 Good afternoon. It's Tuesday and this is Hawaii Moving Forward. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. And today we're going to talk about design, gestalt. We're going to talk about design within transportation structures here in Honolulu and Hawaii. And with me this afternoon, it's my pleasure to introduce Martin Despang. Martin, welcome. Thank you for coming. Martin is a professor of architecture at the University of Hawaii Manoa. Martin also has his own show here. It's called Humane Architecture or Human Architecture? Both. Okay. And that's every Tuesday at 5 p.m. Martin, thanks for coming. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Before we start, I would just like to talk about one who I admire a great deal, and that's Vladimir Asipov. And Vladimir Asipov was a renowned architect that had left his thumbprint on a lot of structures here in Hawaii, particularly the international airport here in Honolulu and then in Maui Kahului Airport. On December 12, 1964, he declared a war on ugliness. Who won the war? Well, thank you for having me, Tim. And that's an awesome question to start off with. We miss him a lot, Vladimir, because he was the man in not only doing the most appropriate architecture of recent times for Hawaii and some of his colleagues, who we shouldn't forget. There was Alfred Price. There was Pete Wimbley. But Vlad was certainly the most outspoken and fearless in approaching things like that. And if that is true, what he said four-way back, we would need him even more today, because at these times, when he was operating, at least, there was a certain consistency, there were certain ethics conventions in design and in society in general. And design basically should do anything. If it does anything, it's basically represent sociotel sort of movements. And so I'm glad you mentioned him, because he was so all over the place as far as typology. He did office buildings. He did shops. He did residences. And he did so many things, but he did our airport. And our airport is actually what sold me on coming here. There are other things, too, but it was the most obvious when I came here that flew me in for my interview. And I had a couple of other offers at other schools. There was somewhere on the mainland grade schools, too. But the airports were mostly regional airports from the 80s or something like that, really techy and cheesy and bad. And I came here and I got off and I saw this powerful, heroic, concrete beams in combination with the coa wood, the simplicity, but the sophistication of that. And then the smell of our tropical air. I said, this is it. I want to be here. So, I mean... That's a statement. You get me started on that one. That's a big statement, yeah. And we were talking about our other most favorite airport. You want to volunteer to mention that one, which is not here, but in New York City? Please do. Yeah, you do. I mean, it says. So we agreed before the show it's a TWA by Aero Sarin, which is another so heroic example of that we as a society were able to build that powerful and that heroic and patriotic, you can say, in a really healthy kind of way. So, again, kind of we should very urgently connect the dots to where Vladi has basically stepped off the stage and that's where we have to step on and pick up that torch. I couldn't agree more on that. Was the torch dropped? And if so, wait. I think so. I think so. It's tough. I would have to be a historian or sociologist to exactly and if I would ever do a PhD, which I will never. I would do it on that one. When did we lose it, basically? But I think it must have been somewhere actually tragic when I went to school in the early 90s where the 80s were bad enough, but in the early 90s we have lost all sense for what's relevant for what's important. I mean, in the 60s it didn't come from nowhere. Vietnam War, you know, the people stood up and they were fighting for things they believed in. And somewhere in the 90s it came down to surface. And I would say it's probably the sort of substantial approach that everything had way back at last and we reduced it to just the surface of it. And we talked before this show that if we do infrastructure today we could look neat, we make it look nice, we throw some Hawaiiana decor on it and we think that does it, but it actually doesn't. Glad you mentioned it. I want to dive a little bit deeper on that exact point a little bit later in the show, but you're here. Would you please show me some examples of design? Yeah, yeah, and let's start a little story here and storytelling and this is sort of my holly sort of view or interpretation of transportation on the islands here, especially our island of Urabo. And so way back this is an illustration of the system of land management, the Aupua, and people just walked and they swam and we go to the next picture. At some point we moved from two legs to four legs and let us be basically pulled by horses. And at that the next step is the one where things have changed. I believe that the two worst things that ever happened to the island were the import, the introduction of the combustion engine, both as air conditioning in my discipline and in transportation in your discipline. Once we started to do that things went down the hill in that trace aspect of Ladi Asipov because he hated air conditioning. He said we have the trade winds, this is the best natural AC in the world. Big boxes and dicky type design. Exactly, exactly. And we should use that. If you can go back to picture three, I make a cut here in which return full circle at the end of the show but this is where I come from. I grew up in a very urban European fabric. Actually I walked everywhere. At the walk it was a five story, we talked about TOD. It was a five story walkup, 96 steps I will never forget because either was the one to get the milk when my parents said so. And by the way today is my father's birthday so happy birthday dad. And so it was really that but then you see I got excited about two wheels and I got excited about four wheels and the next picture America was the holy land and so this is my 72 flimid fury. That drove me all over the continental U.S. No computer chips in that? No, not at all. And the next picture I actually used the automotive as a vehicle for explanation for architecture and the next couple of pictures are about that. So how we can actually rejuvenate so the cash for clunkers thing that you guys got from us Germans by the way was a catch it was a branding it had nothing to do with sustainability the way how it was sold because the few pre-assists and whatever we got out of that are so marginal that they don't count. But on that picture a number five good old rocker Neil Young has this link vault project where he converts his 59 Lincoln continental into a hybrid into a 30 miles per gallon hybrid. If you can think about the impact of that nationally he can train every little shop automotive shop at the corner and make them convert it would be huge right. So the next picture we're still within cars is innovation we both share our love for the innovators in the United States this is Bucky Fuller I'm going to have one of the next shows with the sort of brown about the Kaiser dome here so we have some trace of Bucky here on the island so he was ahead of his time in so many ways this was a seventh-seater it was so fuel efficient just for clarification it was the geodesic dome that he was in for this one. Exactly. Next picture is when we design new you know maybe these are new and this is an off-the-grid NETZER office building we designed it better sort of demonstrates in its form in its design its innovation and there are some cars who kind of do that but I'm holding against the pre-assist you know I don't find it innovative as far as design the Honda Insight by the way one of the very first ones actually did that and they're actually collectibles now I found out they're very durable so this is sort of a pioneer in the range of cars. Where were they first produced? They were they were here I think they were introduced actually here in the 90s actually and the next picture is downsizing so this is my German car which I still keep this is a no-twinkle it's a micro-compact car this is not my car I wouldn't have put that sticker on but my son Joey who's also standing there in his car this is an Audi A1 this is the smallest Audi they don't import that here to us they don't want us to have it you know so downsizing and architecture very important but also in transportation important and next picture you can downsize even more these are my mentees Chris and Shirage visiting me in my hometown so to the left is my by the way 23 year old car that might be small but the same maker this is a Renault makes this Twizy and the Twizy would be a perfect car for Honolulu here because it's a two-seater actually you sit behind each other and it's easy breezy so it's like a Vladi you know philosophy kind of car so you have a built-in backseat driver yeah and it's basically it's basically it's basically all electric so why don't we get these goodies they're out there and at that point I want to stop with a light four wheels and go to the heavy four wheels next picture please which is the bus we have supposedly one of the best bus systems in the US there's probably some truth to that but me who is predominantly on two wheels we get to that next if I am behind a bus it's horrible if I'm in a bus they cool it down to sub zero it's horrible too so there are many defaults on buses as well but let's get to design number 12 this is a traces back to my Nebraska years in 2008 there was Megan's design she refowed a bus station and she she thought about it socially that sometimes you end up with these people you don't know strangers right and sometimes it's great to communicate with them sometimes it's not sometimes you're there by yourself sometimes you're there together and this here basically tries to say these are almost like Arna Jacobson pictures on on tracks and you can turn them around and if you're there with your with your loved one you can do what you see at the very top right you can get very cozy and basically close yourself fascinating project to rethink sort of transportation from a social point of view next picture is is probably what you all prefer this is a bicycling here and Jay our founding father is a pioneer in the bicycling movement and and if if we don't bicycle here where would we do it in the Netherlands they dedicate entire highways to bicycles it freezes and it rains and they do it anyway so if we don't do this here this is a show we had we had someone from the bicycle league and really comes down to segregating the lanes that are safe not just necessarily having a bike bike lane that is in between general purpose lanes because there's a fear factor so we need to think about how we're going to make these lanes safer absolutely and what can we do as a designer that's number 15 whenever or actually 15 whenever you know it's a little things you gotta elevate the post fossil commuter above the fossil make him or her special by design so if you design them a bike rack which we try to do here in a way in a nice way they feel like oh I'm special right and they're proud and so that way you can encourage and rethinking conventions this is a bike rack out of wood we could make this out of albica wood here we can reclaim it engineer it this is fiber cement board it doesn't have to be exclusive it doesn't have to be glitzy it can be very utilitarian but it has character and thank you for adopting the term gestalt at the very beginning that J and I started to prefer over design in the last show alright well we're going to be right back and we'll continue on with our discussion this is Hawaii Moving Forward hello and Aloha my name is Raya Salter and I'm the host of Power of Hawaii where Hawaii comes together to figure out how we're going to work towards a clean and renewable energy future we have exciting conversations with all kinds of stakeholders everyone who needs to come together to talk about renewable energy be they engineers, advocates, lawyers, utility executives musicians or artists to see how we can come together to make a renewable future Tuesdays at 1pm Aloha I'm Richard Emory host of Condo Insider a weekly Thursday show at 3 o'clock that goes all summer long talking about issues living in a condo association each week we bring experts to talk about the rights and obligations of owners and boards of directors to successfully run their condominium it's a great educational show answers a lot of questions we hope you'll visit us sometime Aloha welcome back this is Hawaii Moving Forward and today we're speaking with Martin Desping who's going to talk about who has been talking about design and Martin please continue so this gets us finally we've been on two feet on four feet on four wheels in different ways and on two wheels and now we get on track so if we get number 18 which I will just skip over because you've been talking enough about the heavy rail problem that we have here we need to talk about more you know I mean the track itself and the sort of the massive construction and the cost going with it is one thing but what really gets me going is what we see in here that couldn't we at least have ordered or have someone design we call this show Tropical Transportation a tropical version of that car this is a truly invasive one they would buy this anywhere in the world where it gets cold and hot it doesn't do here so then we feel a little bad and we throw this sort of wave pattern on it right but it should have been if Vladi is that the design right there I believe so and so that or something else and so I believe like you know really and it's the same with the viaducts here let's talk about that because I see they've tried to incorporate a cultural theme who selects this is this going to the community are there options and the community says we like option one or option three how are we arriving at these kind of motifs on our concrete structures well and I put these two in a polemic way I see that obviously right I'm not knowledgeable enough honestly too I have my sort of theories and I think it's like we design this and then somehow this sort of bad conscience catches up with us we say oh what can we do what can we make it look like but again the spirit of the people here you know people anywhere in the world indigenous people they just did the right thing they didn't do anything more my theory is they wouldn't have done this sort of heavy lifting of that kind of heavy rail right and I will show you an example here number 19 is how this is the beginning actually of my architectural family business and this is our project it was almost two decades ago when we had the World Expo in 2000 in Hanover Germany there needed to be a new public transportation artery and we want a competition to design these actually 12 or 13 tram stations and this is one of the publications in the Wallpaper magazine and certainly you can read it and say they thought it was sexy I mean that's what the cover title page or the article title page basically says but if we go to the next page what's really important to me maybe we can get 23 instead but this picture is what it was originally designed for to give access to people basically egress access to public transportation wheelchair people strollers for kids and dads and moms and older people but this picture when I went there with my mentees somewhere we were sitting in a cafe and watching that and that I think is so more important than talking about the design itself but the impact of design because yes we can see basically Arab Muslim ladies on the bench we can see an African guy walking we see some German dudes there and we actually see some other cultures there too so design can actually sort of connect people and ease their fear that is instigated currently all around the world that we try to you know shy away from each other and we're like afraid I mean design can basically bring people together and so again is that one of the goals of design? it should be I think it was in the good old days we're talking about that was their intention they came with a social mission and they just tried to find the right but these days we do something that's driven mostly by capitalized motivations and then we brand it and that's sort of our conspiracy theory and it's probably more than that how does government play into that? I mean why is it so difficult for government that are working on public works projects to incorporate good design with the final end product is it cost we don't have time we have other priorities what's your theory about that? Well a positive answer would be if we show 24 this is actually a competition we're decided to participate for the city of Karlsruhe in Germany and they had they had a light rail and a very sensitive green corridor that you know there was a lot of demonstrations and people were environmentalists were chaining themselves with trees and saying this is not supposed to happen so the goal was how can we make this in the least obstructive way and integrate it the most and once again as if I would have known I would end up in Hawaii the material choice is very much like we would use it here there are strips of basalt and every other one is once again could be an albiza or eucalyptus basically a baton and you just throw this out on the track and even the little waiting house is out of the same material so it could be very and this gets back is sort of an answer to your question you know this doesn't have to be expensive this doesn't have to be a heavy lifting so it doesn't answer your question because I don't have the answer I'm as puzzled as you are and maybe with good examples with best practices we can actually involve people who are more in these decision positions to talk about that and motivate them I'd like to get some hard people on here and actually I'm going to reserve part of the show for how are they engaging in design and Gestalt with the structures that you know let's think how long these are going to be in place 50 years 70 years that's a long time with that design it is and number 31 is actually the project that we also see in the background all the time this is a project we did most recently and number 31 illustrates that working title we call it urban waterfalls and it's basically the canopy for something that I always thought wouldn't have worked here until recently I ran into an older gentleman who is a veteran structural engineer from the good old days and we got into a discussion and he said we should have and we could have done a subway here and I immediately said well the water table is so high we're a coastal town he said isn't New York City as well isn't Seattle as well so it shouldn't have been a no go for a subway however the big dig proved otherwise proved that the water table was problematic yeah well and again I'm not promoting and saying we should have done a subway but this is again an example for when you have a subway that once again the inspiration or the motivation for that project is obviously the Paris subway right from the Art Deco day or the Art Nouveau days when these shelters were delicately sophisticatedly crafted pieces of public artwork that were once again privileging the public transport commuter and saying you're something really special and we honor you and this is why you get such an awesome design in Gestalt did we make a transition from when we had all the street cars and street rails back in the 30's and 40's and then the advent of transit bus did that change dramatically our transportation structures as far as design do you think I totally believe so number 33 is the perfect picture and once again it's very blurry and I apologize for that but we can glimpse what it says so this is for me the key picture this is my most I have to find the original where it's not blurred because I took it from online but this speaks for me this is for me the epitome of how it should be I mean this is the electric street car that went up into the mountains as well can see it's easy breezy I mean this is tropical transportation at its best and I think all we have to do and this is number 34 is sort of a demonstration of an academic project once again how we could potentially reconnect so look into the past to learn for the future so we wouldn't bring these things back nostalgically once again we have these trolleys which mostly the Japan airline tourists kind of use in Waikiki they're basically fossil dinosaurs they got the same horrible combustion engines they're easy breezy so they look like the old street car but they're not so it's once again faking, it's branding we need to bring the technology back and it's interesting that there's actually talking to one of my guests Nicole Horry who I would highly recommend for you to have her on your show as well because we were talking more about the cultural impacts of her very visionary concept and you can talk more about the infrastructural one and that's picture number 32 she proposes I call it sky driving so she proposes gondolas or even sort of like you have in ski resorts the lifts where you basically you bring back the idea of the street car but the street car in these days to reintroduce it we had to do this in Hanover with this project to squeeze it into the existing street width which is really tough but for elevating it you just need a pole here and there and just imagine I'm highly I'm getting on her nerves because I keep telling her don't import an enclosed cabin right you need to have and she's there she wants to pin in Farina could be involved as a designer to make the easy breezy tropical version of that could you imagine you just slowly cruising through the sky in our most awesome environment I could but I also remember political realities this concept came up just briefly in Seattle as we're putting in our real system and of course people pay a premium for their views from where the properties are located and now somehow throwing something up that may obstruct your view political reality there's the rub don't we know that from something we skip on which I also hear now it's being reconsidered which is the fairies right it was the same thing why some people got because of the views right that's another conspiracy theory and I think this is sort of you just identify the problem that we have we were way more collective as a society where the common good stood above everything where now it's more the individual well I think you look at property values and those that have the best views are the more expensive homes those that own the more expensive homes tend to be a little bit more politically powerful and those that are on the back 40 on Malca side that don't have the political power so you think about you know where the pressure and the power comes from as far as how our design is going forward in this town and 34 I think is sort of probably the closing picture the best closing picture to demonstrate that it could be a very integrative approach this is a project I had the benefit and privilege to do with the emerging generation we call it rethinking paradise where you rethought Waikiki because there's a serious urgency of redesigning tourism because tourists who come here they're just not turned on anymore it's just a key that was maybe the case in the 60s and certainly but not today anymore so if you reintroduce that and you basically rather than being so the walking on Kohi or even Kohikawa Avenue is no fun as a pedestrian it smells it's loud it's dirty it's ugly so if you just you know take out the individual traffic and replace it with the rail systems both for luggage and both for food and both for people like the plantation trains have done it I stopped to go to say well you know where I come from we do it this way because I heard too many times well then why don't you go back because so I taught myself basically yes really I taught myself to say to find out what was the case here on the on it reconnect to that so the plantation train is the perfect example to me that basically was hauling the sugar cane as much as the pineapple as well as the people and the people were dressed up and it was a social event to ride these trains so I think these are additions to really look back in occupancy vehicle has basically taken away all that experience transfer becomes you know saying how do you take the public public transportation why when it's an opportunity for us to meet our neighbors and speak with our neighbors but you know it's it's it's come on with a derogatory concept and it's something we need to get past absolutely we're almost at the end here and I just wanted to say that there's I can't say enough about design and the importance of design in our culture be it no matter what culture you're from design has to play a big part in that and if it doesn't then I think we're doomed with structures for 50 70 years that subliminally I think affect us rather than not always consciously but subliminally it affects us and in our moods it's so true and I want to thank you for as a colleague to run this show because I think your show is like obviously because you know my way of talking about proves how passionate I am about that and I think this show is not only we say we run on tourism we run on military but we run on transportation and education economically but it's more than it's it's a cultural thing that we for root sort of rethink a transportation on the island that could benefit us all it wouldn't be counterproductive to any of the industries I think we would all benefit from that and so thank you for taking us on as a as a subject transportation isn't the most sexiest thing to talk about but it always ranks very high as far as what people feel are as important on their mobility or the lack thereof so again thank you very much and I'd just like to say this is our conclusion of today's show and Martin I hope we can get you back on I think we just barely scratch the surface here on design and how it affects our transportation the structures and how people relate to that