 to have you back for another episode, which happens to be our 236 of Think Tech Hawaii's human-humane architecture. We're broadcasting life once again from two very apart locations in the world, which is with our mid-century modern master, Ron Lindgren, back in his Long Beach, California. Hi, Ron. Hello, everyone. I'm sort of taking the Soto of Brown's place today, who is taking care of the centenarian mother, and I'm very happy to be back in front of this audience again. Yeah, thank you very much. Good to have you, young boy back, Ron. Good to have you back. And me, your co-host Martin Despang, when you wish so, broadcasting life from near Munich, Germany. Can we bring the first slide up, which is on a very kind of a touchy note, because this is our spring break edition. As the article at the top left points out, as Hawaiian News Now reported some 10 days ago, that while overshadowed by that tragic war in the Ukraine, it makes us almost forget that there was another tragedy, which is still ongoing, which is COVID. But since the restrictions get eased, as One News Now reports, that will basically help to flock, have a tourist flock in again. But even in Hawaiian News Now, at the bottom, you see the next article where all over the Ukraine. And how is this besides the tragic losses of life of innocent people, civilians, and children, and women, and men, what does it have to do with architecture a lot as well? Because on the right side of that slide, let's try that weekly lesson of German and just limited to not your whole sentence, but that one word. So what do you think means whole house, Ron? My German is much lacking. I'll leave that to you, sir. It's OK. So I help you out. So house is house. It's the same. And whole means high. So it's a high house. So it's a high building. We call these high rises. And this was from two days ago here on the German News Broadcasting and TV, where they were reporting that they were hitting this residential high rise here. And I think now tragically two days later, I think that high rise basically was was taken down by these by this missile attack, which is utmost tragic. And even we don't even know what what else to say and how can we get the angle back to a paradise in Honolulu? But we want to and we have to. And let's get the next slide up. Because, Ron, you and I and DeSoto, we have been, you know, spotting the most recent developments in high rise condominium development in the last couple of shows as there was the Liliya in Waikiki, the most recent residential high rise rental. And then there was after that was the Kuula by G.E. Gang, which is for sale. The units are for sale. So we see them as show quotes at the very top right. And now we promise we want to move on to another part of town. But before we do that, Ron, you also, you know, having a large body of work in hospitality design all over the world. But you also went up high, right? Let's recall how high you went in Waikiki with your, you know, Halle Kalani and the Halla Puna. How many stories were they? Yeah, I'm certainly not a high rise architect, but in my hotel designs, especially in terms of Halle Kalani and the sister hotel Halle Puna, many people there in Waikiki might be surprised to know that there is a 22nd floor at the Halle Kalani. It happens to be an elevator room. And across the street at the Halle Puna, the upper most floor is a 26th floor. So, yeah, I've had some experience getting people up in the sky and giving them views to ride home about. Yeah, and adding to your expertise experience, Ron, is that your friend and boss and partner, business partner, Edward Killingsworth, was residing in one of the best examples of residential high rise. And you were a frequent visitor there, right? And stayed there, right? Yeah, Harbor Square, which we've covered in several programs in the past, is a quite compact urban development of two residential towers all about the same size. And definitely a high rise living right downtown in Honolulu. Yeah, and you haven't been a co-host on the previous show and that adding to that experience, that made you actually sit down and write some reflective notes on what do you think the recent developments in Honolulu are? And I think we should dig these out and can you read your notes to us, please and share them with us? Yeah, especially when I see the second slide, which shows so many high rise, glassy prisms in the sky, both condominiums and office buildings, no doubt, all clustered together. It did make me think of something that I'd written down myself some time ago about my reaction to that sort of glassiness in the sky in tropical Hawaii. And so with apologies to the listeners, I'll basically have to sort of read these old notes. These glassy high rise housing towers require, in my mind, little design attention from architects. The appearance of the towers is rather in the hands of engineers who work for curtain wall manufacturers. They are purveyors of perfectly impermeable glass skins. This is an amazing engineering feat, especially when you combine it with total air conditioning systems, but it isn't architecture. And certainly architects aesthetic design attention isn't much needed when you've got these vast, flat expanses of glass that are a sort of a graph paper in the sky, which basically just sort of delineate where the floors occur and where the interior walls beat the outside glass, characterless, scaleless, shadowless glass towers. Where is the architecture? And I'm looking again at that second slide of so many of those glass towers. I guess the dubious accomplishments that I think that property developers have done, not just in Hawaii, of course, it's a worldwide problem, but they have learned how to build giant refrigerators in which people are sort of tightly sequestered together on the shelves of the refrigerator. Now, I contend that housing either on the ground or on the sky, the kind of housing that people want and they're hungry for is to be able to secure an identifiable and loathed home sanctuary either by looking at a tall building and recognizing that that's their unit or of course living on the ground. But the tough and critical questions of creating humane, high-rise housing in Hawaii or anywhere in the world, they're simply being ignored. Martin and DeSoto have called these out. Here they are again, energy efficiency, responsiveness to climate and to the detrimental effects of climate change, and outdoor engagement with the benign tropical setting, a possibility of actually having urban gardens in the sky, which are indeed possible, affordability, and the possibility that someone could actually develop a sincere pride in all sectors of Hawaiian society as to how they have come to be so humanely and comfortably housed in paradise. Now, are there really some handsome living quarters scattered about amongst these glass high-rises? Of course, but that again, isn't the purview of architects in my mind, but rather that of the developers, interior designers and advertisers. That sort of serious and all-consuming housing lust that everyone falls prey to, I think in the United States especially in humans is engendered with those extravagant advertising depictions of residential luxury in the sky. It's personified by such things that have become must-haves like marble countertops, rain shower heads, double ovens, wine coolers, and lavish home entertainment payment systems. So I still contend that developers, curtain wall manufacturers, and interior designers are together creating these vast urban residential refrigerators with the least involvement of pesky architects as possible. This of course is not just in Honolulu or Hawaii, but that's a worldwide housing reality. And that is my comments on some notes from some months ago. Yeah, and they're still pretty current and giving it the benefit of doubt. Of course, we will hope that the ones that we will now in these several volumes of this show here that they will make a difference and not be like the satirical cartoon at the very top left basically applies as being sort of greenwashed. What makes us curious however is this is a watercolor technique they use for the towers. And so, and they're in between blue and green. So the question will be, are they just greenwashed or at all or what? And but just before the show when we talked about it Ron, it also brought back another memory of yours or thought that has to do with something that has to do with the revenge of nature and a creature. Share that please. Again, when I see the second photograph, this broad view of so many of these sort of scale lists and inhumane looking glass prisms, I could almost imagine Godzilla having waded out of the ocean from the right comes into this area, looked around him, he's blinded by the sun glaring off of it and he gets angry enough to lean on them enough to knock them all down. And Godzilla from the early fifties when he made his first appearance in a Japanese film has become a symbol of nature's revenge. At that time, it was mostly revenge for the threat of nuclear annihilation of the human race. Now it's a manmade potential sixth extinction event caused by humans directly that might bring Godzilla to Hawaii to sort of clean up the mess of it. Yeah, absolutely. And another thought we have to have had is has to do with your friend and colleague, Mr. Fitzgerald, share these as well. Yeah, again, I feel sort of hopeless there looking at that second slide, but my good friend helped me to photoshop away some things so that I could make some points about livability and so forth in hotel rooms. If that same friend took diamond head off of the upper right of that picture and took the slopes of the mountains to the upper left away, again, that could be a portion of Chicago and that could be Lake Michigan to the right rather than the Pacific Ocean. Here is almost a complete denying of tropical Hawaiian paradise. Yeah, and talking Chicago and the Midwest, where you're from, and I call it my home away from home in Nebraska, we know this very well that at this time of the year, you were just sharing with me the two places you would love to be the most at this time of the year, which is not where you're from symptomatically, but at that time of the year, this glass would make sense because it basically could help to harvest as a solar game, but there is no such thing in Hawaii because that sun that will always be our friend, but it's sort of in our face and in our comfort zone, so to speak, and we try to stay away from it as much as we can and shade ourselves and shelter ourselves from it that way. Okay, so we will, as you see up there as the link to this, where we got this picture from, this area, the people here call this Midtown Alamoana Mu Kaka Ako, and that makes us more curious, it makes us go to the next slide, and this is from their website, and this is around the mall area that we dedicated a show to a long time ago to Soto and I at the top right that you might want to revisit, and sort of what makes you really curious is that what we associate the most with Alamoana and being the most innovative, and we continue to dwell upon that, which is the Alamoana building from 1961. Just in the last show, this Soto was reiterating the level of innovation and the biochlamatic, kineticness of that building that has sort of a feather, you know, a shading feather skin, feather-caped skin that kept the building cool by these louvers that were basically following the sun and always, again, keeping the glass behind in shade, and almost ironically intentionally or just coincidentally, we don't know, they covered that building with their big round logo of Midtown. So what is that about? You're wondering. And let's get us to the next slide and because they're hiding it from us, we want to not. And so here is, again, the building we're talking about. Very top right is the show quote from way back, and you see in the middle top, you see these operable louvers that they unfortunately stole away from it somewhere in the early 90s, shame on them. What we also see here at the very left, top left is the related exhibit that Bundit Kanista Khan dedicated to it in the architectural schools, Shem Galri, because Alfred Yee was the, as for many and most of the buildings of innovative kind, as he's been working with you a lot, Ron as well. And for the Kahala apartment, for example, he was the structural engineers and there was even an ad, and Al did the SPAC project together that we did a show about, right? Which was the seashore apartment, which they now rebranded, I forgot what, because it was so kind of silly, but doesn't matter. It's on Seaside. That was a SPAC project, Ed and Al basically did together. This project here was Al with John Graham, America's most commercial architect at its time, not a boutique architect, how you would call all these hot shot guys who are chosen to design these exquisite high-rises, but basically America's most commercial architect who did a good job. And up to this day, the project at the very bottom where we overlaid the Dokomomo Hawaii logo that you were keynote speaker at our national symposium, still is still looking pretty mighty good. The breeze blocks are coming back so there is renaissance of breeze block, the fine detailing, this is really America at its best. And that is the tradition of that area. So let's see how that tradition was respected or was basically continued to be written. And let's go to the next slide for that. And maybe both of us share in what we see and how do we think about what we... And I have to upfront, because I only provide you the picture, Ron. And so you weren't there with me when I was taking this picture, but you're probably happy and say, oh, there is this piece of grass down there on the ground that's might be helping to fight what we call heat island effect in the city when everything is asphalted and radiates back. But I have to disappoint you because this is not grass, this is turf of astronature astroturf, which is plastic slash petroleum. So this is very, very ironic because this would actually catch just the rain because it's open to the skies. However, at the back of it behind it, there's something mounted to the overhang of this big sort of four-core chair or patio or whatever you wanna call that. And this is one of these fancy in style these days, green walls, which is basically an artificial system. This is like you're in the emergency room, right? And you're hooked up to the machines and that one keeps you alive. That's how this system is. And that's its only way because that one doesn't get ever any drop of rain. So that's pretty ironic, isn't it? Yeah, the fact that the rain, if that were grass, obviously, the rain could percolate through it, get to the soil, but now it just rains and pours off under the concrete, which pours off into the sewer system, which pours off into the ocean, carrying God knows what with it. Exactly, micro plastic particles from its plastic nature, right? So if we do a little bit more detective work the very upper right corner of that image is something that we see up closer on the next image and the next slide. And that's something we don't wanna see these days anymore. This is a grill event for what we have to assume a single wall unit fossil AC behind. And we would have thought this is something from the past. And while obviously we're even more disliking the ones that they just bolt and attach to facades, but here going through this effort of having these glass curtain manufacturers that you was so perfectly elaborated on just before Ron and charging them to put this sort of this panel into their facade that there is nothing but fossil fuel being burned to cool down, basically refrigerate that otherwise microwave behind. It's pretty outdated, right? We shouldn't have these anymore these days at all. So if we go to the next slide, this shows us how the building is comprised and composed. The image, the left image is basically the elevation the only elevation where nothing but glass would be okay. Of course, the sun comes around, even to that one but only for a little bit at the very early morning at the very late afternoon, but otherwise it's totally in its own shade because it's North. But we see here where they could have afforded nothing but glass, there's this middle part which is seemingly is the end of the corridor and maybe the elevator shaft. So they're basically missing out on that opportunity to actually open up to where you could and should open up while the elevation on the right side, there is then the opposite one is the Southern elevation. That's facing the, facing Makai, the ocean. And let's go to the next slide and look at that one a little bit closer. What do we have, right? We have largely what you've been getting at nothing but glass, right? Flush glass, that is we don't see any or hardly any operable function maybe there's some little awning function there but it's marginal that won't bring enough airflow through and the only sort of tropical exotic we see there is at the very top left, right? These are Lanai's and these basically facing South they do some shading and they're good but I mean, what are they? Like a fourth of the facade or even less and the other stuff is just brutally exposed to the sun, to the pretty, you know, harsh sun in Hawaii. Next slide, you get more of these Lanai's which we promote and foster but you get them to at the wrong facade because this is facing West and this is where the sun is so low and that's why we say in biochromatics so our emerging generation 101 to the East and the West you wanna have vertical shading that ideally is sort of tilted towards the North so the West sun has been gonna kept out while basically the view and the daylight maximization is being kept. So here you got the Lanai's, yes you got probably 50% of that facade is comprised of Lanai's that's a good thing but unfortunately they are on the wrong side and also something we were criticizing over and over again and just last week with the Kula again there's glass guardrails and glass guardrails are just, you know making you hot on the Lanai and the Lanai should be the cool place the place that cools you down so no need and no place for glass guardrails. Let's go to the next slide which is showing in these four show quote references at the top there which from a show way back which we sort of the working title was the proletarian power of people's parking plans where we said in some ways actually the car is treated nicer than people because they always throw something over you know the parking stalls as the fenestration some grills, some vegetation so it's actually more biochromatically cooled for the cars than for the people and we see this here in this building again at the bottom you basically see up there where the cars are there are these perforated screens and grills the breeze can go through and it's comfortable while down there where's the fixed glazing you don't want to be behind that when we don't get any of that gas or oil from Putin anymore which is the point these days, right? So next slide once again the irony being that this here might actually be the best dwelling part of the building which is not intended to be for the people it's for the cars but if it's up to me or if again if you turn down the oil supply the gas supply which is happening now as one of the side effects and sort of in the center of the whole nasty war then this is the place to be and that's quite ironic, right? So we can go to the next slide please and we got only a few minutes left but we want to move on because this show has to feature quite some of these characters here and the next one is actually just down the same road which is Keamoko Street which is where the Walmart is on the other side so this one here is just breaking ground and as you can tell down there from us pulling this from the website it's called the park and in fact we see a little bit of green patch there at the base of the model we hope this is not astroturf of course we hope this is real grass but if you would call it a park I don't know we have to wait and to see but the buildings pretty much look awfully familiar, right? They pretty much look not that much different than the one before and one of the issues is Juan you pointed your finger at verbally rightly so in your writing that you read to us was affordability being a big issue, right? and here we're quoting basically the price tax of the units and there it don't seem to be affordable at all so this seems to be all about gentrification so yeah, regardless and nevertheless we have to continue and observe more and investigate more and hopefully find positive things along the lines and more buildings so we will do that hope to have you back, Ron, next week for that and also having the Soto back so it's gonna be the three from the post-fossil filling station then for us reconvening and until then please all stay tropically exotic and exotically tropic and safe and peaceful thank you, Ron, thanks everyone bye bye bye everyone 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, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com Mahalo