that's why we have eyebrows and that's what these are that's what these are understood pretty much right and so if you go to the next picture on the other side of your hall this is again there's more of an overhang for more protection from the sun but this is also a protected area from the wind and rain so there's public space there and it's a low-level low-rise building and in those time period at that time period nothing like this was air-conditioned was ridiculously expensive so they have jealousies they have easy breezy wind flow going through yeah that's how they're ventilated absolutely and I found another picture to compliment your exquisite one which is the next one which I found online which shows the lobby right in Freer Hall which is this sort of exotic you know easy breezy and the way they're dressed just look at like a dress code a dress code you can see that the relationship between you know sheathing yourself yes your architecture is basically consistent right tropical plants indoors that you see on the on the left side of the picture plain polished concrete floor and a lot of open space and a modernist stripped down interior exactly and that looks to me like I mean the statehood had just been initiated right this is right before this even before that this is this is that dream desired place you sure want it to be exactly and when you came there you were something totally different you've lived a different life a different lifestyle then back on the mainland with that snow for example that we just saw that you taste it yeah and had enough of it been there right so now we have to show something really shocking because that pretty nice building had been pretty much leveled yeah and unfortunately not that long ago about a decade ago or so and pretty much replaced by this here and it's still called for your home no I call this fear oh that's right it went because it's still a lot of fear in me because this is like the worst of the worst that you can think of this is pretty much a could be a Marriott or something like that all these ethos castles ethos stands for exterior finishing insulation system if that even has it on they probably didn't even insulate it and then you got these little windows in there and this is pulled it from the web top right is how the student you know rooms basically look like and then of course you know to legitimize it here what do they do well this is the thing that's happening now with a lot of buildings they put on this Chevron design on the exterior which is a which is an exterior decorative element which is really popular right now we're conjecturing that it has some pretend connection to Hawaiian culture but whatever it is it's sort of a it's sort of a cliche of the moment and so we made a differentiation between off campus housing privately developed and on campus housing this is on campus housing so it's you age but you age at that point got chicken shady and basically wasn't brave enough to be the client and basically outsourced it what I heard and gave it to a private developer and if in the 21st century unfortunately where development is not driven by culture as it used to be in the 20th century half especially then that's what you get privatized exactly privatized and just bad and they should have known better because they had something next door that we want to primarily talk about correct you provided another pristine image from your archive so here again and here's our here's our 60s view UH and in the right in the center of the picture you can see the gateway building or the gateway housing which is the dorm that we're going to talk about in the upper right corner you see Elvis and Miley Chad and Miley looking down over Honolulu with the iconic Alamoana building so background there so we're trying to say with this you know comparison is that what the Alamoana building was for more town that icon of innovation and growth and and space age was that gateway and then now you can actually understand its its name because it literally looks like a funnel correct because it's like an depending on at the gateway to the east-west center it is a new structure at that time a new development at that time which I think truly deserves to be an own show so we're gonna do that at some point and they were also they were sort of in proximity location-wise but development-wise they're totally different entities right right and you know that so let's look at that building a little closer with another exquisite image that you provided here right and I want to point out that it looks as though the exterior of this building has those kind of tilted out panels as though they are permanently installed like that and in fact if you look closer those are windows that have been manually opened by the people in the room some of those as you can see are shut so this building as you were pointing out has a dynamic facade that changes according to what people are doing to it as opposed to a static dead one and the Holly Mahana has a checkerboard facade but this one has an actual changing facade exactly so it's a it's a bi-climatically performative on and we can see right that is literally and figuratively cool and I'm a really sexy pair of buildings here yeah so let's go inside next picture which we did because we visited here this was like about last semester or a year ago with the studio we went in there and we walked all the way up so the stairs we're going to dedicate a show to that phenomenon as well that only here you can make exterior staircases and thanks to Howard Wigg we can do it again because we changed the invasive international building code and made an appendix to that our tropical conditions so we want to do that and it's a lot of fun to go up and down these external staircases and then the view and the view and they also make this sort of iconic they give us this iconic character of the building which you see from far away I mean this is the same picture this is why so grainy because I took this where we showed out the problematic soon to be problematic alley street you know it's that far away but you can still see that iconographic feature exactly right and I also found from student housing this floor plan this reminds me so much of my years and or my year in the dorm in Lincoln Nebraska so in temperate climate with that snow yes and it was the same very classic kind of layout the room absolutely minimized to just that hallway enough said two people can get into their bed and then there is a desk that everyone sits there and studies all day maybe not so much a case these days anymore I don't know how contemporary this is all they have to study Holly Manoa goes a step further which you will talk about in that show and basically makes the bathrooms and the kitchen shared yeah this one here is more conventional that the bathroom but it's shared so it's it's again it's more efficient and effective but the point is we are in Hawaii so only when you have to be there you're going to be there and otherwise you're going to right and so next picture is how you access it through these open hallways here and I want to point out that the open hallways are on the Makai side they are protected from the wind and the rain normally the trade winds are bringing the Manoa rain down against the Malka side of the building this is the other side so you're not exposed to that in the winter so this architect knew what they're and yeah with Don Hibbert we're still searching we have some ideas who the architects might have been but we're not at the end of the research so we're not going to say not to confuse people we can say that in a later they were local architects they were they were and they knew this exactly they knew about the so next picture again whatever they did was performative and so here the hallway is also shading it's a shading device we're arguing you know because this was for research for designing own student dorm right so we're going to conclude the show with although this was another class here but we were debating if you could have more openings and you know only really good work you can improve so who are we to correct judge here these modern masters here right but the next picture at some place the architect has done that this is a gathering room here where you can see these basically awning windows jealousies to the Malka side which is pretty much north and then you can see that sliding door to the south and the next picture is going to point out these these awning windows more that I know had been replaced when they renovated this about a while ago but we know based on that old picture that they did originally have windows like this they had something like that they were I was told they were more jealousy like but never mind I mean they're easy breezy and they try to keep the rain out so this is something you got to manage so the next picture is then looking how this looks like from below and if you're perched right on one of those I'm sitting on that ledge here and what it also shows is this sort of participatory play in the facade that in these hermetic buildings the developers try so hard to mimic but it's frozen right as you pointed out where it's here it's it's alive this is this is and if you're on these since we're standing there anyways let's take a closer look because for a while I've been thinking these modern masters would have none not done anything that wasn't necessary they wouldn't have done the core so I was thinking these sort of in plan triangularly shaped eyebrows lids must have a function if it if it's not their function yet I can see it could be retrofitted like that if you put like a little l profiles towards the edge and let them not touch each other at that corner it would basically shed off the rain and funnel it through that nose and that's the furthest away from the window so you basically rain providing or rain sheltering your window and and how clever and up to these days cool is that the next picture so the owner which is also my employer hu age basically recognizes that to the left one is a picture they took and they had a professional doing that there are no shifting lines and I put that little north era in there so we know so it's a it's an upside down v that the open sides basically facing south of these glazed facades basically face north they do slightly west or east depending on the one right but that is still a very biochlametic way to position the building so the gate weighing wasn't the primarily or the only reason it was multiple reasons as these masters were doing and the air can go through on either side the air can be funneled between the buildings and then go around it on either end too exactly and that's again the trade wind the normal trade wind pattern that where these are situated and the gentleman on the right picture at the center there is someone who was helping us and showing his buildings it's Hiram payo he's an architect aia he has worked for the private sector in town is now our representative at student services and student at student housing and as per his self-education and he basically graduated with an expertise in biochlametic design and he says this building is causing him less trouble and maintenance costs because it's just like you know to the spot right and the pomo cake on the other side that hermetic thing is nothing but complaints about oh my ac isn't correct all my filters need to be replaced right you know all these issues so again that tells us why not going back to that right and we always conclude the show with something promising here so together with Hiram we were looking at potential developments for student housing sort of on the edge of campus and there were potential sites here that we were looking at and so we want to look at two sides and these are the number three and the number two we want to look at the number three first which is basically right below these circular dorms on dole street yes and the next picture shows the solution and and i showed this to you before so what was your impression so well one of the what the point of this building is that it is built next to a cliff and it is built not directly touching the cliff but it's very similar to the way the chariton mawai was built at khanapalli in the early 1960s in that it because it is next to this geographical or geological formation it is not so intrusive on the environment because actually it's set lower than that you were pointing out that there's space between the building and the cliff so that that's part of the experience of living in the building and that again it is not just sticking way up but kind of hidden yeah absolutely and then the top right we're investigating in david rockwood's you know platoe for getting crazy about screens so they're like for that little weather protection you need here's an example for using local resources and doing these screens yeah and the next picture is that other side it's actually next to iam pays dorms that we're going to feature in the one the next shows and it's basically diamond head side of that where there's basically a creek and you don't see any side yet but you'd all you see is jungle yeah and how do you feel about that proposal well what you you pointed out something very interesting the purpose of this is for first of all housing for students and the students would live in those regular structures but you also said that there are a lot of what you term no man's which we also call homeless people who are living in this space and your students said okay let's have the homeless people live under these structures the way they want to and the students live inside the structures and so they're on this cliff side so they're sort of sticking out and they've got a space underneath them and people live above them yeah yeah so a very inclusive as i understand the nature of the culture a local culture yeah right there you go that was true though yeah that's very true that's very true and it should be true again it shouldn't be the sort of invasive you know coming from the i shouldn't say mainland but it's more like it's the western civilization that becomes exclusive that's right if you have the money he can do that's right they don't they dismiss what's really so special about us in hawaii right that is true too so let's basically applaud and encourage the emerging generation to do these things differently for themselves and basically again learn from the good past of mid-century for a future that hopefully will be like that again there we are so with that we're at the end of the show there we are hopefully we see you guys again for our next show which is finally looking at another sort of development now back in town on alawaii which we call basically the exotic beauty and the evasive beast that's right we've got two buildings next to each other another one and a new one basically looking at it yeah so until then stay as exotically comfortable as you can be exactly emerging all right see you then bye bye guys all right that was good yeah that was good i like that that helps good yeah now and i like and i like that it's us cropped and not like a frame yeah because the frame deserves the pictures now and and you were right on the projecting thing yeah yeah good excellent that was a good suggestion i glad we got that suggestion