 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Oh, that's a scary-looking beginning, isn't it? Well, happy Halloween, everybody. You're tuned in to Human-Humane Architecture here on Think Tech Hawaii. And as you can see, it's Halloween, the time that we're shooting this show, just to start out with. And I'm DeSoto Brown. I'm the co-host of Human-Humane Architecture. Our regular host, Martin Desbang, is home sick today. So if we look at the general view here, I've got a surrogate sitting in for Martin here on the screen. But we will be seeing Martin up on our screen, I think, in some small moments. And today, Martin, tell us what we're talking about. Well, happy Halloween, everyone, DeSoto. You look great. Thank you. And so today is, as you said, our Halloween edition of Human-Humane Architecture. And thanks for bringing me in in these two different ways. And every once in a while, I'm floating up there on the ghost, and I feel like a ghost, because I caught that cold. And why would that matter to the audience? Because it gives us a chance to talk about what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about healthy buildings, or the absence of it. I think what makes me sick is air conditioning here, because I came here to have the most natural and healthy air conditioning, which is called trade winds. But some people believe it's burning fossil fuels and blowing ice cold air in my face. And if we could get to picture one, this is our new discovery last show, which was dedicated to the same issue, and a brief delay doing it in a better way. We saw the newest power, Use Tower, which is all glazed and glazing people with sun. And here we see in Kakaako the next for the lower income people who have even less money to run the air conditioning. So we don't give up to actually think about how can you do this better? And once again, our methodology is to learn from the best practices from the past for the future. So we go to the next picture, and this reconnects to two previous shows. One was about tropical brutalism, and the other one was just previous one, Bricelle. Because this is a building here, which is themed for basically Halloween today. The Halloween theme is this is like pumpkin carving. The concrete mass was carved out and scored and these slits and that's where the air and the sun goes through and it's filtered and also by the majestic trees that we basically see. Correct, correct. But we don't want to talk, this is sort of history. We want to discover more because when we did this show, Bricelle, we discovered they actually other ways that slightly or not insignificantly different than this way of more monolithic than doing it, doing it more filigree and more tectonically. The next picture shows the prime example of that, which is just across the street and which one is that? Well, this was built as the Department of the State Department of Highways building and it opened in 1960 or 61. It is located on Punch Ball Street at Queen Street. And it's got these exterior vertical fins and that's something we're going to be looking at today, vertical elements on the outsides of buildings. These fins are mounted in a way that they are not only decorative and we're going to see that too, but they do serve a function to a degree as a Bricelle or as a protection against the sun. And that's right, you can go to the next building, you can go to the next picture. Here is the Atlas Insurance Company building, which is on King Street. And when I was looking at this, I was thinking does this really qualify for what we're talking about? Because when you look at this type of building straight on, you don't see those vertical elements. When you look a little bit from the side, from a diagonal, that's when they really start to show, as we can see in the photograph on the right. And that reminds me of the last show, right? When you were looking at the Varsity building as the prime example for the Bricelle and also a very thinned out one and you were questioning, you know, are these even concrete thinned because all the examples we've shown so far are still staying within the primarily sort of associated to concrete exotic brutalism, which is concrete. But you were saying, can you even make it so thinned? So maybe we jump to the next project because there is a point you cannot make it thinner. And then you should use another material, which we're going to introduce, which is actually metal. And this is another, this is a prime example for that application. This is a very historic building. It's a Hawaiian life insurance building, which is on Kapiolani Boulevard at Pequoy Street. And it was built in the early 1950s. And it was the first multi-story building built on Kapiolani Boulevard. It's been restored to an appearance that is similar to what it looked like originally, but many people will remember this for many years as each one of those vertical louvers or elements was painted in a different rainbow color. So when you looked at it from the side, it looked like a rainbow. And this has got a remnant of the hippie era in which it was kind of dressed up so that it would look a little more up to date. And fortunately, to my mind, they have brought it back to its more original appearance. And I think it's an elegant looking and attractive building. And it's very typical of the time period in the Brise Soleil type of manner is what we discussed in our last show. Perfect. Perfect. Halloween edition. It was dressed up in rainbows. And the architect we should add is Vladimir Asipov, one of our prime masters of biochromatic, exotic, modern, white architecture. To what degree there are sort of shading performatively, you guys should check it out when you go there, sort of. And probably the prime, optimum example we dedicated an entire show to. This is our next picture. This is the Alamwana building, which had vertical aluminum fence, sun retractable. And yeah, these are gone. And we made a pitch to bring them back in an innovative way. And we call this building very, very exotic and not invasive, because it was bringing cutting edge modern American technology, but in a way that it was sort of performing the way buildings should perform in Hawaii. But it came so if the architect was a mainland architect, its most commercial John Graham. And the next picture refers to another show, previous show met emerging architect who had worked in this building, which is Neoy Deleys headquarter in Omaha, Nebraska, where there were another version of aluminum. So thin metal screens that were z-shaped and planned, very thin. And whereas probably the destiny and the fate of the Alamwana building was its motor, its engine, and its sort of wiring that probably, you know, went bad over the years, as it does with old cars, who you then, unfortunately, if they're vintage, don't throw away. If you have a 60s Corvette and the power windows get shot, you don't throw the car away, nor do you seal the car and put AC in there, right? You don't fix the power windows. You just upgrade it. And here it was easier because it was on a manual crank. And the guy who was the caretaker of the building went twice and turned the crank and turned the louvers with the sun angles. And exactly these same louvers we have on the island, but in a slightly different way. And that's the next picture. And tell us where that is, DeSoto. Well, this is a small commercial building on Wiley Avenue in Klamuki. And these louvers just shade the front of the second story of this building. And it is a very typical modernist stripped-down building. I like it has sort of a skeletal stairway that you can see on the right there. And the windows are very recessed from these vertical louvers. So they do provide a great deal of coverage. And they do provide a great deal of sunshading of this particular building. And it also adds, I think, a very interesting element to an extremely horizontal building, as you can see in the lower picture, to have those vertical louvers as a contrasting element that still works very nicely. Absolutely. And staying with that sort of more profane ordinary average typology, we go to the next picture, however, introducing another material that you can possibly use for sunshading building. Right. And so we're going from metal, which is more of a machine tool thing that requires professional construction. It requires a great deal more proficiency and professionalism in installing it. Whereas, you can also use wood, as we see with these slats right here, which are, again, across the top of a two-story building, which is located in Kapahulu. It's just the bottom floor is a Japanese restaurant. And with these wooden, barely even finished slats, which are still fairly rough textured, that's not too complex to install. And yet, you can put those up and get the same type of coverage, the same type of attractive frontage, and the same type of sunshading as you can with a more complex metal structure. And as always, I mean, here we share with the audience, because it's Halloween, you've got to trick and treat. So we share some treats, how we prepare for the shows. We get excited about a topic, and then we both venture out, and we do what the Komomo calls the scavenger hunt. And we look for these things, and this is just, we were rather successful, both of us separately from each other, but finding the same. This is just off Kapahulu, and a little side street, a little Japanese eatery. And the same thing, the next picture is in Kakaako. I believe it's a church, and it's the same wood slatted. And we go through materialities. You said in preparation for the show, the difference is between metal. Metal is invasive, has to be brought in from the mainland. You can't work with it. You need special labor. But wood, everyone can work with. You said a simple carpenter can do it. You can use some reclaimed lumber. You can use some invasive species of albicia and monkey pod, and basically do this in a really sort of low budget, very high appealing way, right? Correct, correct. And you can do it to different typologies. So the next one is a more domestic typology, and you found that gem, where? Yeah, and this is in Waikiki. This is Pawakalani Street in the heart of Waikiki. This is the Queen Emma apartments, and again, a small, unassuming apartment building. What I do like, however, in this situation, is that the wood slats, the vertical wood slats, although it doesn't show so much here, have a really nice rounded beveled lower edge. So they are not as raw. They're more finished looking, and it gives it a little more elegant look. It gives it a little more sophisticated and finished look to, again, what is just a low budget structure, which was never meant to be all that elegant, but it has an attractive look. And talking, getting more elegant, and being more refined, and being very artistic, this is the next picture. This is a classic example, where here the wood almost got weaved. I mean, someone was making sort of a fabric out of wood, and, you know, sledding, and sort of not just one directional way, but interweaving it. Correct, correct. And what you're adding, you're adding texture to something which just by itself wouldn't necessarily have it. But again, without a lot of complexity, without a lot of extra work, you can add texture to something which otherwise would look very uniform. And this is now, it no longer looks like this. This is the Beachwalk Ebtite Hotel in Waikiki, as it appeared in 1960. Our most sort of, probably outstanding example for that sort of methodology of Sun Slated is the next project here, which is, once again, a rather profane, this is a dormitory housing for a hospital. And here the entire building is clad with its wood slat screen. And as you said before the show, basically masking, camouflaging, everything of profanity behind, and also what might be sort of privacy and discretion is basically, and you also basically, so you perform once again in multiple ways. And if someone asks, well, what's the right sort of spacing of the slat to be formally performative? It's basically like simple, it's like solid and void and just like with a tree. If you calculate the amount of voids between the leaves where the Sun comes through, this is how much Sun is okay to not heat you up and the rest is dark and shaded and that's what you need to shade in. You gotta figure out the right proportion. But we wanna point out with the next project that it's very important to design it from outside in. So the Sun being your designer, but you need to go inside being the occupant and also basically decide the density of the slat and then you gotta negotiate. So what's the next project, which is the new typology, which is basically transportation. This is actually how most of the people have their first sort of experience with the islands. Where is that? It's a Hodeloo airport. And this again, as you pointed out is Vladimir Asapov at work. And here are vertical slats, but as you can see, they have been fixed or they've been molded or they've been carved is what I really wanna say, so that they create a three dimensional convex form. And as you can see, it makes a wave pattern. So on one hand it's very utilitarian and it's very just these straight up and down slats, but they've also been added to, so that they've got the rounded forms that adds a little more interest to them than they would have if they were just by themselves. And this is to dress up and make more attractive a large public space. And when the airport was remodeled in the 1970s, they added screens like this to what had otherwise been a total utilitarian concrete block building with the linoleum floors to dress it up and make it look more sophisticated than it had when it was first built. Okay, and let's just move on and go through a couple more typologies to show you guys in what building types you can all basically apply this technology. And along these lines, I'm gonna publicly admit that I'm a flat addict and we do it all the time and we stay with the next typology and the next picture. This is a subway canopy with a two years ago where once again, this is the Halloween edition here. This looks like a ghost, right? Or a skeleton. Or something, even that, it looks like you just thought of. That's right, it looks like a skeleton person, yes. Exactly, and so it's like the skeleton is being between. You're not quite gone, but you're not quite there. So it's just you're reduced to the bone. That's another way to call it. And the next picture is once again, sharing the inside out appearance and it's referring to a great show of our dear colleague, Tim Apicello, who's doing transportation, taking on that typology in a show, public transportation. And in that specific case, the slides are doing more things. They're first of all sort of distributing the structural loads over all the members. So it's like a tectonic of solidarity. And rather than having few chunky columns, which is post-modern, which is not my favorite era, this is gonna disperse it over the community of members, structurally speaking. Secondly, when you slide something, you're basically covering up the behind. So you won't see the dirt on glass as in this case. And the top glass basically is the thinnest, but laminated glass. So whenever a glass breaks, because some band will throw a rock over it or on it, basically it cracks, but the lamination keeps it together, but it doesn't fall through because the density of the slide basically holds it in place. So slads can have a very, very multi-purposeful meaning. And the next picture is another typology, which is playing. In Canada garden we did three years ago, two different applications on the right, the entrance to the left of the facade. And here we go Halloween edition again, that we want to point out that the night appearance of slads can be rather beautiful and appealing because the light washes through and especially from what picks up the warm color and makes it look glow and talking goes, which we are today. And here the kids in the kindergarten call these windows the ghost. Yeah. Moving on to the next project is a school for mentally disabled children here where, because the very special needs to be comforted and cozy and feeling safe. We basically slatted the entrance over it, which you don't really see from the inside. That's the beauty of it. The sliding is like depending on your distance to the slad like the desperate house or housewife jealousy effect, right? You can look out pretty well, but barely people can look in and this is jumping back to the last project one more time, please, this refers to a show that I did in the old show days of Urban Transcendence. And if you guys watch that, our director of that kindergarten is rather beautifully explaining why she loves the slad so much because of that. She has her office also behind slads and she loves to get daylight of course and she loves to have the privacy not being seen but she can watch out and basically have supervision, which is a job. Jumping to number 19 is pretty much the same mentally disabled school. We slatted it over the emergency stairs, which we also added light to get the, evacuate the children. Yeah, so we're gonna go to number 19. And we camouflage that with slads. These slads are six meters, 18 feet long. It was only possible with a very special wood treatment, thermally modifying woods. And this gets me to technology. The next picture, number 20 is, I want you guys to make your own mistakes and maybe not redoing martins. And I was young and very ambitiously naive and we did this building for the federal German government. This is a dining hall for the military and very early bi-climatically at the turn of the century, we wanted to sunshade that huge glass front and we did it solely effective with horizontal, almost horizontal, they're slightly tilted with planks and boards. But this is where every rain will sit on and rain is the enemy of wood and it will eventually, you know, the wood will bow and bend and basically eat the wood away. So maybe this is a knot to do so much. And we learned, so the next project is our own little branch office in Munich, which we used not boards, but slats again and we cut them in a trapezoid shade. So the water, which you can see and in a little detail can drip off and it's also thermally modified, in this case even popper. But the next picture, if you want to be on the safe side, stay vertical, that's what you identified at the beginning where we're looking for all the examples. Oh, this is all gonna be vertical, right? That's right, it's a vertical show. Because vertical, it's a vertical show. And the next picture, number 23, is getting us towards the last third of the show, getting back home to the island, which is basically showing our sort of teacher in flatting is nature. Because the forest or bamboo growth is basically the slatted methodology where there's the density and the multiplicity of the same member over and over again. And when it works in nature so well, why wouldn't it work in architecture? Equally well, it gets us to number 24, which is the project that we also did a show about. And number 23 as well, we did a show about the specific project. And number 24, this is the project, which we call the stratosphere, which is using cargo steel slash shipping containers. And they need to be shaded. And so we're using our BCF flat that we had actually sort of even micro-solarly engineered. So they're not square dowels. They're basically rectilinear flat. They're deeper than they're wide. And so their spacing is basically calculated by the sun angle. So you absolutely make sure you're not gonna. So it's micro-engineered, biochlametically micro-engineered slats. And the next picture number 25 is zooming out. Why don't we start slatting on an urban scale? And basically where you're sitting the solo today when you walk out, just imagine there are more skinny towers growing out of the ground where formerly the streets were. And you create a density that you don't have to worry about shading the buildings anymore because they shade themselves. And then you can use the slats as a beautiful screening device as the natural architecture has done a lot, especially inspired from Japan. And using the slats as we've pointed out in previous show is a great privacy screening device. Right. So these are all possibilities that gets us to the next picture, which is you might call us crazy and feel free to because we are and we wanna be to a certain degree. But how about this could become reality and the next picture is like a what if and after all it's Halloween. So here to the left, you got a prime example of slat from nature. This is a banyan tree. All these crazy vertical roots are slat. To the right, you got a project that we wish would stop now because it gets easy breezy that the window glass gets knocked out. But let's be afraid it's gonna be enclosed again. But just for our Halloween satisfaction, let's imagine it would be stay open. And the building in the middle is something that our lovely guests from our tropical tourism shows and shows ago has beautifully, poetically and romantically called the shadow house. And this got us so excited to solo that we might actually make a show about that. You wanna give a little clue what that show might wanna be about? Well, which one is that gonna be? I can't keep track of which one we're doing. The one in the middle, I think we have a really crazy as we are working title, which is a couple of P's. So I think it's like post petroleum. Oh, okay. People parking. That's right. That's right. That's right. We're talking about redoing parking floors of high rises into living spaces, but we won't get into that now. And we will show many examples where basically parking garages have been flooded. So to some degree, they have been more beautifully and more romantically and accordingly treated than people who have been brutally put behind glass. Yes, that's exactly right. So hopefully we got you guys really excited about flats. Now, however, second to last picture now, pouring a little bit of a water into that beautiful wine that we started to like, that's glad wine here, is this is our dear colleagues on our very own UH campus here, who were the best intentions were sort of bi-climatically upgrading a building, an existing building on campus by actually adding slabs. And as we talked before, and actually many had talked to me and I talked to many, they weren't so excited about how it looked like. So it's not just throwing a couple of slabs at a building with some brackets here. You know, this slabs have to do with science and the arts and this is what architecture actually has to do with. And you need to basically achieve both to be totally successful as a bi-climatic architect uses the slabs methodology, which gets us to a very promising last picture because we can cheer up here and give a lot of treats out to our dear colleagues from Pet Pole. So Bundit and Janice have just, are about to complete this marvelous new building, which many and me included consider to be the currently most innovative cutting edge because reconnecting to these old mid-century roots that we continuously and relentlessly discussed here and point out to these principles. And tell me what you find so compelling about the building. Well, one of the things that I really like is that, first of all, it's kind of skeletal. You can kind of see what's going on. It has a bunch of different dynamic elements that are happening. But I also like, as you said, the fact that it looks old fashioned in a good way, being mid-century. I also like that this is an innovative new use of concrete as you pointed out. It looks sort of nostalgic to me because I like the way it looks. But I also, I think the vertical slats are an elegant and attractive way to make a facade of a building. They serve not only for structural elements and strength, but they also can serve as a breeze sole and as a protection from the sun. So all of those things I think are happening there. And I hope that's what you were hoping I was gonna say because I think I see all of those going on there. Beautifully said about a beautiful building. And also Kudos obviously to our dear colleague architect but also to great specific Rocky Mountain precast who are able and willing to do these beautiful things and basically do these, I mean, these are super thin and plan basically diamond shaped or also trapezoid shaped fins out of concrete. And they're, you know, they have the technology so we can basically reach the neck and then do these super thin fins that you admired so much in the varsity building which, you know, we're technically problematic because of the spotting. These probably have carbon fiber mesh in there. So it's all doable. So thank you, Bandit and Janice, and thank you to Soto. I would say everyone keep on trigger and flooding, you know, from here on, not only today. And this was a great Halloween edition, this Soto. Thank you very much. A pleasure as always. Thank you very much. And thank you everybody for watching us. And our next show is gonna be two weeks from now. What are we talking about next week, Martin? Remind me. We actually sort of talk about the same but surprisingly and excitingly in a different way. We call this show the sunscreen to why. And we talk about another, there's yet another way on top of the two ones that we now discussed, ways to basically stay healthy and protected from the sun in all beautiful Hawaii. And look good while you're doing it too. As you do. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween everybody. See you next time on Human Humane Architecture on Think, Take, Away. Until then, aloha and happy Halloween.