 Hello everyone and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii. You are watching Human Humane Architecture. I am this program's co-host. I'm DeSoto Brown from Bishop Museum here in Honolulu. And joining us from Germany is the program's host, Martin Despang, and Martin should be appearing very shortly. There he is! Good day to you, Martin. It's afternoon for us and it's early, early morning for you. Hello DeSoto. Hello everyone. I envy you back in Hawaii. Because? Well, why is it the one here? Because. Well, let's go to the first slide here, which gets us back to Joey and Clara who continue their cross-cultural culinary conveying. And it looks like they're back in Hawaii, right DeSoto? Yeah, it does. But this is all in Germany? This is all in Germany, correct? I guess so. Kahuna Poke Brothers, your bowl of happiness. There's an Aloha Poke sign. And there's the Longboard and other Hawaiian-themed beer. Is that all that for sale in Germany? Well, it obviously is. And I heard a funny story or news about the Kahuna Brewing Company that they got busted and sued for pretending to that beer being brewed in Hawaii. Gets us back to that famous song from the 50s here in Germany. There is no beer in Hawaii. And then obviously holds true in a sort of ironic way because this is brewed on the mainland. So they had to like give free beer to people who were complaining. So isn't that funny? And let's give the folks, I tell you, let's give people an idea in which city this is where they are right now, which gets us to the next slide here. Correct. And this is, we call the nickname as Minehattan because mine is the name of the river in front. And it's the city of Frankfurt. And this is our only, one and only high-rise city compared to Honolulu, which I think is on position six in the nation of the United States as far as the number of high-rises. This here has a fifth of what we have in Honolulu. Honolulu, I think we're around 500 now. This has not even a hundred. And this picture here was taken most likely from the project that you see at the very bottom left and in the middle on the left column, which is a rather tragic project because the European Central Bank by the Austrian architect Cope Himmoblal who started out as nice conceptual architects and small little radical projects but now have become mainstream and won this competition. And I happened to be in Frankfurt some years ago when it was under construction and the construction workers already put newspaper pages behind the glass not to be fried and baked. So I have to say, you know, as we're doing architectural assessment and criticism it's a fossil formalism. And it's especially tragic because when I was at school or just got out of school in the mid to late 90s the building in the very center was under construction which is the commerce bank by Lord Norman Foster which is an icon and a beacon for high rise ecology. So again, we should go back to that and most likely do that even more in Honolulu than in Frankfurt. Where it is, as you said, it's a hundred degrees. There's also another oddity because there is a German version of the all Hawaiian Ironman race and usually the runners are looking forward to some more moderate temperatures but frequently they get hit by even hotter. This is how we start the show and that's true. It's in Frankfurt, you just looked it up on your phone and was it the same for the next days? And it said that Frankfurt was going to be having temperatures from 98 up to 101 degrees Fahrenheit which is preposterously hot for the middle of Germany and all of Europe in fact. So the Hawaiian islands in the tropics are actually cooler than Germany is which shows you that things are pretty screwy and it shows you also that the concerns that we talk about in human humane architecture about sustainability and easy breezy and all of that stuff are becoming more and more important in other parts of the world where it's getting hotter. Absolutely. So let's move on to the next slide and continue to look at that from an intercultural perspective here. This was Joey and Clara going to a department store and they found this little exhibit here which this is your weekly German lesson, the Soto. So what did you learn from that sign? Okay, I think that it says something about when your dream trip or your dream vacation to Hawaii, is that right? That is correct, exactly. So it's a little stand that wants to lure people to make a vacation trip to Hawaii and it's got all the attributes of flowers, tropical flowers, hula skirt here, I don't see a coconut bra, but the hula skirt has rainbow colors which reminds us of Joey and Clara's ambassador vehicle and tropical tourist expert Suzanne provided the very bottom a little sweet treat she brought home and it's a chocolate ball covered with coconut shavings and it's not as explicitly about where in the tropics but you can see the hibiscus flower, you can see palm trees and ural means vacation. So let's go to vacation a little bit and go to the next slide because here is where you see us all. Last year, it's always my birthday when I'm back in Germany over the summer. So last year Suzanne came back with me and surprised you with a gift which was the menu of a tiki restaurant that is more authentic than anything unfortunately was left on our islands and Hawaii Trader Vicks which is at the basement of the most upscale hotel here in Munich the Bible shall hope. So the question was how to top that and kindly we came all together for my birthday and it looks like we did a trip to Hawaii to solo right on the very left. It does look like that because there are people standing on this wooden walkway with palm trees poking through it and it looks like it's outdoors and this is Martin's family gathering for his birthday but they were not here in the Hawaiian Islands. We're about to see where they were which was kind of a misleading thing because initially I didn't understand where it was. So let's get closer to that next slide. So here's us again and you see there's a building in the back. It says hotel and victory. That's to be understood for all of us and at the bottom gives you a clue about the place. And next slide. So this is interesting. So last show about the V-dubs. You were excited about that in the V-dub planned in my hometown where they make the current bus. There was a palm tree. It was more than one palm tree. There were several palm trees right at the end of the production line where the VW buses were coming off and I thought that was a kind of strange thing it turns out that that's not the only place where you can see palm trees in Germany is it? Yeah and that got you going to think about the history of palm trees somewhere else but where they're from right? Absolutely because there's always been a fascination in Europe as soon as people began exploring other parts of the world they began bringing home tropical plants and places that homes that were very big that were owned by royalty or very wealthy people started having tropical plants grown indoors which was obviously artificially heated and there was also the invention of the greenhouse or the conservatory in which these plants could be grown and so wealthy people in Europe and royalty as I said were collecting tropical plants and orchids and things like that but palm trees really were the symbol of the tropics so if you could keep a palm tree growing in a cold climate it was a sign that you were obviously could afford to heat your home but also that you were dreaming about some place far away from the cold of Europe That's a perfect segue into let's bring the next slide because you made me dig into my archive here from my summer stays and this is back east with my parents at the Desping architect from headquarters in Radibal near Dresden and we did some trips my parents took me to this park it's the park in Pilnitz in the area of Saxony and you can see a greenhouse on the left and go to the next slide it actually is one of the oldest greenhouses in Europe and even in the world it's very fine as you pointed out cast iron as an innovative material at its time these few hundred years ago and very filigree built you can see here there's an enclosure with infill of glass small size because at that time you weren't able to make huge panes of glass and more recently they added another layer of polycarbonate material on the backside so it's sort of a double facade and let's go to the next slide this is the I took a picture of a picture in an exhibit here in these sort of pretty do me GDR days they let everything fall apart including this one here and vegetation was taking over in a wild way and then next slide after the reunification they brought it back to its previous glory and we were being philosophical about the art of making of this disorder correct because during the time period that this building was made it was the first time in Europe or anywhere it was possible to make factory produced identical pieces of the same building materials in this case cast iron and the cast iron was not only strong but it was also a modern material that allowed you to build in ways that you hadn't been able to before and coupled with the increasing use of glass and the ability to make glass it wasn't incredibly expensive that's where we start to see these buildings specifically for not only tropical plants but also for people to go in when it was cold to enjoy a warm human environment among their plant collection and go to the next slide talking heat waves by the way there was one on the continental mainland US as well or it still is right it's terrible hot there too so the problem with greenhouses and sort of temperate climates that have both the cold and the hot or the very hot is that you got to get the heat out so here we see at the very top this hot air rises up so the most efficient and effective way to get that heat out is at the very top so you see this sort of vent up there that you can open and drag the hot air out as well as for the next slide please around that in the next ring perimeter you see some additional openings so again in the summer get the heat out and next slide and you were fascinated about that the solar right well you told me that this is a camellia and camellias come from fairly cold climates in Asia but this is an exceptionally huge one usually they're just bushes or shrubs so I'm not really sure what's going on why this one's so big not sure either but it supposedly is many hundred years ago old so it was you know grew many hundred years ago it can't supposedly take the very cold the freaking cold that we were talking over a month when I was here that it was cold cold cold so what they did they had a wooden scaffolding over it with some kind of translucent tarp but then when they got back to prosperity of the reunification they invested into this greenhouse out of steel and glass but that's on wheels so I can basically roll over it and enclose it and then move back on these tracks in the summertime so let's go to the next slide and go back to Bavaria so we're back to that place my birthday place celebration so you can see obviously it becomes pretty obvious this is a spa this is an a leisure place I got a massage oasis and I got a pot here with a tiny skinny palm tree but in the back you see something that we get the better on the next picture and what is that construction well what you this was kind of a surprise to me this is really a huge movable greenhouse like what you just described for the chamelea tree and so I presume that during the winter this entire pool and all the tropical palms are covered up and kept indoors where it's warm and then when you get up to 100 degrees during the summer they roll those panels back and they actually fit one actually fits kind of underneath the other so that that's how they can meet or something you can explain that better but in any case during warm weather you open it up mm-hmm yeah and they have to because otherwise you get baked in there and get too tropical so it's a dome and they split into half two half pieces and they can slide underneath each other on a track and it's rather fascinating it's a clean and lean engineering structure there's no decoration bullshit to it obviously decoration and fakeness you see at the very bottom you know they make this lagoon and the fate rock and all this stuff so it's chlorine pool it's obviously nature underdictatorship but that's how these aquatic amusement parks are and have to be for much any reasons I guess so let's look at that a little closer in detail in all its little architectural details and go to the next slide so you smile so what is that what makes you smile well it's like a little first of all it's called Hawaii Island something that's what Suzanne is holding up on that seashell shaped little fan thing but there also are these little structures which are for people to relax in lounge in this looks like a big giant woven basket but I'm sure the materials are not natural I'm sure that's made of plastic but it is woven together look like some kind of natural material correct yeah and so that's a dome within a dome and talking artificial or modern or innovative materials that reminds us of our favorite Henry Kaiser dome in Waikiki that's unfortunately not anymore so let's move on here and check out some other pieces of architecture entertainment leisure architecture here so that reminds you of your workplace right correct and in the picture in the upper left corner you see the interior of Hawaiian Hall with the only surviving authentic Hawaiian Holly Peeley or grass house so these structures which again are for people to lounge in except this is outdoors are kind of replicating a primitive or more undeveloped type of architecture with a roof that looks like it's thatch that's just decoration and then as you pointed out the structure is made of bamboo correct exactly so let's check out more next slide please here so there's a sort of utilitarian area which you see a glass pyramid here so it's sort of an eclectic collection of different things and there are these interesting sort of Polynesian looking huts there in the back and they're in fact thatched and if you go to the next slide that's sort of zooming into that but while it was the appropriate building material way back actually universally there's a island here at the very north of my country here that was using thatched as well for the roof so that's not unique to the tropics but certainly very iconic for it but we can't build with this anymore because there isn't enough thatched around there's too many people it's not complying the fire code anymore so we have to look for a new indigenous leftover abundant materials and we think we found this in cargo steel because shipping containers we have a lot we have been proposing several solutions and we will continue to do that in the next upcoming so there's a teaser page of the syllabus at the very bottom right here but let's go back to the more people populated to area of this sort of little resort so let's go to the next slide and so there's the pool and then there is a structure and that looks familiar right that kind of roof type you grew up with that well yeah this is a double-hipped roof and it does look like not only architectural styles have been popular here but because of the natural covering of it because it's got shingles or shakes on it it does look again somewhat like it's tropical and this does resemble a structure that used to stand here and let's go to the next picture and we'll see the picture if we get to the next picture we will see what there no that's not it that's okay that's okay I was thinking something else but these are what we were just talking about what I was mentioning which were these again recreational little basket like things which you can zip up the front for privacy and presumably you go in there and drink beer correctly because that's actually the well that the umbrella is advertising beer and presumably that's certainly a special kind of beer because yeah and vice be as as Bavarian as you could get it if we go to the next slide which also gives us a key of the sort of strange amalgamation of these tectonics here now it looks more like a Bavarian or an Alpine ski hut so what from the distance looks like a Polynesian hut and then when you get closer it looks more and more Bavarian and so this other riding here on the other umbrella here Erdinger is actually the name of the town with this little resort it's not little it actually claims to be the largest in the world largest aquatic spa in the world and they found while they were drilling for oil back in the 70s they found some hot springs and wells and they used this sort of geothermally power the thing which helps to mitigate the carbon footprint of it but the town is probably equally or even more known for its beer and the Erdinger is a very very famous local beer from that specific you know little place outside of the outskirts of Munich let's go to the next slide here and stepping back and looking again at this strange combination of buildings here looking again at that sort of double hip Polynesian hut that reminded us of another resort that we did a show about referencing at the top right and that's the Makaha resort and I'm very happy to present a late entry treasure archive picture to that show which is the next slide and this is what I was hoping to talk about and I mistakenly jumped the gun and tried to talk about it before we were showing it this is the Makaha Valley Inn right after it opened and this is a picture from 50 years ago and right in the center of that picture is the youthful DeSoto Brown the way he looked 50 years ago with my sister and my grandfather this is gone now we did a show about this all of this resort has been destroyed it's been leveled but there are discussions of what's going to be built to replace it and we shall see what if anything comes of those discussion well I have to say DeSoto looks just like today so the architecture would have if they wouldn't have torn it down and we were analyzing that while from the distance it looks very sort of Polynesian and very sort of pre-contact very archaic the closer you get the more you see it's a very contemporary construction you got that sort of grooved concrete pillars you got probably glueland beams there's a very clear logic how the whole thing is basically put together and different than the resort stuff it's all fake and sort of a strange reminiscence of old days and the ways you built today this is very clear this is sort of an evolution of tectonics and an interpretation in a very sort of contemporary refreshing way or at least was because again it's not anymore and next slide here which gets us close to the end of the show and looking at some polemic propositions this is an aerial photograph of that monstrous area and you can see this is a big amusement park you know this is a big has a big tall on it's on the land it's sitting on big carbon footprint all the cars and parking and all the logistics and all the chlorine water and at the bottom is where the place how the place looked way back it was a typical small Bavarian town with a church in the middle with a tower and then everything naturally grown around it and what you see in that in that drawing is the backdrop of the Alps which are actually pretty close and it's kind of sad that when you're in that resort you don't recognize the proximity to the Alps so what makes the place is sort of ignored so it's a very sort of autistic self-referential place and makes the things about you know as much as nice the naming of the tropics the question is should we build things like that and that gets us back to the islands because we have similar questions to ask and let's go to the last slide and share our thoughts which we had to sort of about that well what we were talking about the Makaha Valley Inn and the potential for the redevelopment and the upper right corner you see a recent newspaper article about how a new golf course is supposed to be built there by an international golfer and we've also got a little photo at the top of the way things looked or the layout of what it looked like back when Hawaii 5.0 filmed there the original Hawaii 5.0 again about 50 years ago we also talked a little bit about just new resorts in general and how environmentally friendly are there and as Martin just said are they a huge plot on the landscape that picks up a lot of room because he's been teaching in his classes there are other ways to approach this and the Primitiva Towers are something that we have discussed as being put into the Makaha Valley area which are open which are green and that they literally have greenery growing in them and they are naturally cooled by the ventilation of the trade winds and they also are intended to be more integrated socially so they're not all rich people or all low income people living together and also other things on site to keep people mingling with each other and doing things that they don't necessarily do in buildings the way they are designed today so that is perhaps a direction that we might go in and we're talking about the real tropics here as opposed to the faux tropics that Martin is currently been visiting in Germany well and as you say that's perfectly put to solo because the bottom here is referencing to the Cocoa Palm Resort which we're actually not unhappy that it might not be rebuilt because just in these days you can't do it as Pete did it way back in this beautiful way as it's captured in the Blue Hawaii movie with Elvis and when we're talking about that with Tropical Tourist expert Suzanne she was indeed opting for that the real tropics and the very special ones because tropics usually we should say 40% of the world climates are tropical but they're mostly subtropical so you have equal 100 degrees and 100% humidity saturation which we don't have in Hawaii that's why amongst the tropics we're so precious we're so special so we better keep that USP as she taught me that term the unique selling proposition with it and the very bottom picture is actually from the show about with John and Hera Mayumi Hara and this is Kapolei so we probably don't hopefully don't Kapolei everything we have and make it a big suburbia but be very very conscious about our land and build on it very wisely and the footprint of a primitiva is very small and then it goes high and so it's carbon footprint is small it's ecological footprint is small but then equally or even more important again there needs to be a new way of tourism on the islands that's more integrative that you have people visiting become short term residents and they mingle and that's again our vision and proposition for how to develop in an innovative 21st century way on our so special tropical real tropical islands of Hawaii absolutely so I guess we're at the end of the show so you stay cool over there and I will try to do as well and see you in two weeks for another exciting show there we are everybody thanks for joining us on Think Tech that's the end of Human Humane Architecture see you again next time till then aloha