 Welcome back to our show Human-Human Architecture here in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii, on another wonderful early Tuesday evening in for sure, climatically, Paradissel, Hawaii. So the show today, about a year ago, someone challenged me who I'm hopeful to have on the show in two weeks. It's Kurt Sandburn, who is almost investigative journalist. And he charged me with a tough question what the best piece of architecture is on our islands in Hawaii. And since my mindset is the same as of the show, which is of no surprise to you probably, that our national environment is so stunningly beautiful here in Hawaii that our built environment should better be up to that. But my provocative pitch on that, that it might not be quiet yet. So I had a little bit of a hard time and I found something that, hopefully we can get that on the show as well, but then I was back in Germany and I stumbled upon a pretty wild thing that came out of the woods all of a sudden for me. And that's Nathan and not to forget to mention your wife and partner in life and in business, wonderful Tiffany, Toofman's child. And his or her name is Elevate and the show is called Elevating Social Engineering for certain reasons that I'm going to get to. And if you don't mind showing the first three pictures to us, and that refers to a show that you've been on about a year ago with my colleague Chris Liefen. And so we don't want to talk about that because the audience please goes back and watching that. But maybe in a nutshell, what in the world is Elevate? And then we're going to soon dive into what has happened ever since. So first of all, thank you very much for being here. Thanks Martin. Thanks for having me. Yeah, in a nutshell, Elevate's a nature inspired structure. And so the concept of it is really fairly simple and concept and that's a tree. And how do you bring the functionality, the space, characteristics of a tree into a useful structure and one that benefits humanity in general across the number of applications. But it's a relatively simple concept really. And I don't know why it hasn't been done, maybe we'll find out. But that's the concept is just a tree and then take that and do the iterations and look at the benefits of it and go from there. So relatively simple concept. And the ones who know me, I'm very sort of cautious when it comes to postmodern approaches where it's about literal symbolism or analogy. So when you're talking about a tree, you don't necessarily mean literally a tree. And another thing I want to talk about is that amongst the many working titles we had for this show here, one of them was Walk the Talk. Because Jay basically charged me and said, Martin, you know, he's been doing this here for a while and it's going well. But we get out of the room and we go back into our daily grind and hardly ever or not enough things actually happen. So you, another thing that's stunning that provocatively from an architect, an architectural professor, I choose a piece of architecture which is conceived and basically given birth by who is not an architect. You're actually an engineer, you're a civil engineer, you're a nuclear and naval engineer and created one of the, well, I consider best pieces of architecture on the islands. Why is that, Nathan? Well, maybe because I didn't have any formal training that I would try something so crazy that's part of it. But I always loved architecture. I mean, I wanted to go into architecture in college and because of scholarship things at the time I ended up going engineering route. And so my passion has been for a long time, spaces and buildings and that's what I, growing up with, you're always either drawing jets because I wanted to fly in the Navy or houses. And so it's been something that's been in me, my grandpa used to build this little cabin out in the woods and my other grandpa kind of tinkered and made things. So it's just this creativity thing that was just kind of born in and just can't separate myself from. And so this was kind of something I've been thought about for a while and then it just came time to try it. Researched it, thought about it for many years and then it was just a matter of, well, let's try it. And the best way to showcase something like this is to actually build it and it's not like building a skyscraper so it's not super expensive but just try it and see what happens. And Zuri has kindly showed it the way we would like to be shown which is from inside out. So the very first picture was basically showing how it feels. There it is again. Thank you, Zuri. This is how it feels. It's really about feeling good in the tropics. And I have to say, I mean, the more we got to know each other after I reach you out, the more I'm impressed because this isn't any kind of little game you're playing. This isn't like a little hobby on the side. You actually, I don't know to what degree you want us to talk about that, but you put all your eggs into this basket here of the Elevate Basket. And basically you believe basically this is it. You basically had a couple of people from your personal environment to become investors and basically say, let's just do it. And so the prototype that Zuri showed is in Kailua and the quarry. So it's in a very sort of unusual situation. And just before the show we said maybe next time you should basically cover people's eyes and walk them up into the space, feel it from inside out first and then go outside and see it basically as the artifact that basically is. Yeah, I've never thought about it that way before we talked about that earlier. But when you're inside of it, you almost feel like you're being hugged by nature because it's surrounding. And the space, I think, feels bigger because there's four walls of air essentially around you. And you just get this sense that you are on a small pedestal, at least when you've already seen the structure. It'd be interesting if you hadn't seen it and come into it. But just the fact that you're lightly touching the earth, you kind of get a sense of that, especially if you're on the rooftop space as well. And so when you're up there, you feel isolated from the world. And sometimes you want to be connected to what's going on below. And sometimes you want to be isolated from what's going on below. And so I think there's great potential for that, the isolation part as it fits into other things. And then there's a security aspect to it. It's harder to get up into. There's various access ways. But in general, you feel more secure. So in some cases you want that. And some places don't have that sense of security. And so it's a different feel. It's something really you need to experience to be in as well. And we think that once more people can experience it, then the concept will be easier to explain when you just go in it. And how did you feel? But in general, the response is when people come up into it, it feels bigger than the space that they thought it was. So it's just a 250 square foot space now. You can do as many of them as you want to get larger areas. But yeah, it has a good feel. And if you don't mind walking us through the other pictures that we have, and we basically organized them in a way that we agree with certain things we don't want to talk about, because this is how it might be misunderstood. So first of all, we haven't called it a house yet. We haven't called it a home yet. And secondly, we pretty much also are not talking about the accessory dwelling unit, because that was sort of maybe one of the initiations or the easiest for people to understand what it could be for. And I still have to actually protect it and saying, you know, actually for that, it would be the one of the best I can think of because you have, you waste the least amount of garden space you have in your backyard. You end up with a great shaded canopy, so you feel good. And above that, you can do whatever you want to do. So I'm still thinking, but I understand that it sort of became or almost became a trap that you realize it would basically pinch and hold it to. You shared with me the tiny houses which people know from TV kind of segment, right? Is that correct? Yeah, and it was conceived more as an off-the-grid micro-home or just home that could do multiple ones. And then the ADU thing came out, okay, that makes sense. But really, you know, we think solutions that have addressed city issues and overcrowding issues and the effects of urbanism with, you know, everyone kind of congregating in the cities and the projections for that growth is really high. So we want something that has the most impact. And ADUs could be one of those. It's just a matter of timing and the right fit. But the concept there is that you have a less, take up less yard space and you almost mash the look of the yard instead of matching the look of the house. So it's kind of a different shift. So therefore it's kind of different and not instantly accepted. So the picture we're seeing in the back, I would characterize this as really sort of homegrown and in introduction we say it's like a, you know, there's a term grass roots. And I would say there's like a tree roots kind of thing going up here. And it's certainly, you know, homegrown Hawaii because you both live here and you have a wonderful family here and your son is very creative. I got the chance to meet him and his dinosaur expertise. So this is sort of being rooted here and believing Hawaii is a place you both choose. And so this is where you saw this, you know, making sense and coming out of certain necessities. But as the best things that have happened in Hawaii, it's not exclusive to Hawaii, you know, it basically can go out and about into the world and, you know, be, you know, of help and meaning there too, is that correct? Yeah, I mean, the concept is to go far and wide and to make something that makes an impact well beyond Hawaii. And it was inspired here and maybe it wouldn't have been inspired in some other areas. And I think also Hawaii is small enough that you might get the confidence to try something big because, you know, it's smaller, you know, it seems doable if you're in California might seem like too big of a thing to take on. So I don't know how that would have progressed to other areas, but I mean, Hawaii is a naturally beautiful area. This was inspired on the North Shore at a remote site to, you know, try to fit in, walk you go in this place and meet the needs of that area. And so, yeah, that the reach is intended to be global because this, I mean, trees are global, so the reach is global. And on the other hand to also be critical in the show, that's the format of the show. It's like, although it's from here, and I think that happens also a lot to people and other products from here. They first have to actually gain recognition outside. So there's a saying the profit doesn't count as much in his or her own front yard line. So maybe it has to go away to earn its credits there and basically come back. You basically have been in San Francisco quite a bit recently because of, you know, many people you talk to of different kinds. One of the friend of ours is Chris Ford, hi, Chris. And Chris is part of an organization that's called Regen and probably the ones you see in the background that Zuri has chosen is probably the, could be the most sort of of that kind that you create some more sort of rural communities, new communities, new farm towns or something like that. But while we progress through the images in Zuri, if you could move on, we actually sort of progress into more urban areas, right? And so maybe you can talk about why that is, why you see if not the biggest potential of Elevate being in the urban realm. Well, within urban realm, one of the biggest opportunities as we see is parking lots and that's a big waste of space about one third of the footprint of most cities that just contributes to stormwater runoff and it doesn't have any positive redeeming qualities. So that's a huge opportunity within an urban context. And there's lots of other nooks and crannies within cities. And so it's just urban infill really and that's one of the things that to make cities support more people is we need to do more infill. So this is a concept of infill that hasn't really been considered in this way before. So that's the main thing for cities is that's where people are moving towards, I think in 2050 there'll be two billion more people but there's gonna be three billion more in cities. So that's the movement is towards cities. We need solutions that address that reality. People aren't wanting to live in the, there'll still be people living in the country of course and there's great fits for that but we wanna go to where the main problem is and how to address that and work on important problems. So we gotta, if we have a good team working on important problems we'll eventually find the right fit. That's super exciting, hold that thought please because we're gonna go into a short break to then be back with Nathan Toothman and his elevating social engineering topic of today. Welcome to thinkcarehawaii.com. This is Johnson Choi, I'm the host for the weekly Thursday 11 o'clock show called Asian Reveal. See you next month. Aloha and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii. I am Inna Chang, I am the guest host for Small Business Hawaii with Reg Baker. To tune in every Thursday at 2 p.m. and watch us. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Chantel Seville, host of the Savvy Chick show on Think Tech Hawaii and I'm going on tour. I'm taking you around the world, we're going to Canada and then we're going to, well, we're in America then we're going to San Francisco. So keep staying tuned, 11 a.m. every Wednesday on the Savvy Chick show, we'll see you next time. Hello, I'm Patrick Bratton, I'm the host of Global Connections. I'm also a professor at Hawaii Pacific University and my show and some of the other things that we do is show soft the collaboration that we have between Think Tech Hawaii and Hawaii Pacific University. So I look forward to seeing you and talking with you about a lot of issues dealing with Hawaii, the United States and the world. Thank you very much. Welcome back to Humane Architecture with today's guests, Nathan Toothman, talking about elevating social engineering. And you know, your project is pretty much a great case study for the show which talks about the humane aspect. You wanna elaborate on that a little bit? The humane aspect? Yes. What's so human slash humane about the project? Well, part of it is it's on a small scale, maybe. So a few people I think relate more to smaller scale buildings. It's intended to help more of the small guy than the big corporation, so there's that aspect. You know, the nature part, people identify with nature. And you know, you think about, there's lots of shows and songs about the tree houses of our youth, you know, and relating back to that. So it's very much that is that people either played in a tree house or knew somebody had a tree house or wanted a tree house. And so it kinda taps into that, like a simple sort of understanding of it, I guess is humane. And so it's, you know, when it comes to, that's why we avoid to say a house or that comes with a mortgage, becomes with all this pressure. And so here, this is sort of really affordable. This is really doable. I don't know if you wanna talk about the cost because you had prices for the prototype. And as I know very well, if you design systems and serotypes, you know, the more you mass produce, the more the price could basically come down. And but it's really sort of doable because you don't need to, you know, do this kind of heavy lifting. And at the same time, it's not set in stone. Like usually, you know, either you have a custom home and speaking as an architect, right? Which architects fee and all this stuff. Or you have something from the builder is from the 10 tree or the Armstrong's. And you can basically, you know, order from a catalog and you can have either war and you can try to customize it. But as I understand, what I find really amazing about Elevate is that it's a thought more, it's a concept more that depending on who wants it, can basically transform it to their kind of needs. And so it reminds me with the analogy to a tree. A tree is obviously a global system, right? There are trees everywhere in the world, but there are thousands or even, I'm not a botanist, I don't know exactly. So you guys forgive me for that, but there are thousands or even 10 thousands of different species of trees, right? Yeah, it can be very adaptable to the person, even to the standpoint of each foundation for it is separate and really each structure is separate, they can touch and you can connect them together. But it actually allows for houses to expand and contract as you might need, you know, so when your family grows and family shrinks, it can allow some flexibility that's just not there with a normal house. And it is modular, so each one is basically the same and we do a lot of them, so we get the cost down, but we're really trying to get, also bring in technology to that, to look at options like 3D printing of components, trying to take more of the labor cost out of it, looking at other industries, how car manufacturing stuff, how they've done ways to get the cost down. And so there's a lot of advancements in a lot of areas, cars advancing crazy fast, rocket ships, phones and but houses aren't really advancing too much beyond what we've already known about. So one of the goals there is to try to take a new approach at it, new thinking and more infused technology into that and that's one of the areas where the Bay Area has helped that we've been taking the trips to because that's kind of how they think and think outside the box. And so that's a big component of this. We want it to be at the end really affordable, we want it to be flexible and we want it to maybe adapt to a different philosophy that people might have for housing. You know, there's adapt a different value system for what you expect out of your house, how long you expect it to last, how much time you expect to be in there. And it varies as you go through different life changes. You can't fit a family of four in that small of a house but it can expand and contract. And so it's just trying to rethink essentially everything. Maybe you talk about some sort of case studies more in specific or explicitly. And I think this was before the, or after the last show. One of the things that sort of made it very clear to me how creative the thing could basically be a parasite. That's another term maybe from the plant life. You were pointing out to a parking lot at Kailua shopping center where Starbucks or McDonald's, I forgot which one, had basically taken over a little piece of the parking lot in a very invasive way. Stealing many of the very profitable stalls. Whereas Elevate could come in and basically kill several birds with one stall. And you want to talk about that? Yeah, that was the example of the Kailua mall drive-through for Starbucks example of, I think the total square foot was around 1200 square feet by the time you had up the landscaping in all this area. And parking is already really terrible there on the weekend. So the idea is really to be more space efficient. So you only have 40 square feet on the ground for 250 feet above. So you was just trying to tap into that vertical space with less impact below. But the key is to do it in an aesthetically pleasing manner. So something that's acceptable, something that fits in. So it's functionality, but also beautification at the same time. And so as a result, you get a good three layers of usage below, it's shaded, it's like being under a tree. It's a good environment. The inside has its good environment that we talked about and then potentially some applications using the rooftop as well. So it's just stacking more layers of efficiency in smaller areas. So that's a good case study for it. And I like the term parasiting for some applications. Yeah, parasiting paradise, right? That makes me come back to something you said about songs, right, and trees. So there's one song that's Pink Paradise put up a parking lot, I don't really know by Joni Mitchell originally, I haven't been sort of reinterpreted by many others. That song is critical and that sort of reminds me of my, when we say, you know, it was homegrown here, it went out into the world and it eventually comes back on a share with you, my most favorite application for homecoming, which is basically Kalakaua, which if we allow ourselves to call Kalakaua our strip, you would take out the individual traffic and replace it with more sophisticated systems and then you basically populate it with trees, with elevated trees. Yeah. How do you like that? I love it, let's do that. And when we were in San Francisco recently, was talking to a planner for San Francisco, the city, and all of Market Street, it's a really large major stretch. They just want, they're gonna redo the whole thing because they have the money too. And it's gonna be done over time in the future. And so it's less focus on cars and less focus on the transportation. They're still in there, but it's more bike-friendly, it's more walkable. But it's also like, they're trying to bring things that people wanna congregate around the community, gets to and enjoys. And so we see a big opportunity for that, is it's something that people wanna come, they wanna look at it, they wanna frequent the small business down below it. So it's a place-making community, a little bit of a focus more on the pedestrians. And I'm saying Kalakaua because Jay asked me to do a show about the old slash new international marketplace. And so Elevate as being the sort of guerrilla would be another term I would like, comes and brings back to what international marketplace basically had, which were the little vendors, the little people who didn't have a lot of investment, who couldn't pay these humongous, outrageous rents there. They could come back and populate the streets, right? Yeah, you might end up with a lot smaller space than maybe you had before, but maybe that's the trend that we're all experiencing, especially in Hawaii, we all live in smaller spaces. And we just can't really maybe expect what we had in the past. So that's one option that might not be there in another way is you get a micro space, but at least you have a space. And so that's one of the concepts for it. So one of the guys we know, because we talked about him and hopefully get him on the show, was Jeff, who basically we call the home full. I call him the home full because he has a home. The home is Waikiki. All he's needing is a roof above his head. And he's very creative as being a little vendor. He makes lays and he crafts stuff. So he could basically open, work out of the trunk and have a lid open and congregate the area around him. And whenever he's not at work, he basically is upstairs, right? Yeah. And so you bring back what Waikiki Hawaii was about, which is the gritty and small grain and the little people, right? Yeah. And your elevate could be a vehicle, right? Could enable the people to do that again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, kind of provide something that wasn't there before. And in some cases, it wouldn't be a mass scale application, but it's helping some people. And then maybe it grows through that. So yeah, I think there's lots of opportunities for that infill of small ideas, but really impactful for those people that are affected by it. And the illustration also shows, we wanted to mention Julian Park, who has become your collaborator and I'm blessed and honored to have him as a DRC student as well. Yeah, he's done all these images. And I give him a concept and then he takes it and makes it great. And sometimes we don't communicate exactly what I said was right, but then it turns out better than what I had. I would have tried to communicate to that. And I think let that zero-bink this one here because this one shows a vertical orientation. So my favorite sort of enclosure application would be having these vertical retractable louvers. They're planted on one side and displays on the other side. Yeah, it's like a giant jealousy, but turned sideways and then you can rotate it. So you could bring the greenery inside. And that's one of the things I didn't realize doing that my outside didn't match my inside too much. And so I was pointed out, you really need to bring consistency. That's my complete lack of architecture training. Don't worry about it. I think it's great. Our exchange, I've always been there as the engineer thinking architectually and there's the architect trying to think and human-wise. We're towards the end of the show. We can talk for much longer and we will because there's a tradition already to have you back to update us on the development of Elevate. So thank you very much. All the best to all the team and Tiffany and your kids. Yeah, I really appreciate your passion for it. And thank you for doing this for us in Hawaii. Of course. Thank you very much, Nathan. So I hope you enjoyed Humane Architecture again. And if so, please visit us again. We're always on Tuesday, early afternoons, 5 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii. Bye-bye. I'm Icy Davidson. Thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii. One of the things that we try to do here is promote civic engagement. How do we do that? We put on shows weekdays from 12 to 5 p.m. We let people in our world on Facebook and all the social media. But I'd like to talk to you about another way that you can engage us here at Think Tech Hawaii and help us promote civic engagement here in Hawaii. What you do is you get on Twitter. You follow us at Think Tech H.I. And during the day, weekdays between 12 and 5 p.m., you can interact with each of our live shows. What does that mean? 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