 We're very happy to have you back with us here on Human Humane Architecture, broadcasting live from our low-hanging fruit, plentiful, paradissel islands of Hawaii, with DeSoto Brown and Martin de Spang. And we got everything here, right? Well, we think we do. Even picture number one? Even think we've got a wonderful building right in the center, that's what we're going to be talking about. Simonhead Beach Hotel, and it's indicative of what we're talking about this. So what's the next picture? So we got everything even. We got pyramids? Do we? Do we have pyramids? Do I see any up there in that picture? I'm not sure. Well, we don't see any easily. We think of pyramids. It's like what they ancient Egyptians had, but maybe we got it closer. Okay. Let's go to our ninth island. All right. Next picture. Yeah. And we have to explain this is how the locals call Las Vegas. That's exactly right because that's where many go. Eight major Hawaiian islands, and this is the one that you go to after you've been in the other ones. There's direct flights to it. Oh, yeah. And I happen to be there because we were published along with this French interior designer Patrick Girard, who did this wonderful reef inspired, by the way, top right picture, bar and lounge in the V Hotel, which is part of the, unfortunately, recently tragic mental A-bay because of the shooting. This is straight in front of that pyramid called the Luxor. And so that's what you see there. And the next picture. And we were talking that the Egyptian pyramid is the epitome of a solidity. It's solid inside. There's very little open space, but not this one. We said, you know, the little tombs there in there or something, the mummies, which we have this discussion. Right. There aren't any mummies in there, but there are just some little, some little cables, a laboratory chain, right? Exactly. Some cages in there. But this one, he is corporate America branding, rebranding a pyramid. This is hollow because it got the atrium. So all the hotel rooms are basically suspended from trusses in the corners. And so we went because we're one to learn. So we went into these egress staircases. They're all enclosed. And this is the detail. This is the scariest welding I've ever seen in a while. And I thought, God, let there not be a fire in the building because in a previous show we had another building on Vegas that was on fire, right? Right. Yeah. So this is, this is the antithesis of, of a pyramid. Solidity. Of that. Exactly. So we've been there a two next picture. Yes. What happened to you? Well, when you go in these rooms, you want to walk over and look out the window. And without thinking, you walk into and bang your head against the glass because it's tilted. Ouch. Ouch. And you see people's prints of foreheads and noses and stuff against the glass. Yeah. And another criticism, next picture on my side here as the architect is that this thing is beaten by the sun the whole time. So the pyramid, again, is sort of crazy antithesis. So the sun god originally that was involved. Correct. And now here it's the air conditioning god. And it just is, it's throwing energy out all the time. Yeah. Versus the theory of the original theory where it's sort of a cosmic power plant. Exactly. Well, this is not generating power. No. It is taking power away. This is powered by the oil industry. And as you said too, it's sending out that beam of laser light every night that's spending energy. Exactly. And that facade gets pounded by the elements by the sun and the rain. Every drop of rain. So you can see the glass going bad at some point. And next picture, we always have nice suggestions for retrofitting. This is a product that I, in many ways, their products, they're too good to be true. So they're not really become mainstream. So it takes a while. This is originally, there's a little bit of my original culture, patriotism, a German company called the Plastivarca Arnold and they created this product Voltaux. And then a Spanish company is now in business with that. It's called Onyx Glass. And it's basically baked on glass, photovoltaic frittings. So these dots and different patterns you can make. So we're suggesting to retrofit that pyramid though. So it can create its own energy so it becomes its own power plant using this analogy. And those, that elements of the photovoltaic material is also a shading factor. All right. But that's true. Yeah. And let's go back to our other islands here. Next picture. Back to our islands. Exactly. And this is my dear professor and colleague, Keith Sires, who together with my other professor, Homer Pewterbaugh and another colleague have done this great introduction to structural systems. So here they introduce us to what we're going to talk about today to the phenomenon of Bedard and Buttrist. Bedard, we have that at the very top in Buttrist. We have at the bottom left. And Bedard, you can see, you were saying our termites unfortunately don't do that. But when they originally come from in Africa, they built these mountains. And these mountains are thicker at the base and thinner at the top. They're totally figured out. There's also some very biochlametic and easy breezy. Everything that we want to... Everything that we like. Yeah, exactly. We like the termites. Exactly. So next picture is then, in previous show, you pointed out that the indigenous sort of had dealt with that as well. Right. And one of the things we just pointed out is that things that are wider at the base are more stable. And so a wall, a stone wall that's particularly dry wall or dry stack, wider at the base means that it is more stable. So these walls at the Center for Wine Studies at the University of Hawaii are mimicking the way walls were built for really big hey-ow that were wider at the base. And this is typical for six seas. And this is us with World Bruder here touring it was the glorious interpretation of indigenous culture, not imitation. Right. It was interpretation versus imitation, which we like to do these days. Another show, we found these walls. Next picture. Yes. So when we went out to Makaha, you went and I went. And we discovered these remnant walls of the now vanished Makaha Valley Inn. And they too have this battered, wider at the base tapering up to the top motif that is probably mimicking ancient Hawaiian culture. Exactly. And they also did it to a column. And next picture, we also see that at another project here that we've been featured as one of our favorites. This is Pete Wimbley's Bank of Hawaii and the top right that we featured in another show is that unfortunately this plinth isn't there anymore, as I like to say, got cheese caked. Yes, it did. It looks pretty corporate American general and not that specific anymore. And here, as you pointed out, this nice sort of, again, getting thinner to the top columns, which reminds us of another even more prominent building. Next picture. And that is the Hawaii State Capitol building. And we've got two elements going on there. The columns are battered in that they are wider and tapering towards the top. And then the two chambers on either side also have that same format. Those as we have discussed is not just purely for decorative effect, although they do mimic a naturally occurring form, which we'll look at later. But they also do have this function of being bigger at the bottom. And you can accommodate more people down there where you've got the legislators and the senators sitting. As the picture on the top right shows, you can experience that lively, spatially, as sitting there. So it's not that lick and stick on the surface, it's essential, you feel it right. And what Bruder called after having seen it, he called this the best capital in the United States that he has ever seen. And this is not just because of the way it looks, it's the way it functions. I've been doing the women's walk a while ago and I experienced this power of democracy and people standing up in there and expressing themselves. As the amendments tell us we should do right, this is great. It functions very well. And again, they do these elements, the Faden City Guide basically that has this building in there. It basically points out in a very precise, short, but sweet way, it says the symbolism of this project has been controversially discussed ever since. And I think it's great, like true modernism is you can see these literal energies in there or not. It's up to you. Because postmodernism shoves it in your face, you have to look at it this way and you don't have another choice. This is more liberal, which democracy should be. So next picture, one of my experiences with this, and this is the term, the phenomenon of basically batter it, is still the tallest, because we want to get to tall buildings because we have a lot of them on the island here and this is in Chicago, this is Burnham's 1893 Monatnok building. And it's a solid, steratomic monolithic high rise out of brick. And as you see us with our merging talents down there, it's a we observe and are fascinated by the six feet thick walls at the base. And I think they go up to like three feet or something like that. So it basically does what the walls do as a building. Exactly. And this is all before the use of steel skeletal girders on the inside. Follow that because it means from the role of that build, make sure you have apartments as the most prominent because he said, well, this is made doesn't make sense to expensive. Let's use modern technology, steel and glass. And that's where we are now. So and let's go and search for towers that implement these things here. Right. And we had already found one a while ago when we were talking about the Hilton Hawaiian Village, Kaiser's mainstream Hawaii, the Astro Tower here, excuse me, the Lagoon Tower, pretty much by Edwin Bauer. Also a show with John Williams about that. And we pointed out that this there are these sort of pilasters at Taper. And you can see this being inspired by the banyan tree root. Exactly. But again, you don't have to see that. And there's also a performative benefit for that from the from the visitor side. If you want a balcony or a night that's more secluded, more protected, you go to the bottom of the building. If you want one that's more floating there in space, you go. So there isn't just a decorative benefit. And the banyan roots are not just decorative either. Exactly. They are there to hold up the tree. Absolutely. So it took that great point. It took this analogy sort of literal because it's not a literal orange. No, it's not. I think it's a functional and a performative thing. Right. And now the next picture is another building we found out. This is the Sheraton in Waikiki, which this building as the previous one, the basic building is straight. Yes. But the ends of the buildings, they play with that. So there are these very sculptural sort of sort of exotic, brutalist sort of gestures. One has the elevator and the other ones are basically just the ends of the building. And they also do that. It's hard. It's hardly noticeable. But if you guys go there, you can see that. Right. And there's a third building just next to us. Which one is that next picture? What's our next building? What's our next building? There we go. We are right here downtown at the this is the financial plaza. This was built as the Castle and Coat building. There is a flare at the base of the building, which probably was there for decorative purposes. But as you pointed out, I'm sure it does add stability as well. So you can see there's a little bit of widening at the base of the building. And this is a brutalist building with this textured concrete and a very fine example of tropical brutalism, tropical brutalism, that Timothy Schuler, who is going to be one of our hosts over the summer, is going to write an article about and also do a show with us. And this is a prime piece of architecture. And here's Will Bruder again last week, very impressed by it. Also by the landscape part, which credits back to Lawrence Halperin, whom he had known in person. So the next picture is not so good example that you contributed. Right. And this is purely decorative. We don't think that these fins really do do a heck of a lot for this building. And if you look at the picture on the top in the middle, what's cookie to me is the two facades that face outward of the building have these buttresses, if you will. But on the backside where you don't see things and people just park, they just left them off and they saved money. They value engineered that that out of the building and on the front, you see these buttresses. Exactly. And that being said, let's go to the next one and look for buildings who do battered, battered buildings, battered buildings. And here's one in Waikiki. There is one and that's on our end on the diamond head end of it. It was Suzanne on the walking tour with me. And all of a sudden there was this cigarette there. You know, pointing out in bright yellow. And next picture, it also goes into the category of a previous show, Crazy Candle-Leaving Canopies, because look at how crazy and they're like coming out and then they get thinned out and you got these notches at the slabs on the side, so very sculpturally crafted, very tectonically clear. And, you know, in fact, very spectacular and sort of it's interpreting the anatomy of a pyramid, which is per se touching the ground. Massively, these are floating pyramids. That's right. That's pretty cool. That is. And next picture is showing us. I also want to give credit to the current occupant or hotel user of the building. This is called the Aqua Bamboo and you can see why. And they're basically heavily vegetating, making it in an urban jungle. It's a great experience for being in a great jungle. Right. They green it a lot. I want to give credits to that. Yeah. And next picture is our next example of that family, which is on the other end of Cuyo, on the ever end. And you know the original name. And the original name of this is the Waikiki Gateway Hotel. It is at the split between Cuyo and Kalakawa Avenues, where the Gateway Park is, and it's built in the early 1970s and very clearly, as we can see, it's got that tapering upward so that you can clearly see, as we'll see in our next building too, those two tapered ends. Yeah. And next picture here shows how that gets celebrated in the facade. You've got these sort of shadow reveals that underline the floor slabs. The one that we pointed out in the beauty and the beast show we did a while ago that can't do any more crafts wise. They were doing them very well. And then again, they get notched out at the end in a very sort of accentuated, expressed way. Next picture. And sort of he was playing with that theme of the floating zero at here even more dramatically at the bottom picture. You can see pretty heavy beams going Malka Makai and then sort of thinner, but still impressively tall beams, which are actually the bottom of these fins. Right. And so this is this is expressed structure at its best. Right. And they look like rafters. They look like rafters that are protruding out of a traditional style home or wooden buildings roof. Yeah, absolutely. And the third one of that little family here is the next picture. And have we mentioned the architect yet? We will soon. We will soon at the end of this project here of these pictures here. And this is also our permanent background picture here. Right. This is in the Gold Coast area here. And that's the Diamond Head Beach Hotel. Yeah. And that is a condo hotel combination, a condo hotel, how they call it. And it's very skinny. So it's almost an extruded skinny tower. Right. Yes. And next picture shows us that it has the same thinking as the project we pointed out in a few shows ago, which was the Bellevue on Alawai, correct. Which the building is skinny. And the building is oriented the same way that at the top picture, the circulation is on the south and the openings are very minimal and jealous. Yes. So the walkways are your shading eyebrow. Correct. Whereas the bottom picture shows the north facade where the living rooms and the lanais are and the building always stays cool. And it is not doing the mistake that the new towers do that obsessed, overly obsessed with the views and do that on the expense of being hit by the west sun where the sun sets. Exactly. And then you need the AC to basically keep yourself cool. This building is bi-climatically, literally and figuratively cool. And what I like about this building is, as I said, because of the way it's situated, you clearly see the tapering size of it and that it is a pyramid. Exactly. Because of the way you see it from the street. Exactly. And I happened to, when I wanted to take more pictures, I ran into a tenant who turned out to be German. So there was a lot of chitchatting going on. In German. In German, yeah. And she was confirming to me that, in fact, all the units have different sizes, square footage sizes due to the nature of the building being taller at the bottom and to the end. And that is, you know, if you think about providing a larger range of dwelling propositions, it's pretty interesting. But as we've also discussed too, every time you vary something like that, you are charging more money. And we will get into that touching subject exactly. So last, next picture here, which is the last picture for this project, is also referencing and attributing to our show about celebratory circulation, our last show. And this was actually our winner. We set this building to its best. It's showcasing the circulation being at the sort of narrow front end. So the facade, the address, the face of the facade, facade becomes the sort of post-fossil ascending and descending of the building. Right, right. How cool. Showing off the stairway. And of course, we'll mention the architect. So next picture, because until now, today we found out that the architect Jopo Rongstead is Mr. Ziggurat. And until then, we thought he was Mr. Skinny Towers, because most of the skinniest towers on the island, not only the square ones, but these for sure, but also some very other funky ones are authorship by Jopo Rongstead. And I happen to know the building manager of this building, which is Century Tower, just next to the convention center. And he told me that the windows are about to go bad and need to be replaced. And I said, there we go. Please replace it where this photo will take us. The building's orientation is because it's ideal for that, because every facade gets hit by the sun. Sure it does, and it has no shading. But no, it would then, because wherever there is opacity, it shades. And at the same time, this opacity creates energy, electricity that he can use to cover the rest of the building. He's got two positive attributes. You could basically biochlametically retrofit and our Doko Momo members will like, not dramatically change the appearance of the building. How cool would that be? So not so cool are the next couple pictures to pour some little water into this wine here, because Glass Tower is way back. And actually our first original Glass Tower wasn't the Glass Tower because John Graham at the very left, we ran a show about it. Our coolest commercial classic had louvers to shade the glass. They unfortunately took these off in the early 90s and thought, you know, they can just replace it with AC. And that's the way we're still building. So the building in the bottom middle is a little brooder at the IBM, how it used workshops, staring at this thing, which is done by some very respected colleagues of his who have done the Apple Store in New York. But when they come here, they ran out a little bit of inspiration and do at the bottom right, a picture I took while being in traffic, just the same old Glass Tower that's basically is hit and blasted by the sun and needs to be aced. How sad is that? And these are even the square towers that the developers even think they're not sexy enough. So next picture, they do other ones. That's right. And they make these funny shapes. And there are, as we pointed out, the architect says, the left one is inspired by Hawaiian fishing. The other one, I'm lost, maybe intestines or something like that strange ways. That's true. I don't know what that is. So we would caution the young generation to be formalists, but be performer tests, maybe. And so the next picture on a recent trip to San Francisco here with our friend Kurt Sandburne, almost activist journalist on the island. We drove far out to look at the skyline. And of course, we know the iconic Pan American. Trans-American. Trans-American thing here to say this again. Pyramid from the 70s by Pereira as the architect. But now the skyline is dominated by a new one, the very tall one that you can see there. And this is a Cesar Pelle tower. And Cesar Pelle also did work on the islands way back late sixties. These are the towers, which are on couple on the Boulevard close. All the way and University Avenue. Both buildings meaning well and certainly architecturally ambitious, but by climatically sort of not where they should be. So well, Bruder made a pitch and he matches former governor Abercrombie to say, we need a beacon. We need a tall tower, but needs to be a highly performative tower. That's setting a standard that is top notch. And and will say, as it might want to be someone like Renzo Piano, which you can see at the bottom right, this is a shard building in London. Correct. And I want to point out just really quickly that we already had an iconic tall building for much of the 20th century, which was Aloha Tower and Aloha at Honolulu Harbor, tallest building. And as we like to say, it was easy breezy in addition to being an icon. And it's a skinny tower. And so the air can go through that's the air went right through it. Perfect. This is our grandfather. That's right. Easy breezy grandfather, skinny tower. Very well. But come on, can't don't we have pyramids on the island? If we take one and we turn it really fast, that's right. That's right. Well, there is a natural form that looks like that. Let's go to the next picture and that is a cone. That's a volcanic cone. Those cones are formed from things being ejected from the volcano. And they naturally assume this cone shaped, which is stable. Yeah. And we got we got sort of tempted to think about that as far as using that sort of anatomy and not form for building a next picture. Where's that? Well, that's primitiva. That's one of the earlier primitivas. And we've got you explained to me that there are two here. The one on the left was intended to be on a slope where the terraced slope could serve as taro terraces to grow taro and that within the tower, which is tapered, there would be a mix of Hawaiian homes, people of renters, buyers, etc. And then again, a lot of open spaces for people to mingle. One of the problems with that is, however, as we've discussed, whenever you make something that's nonstandard, then there's more cost because you do not have standardization to be able to use, for example, the pre have pre fab concrete. Exactly. So I got in trouble with less campers as you perfectly indicate already because he said, Martin, you're violating one of the two must do's for for efficiency and effectiveness in pre fabrication. One is maximum unit size, which we did, but the other one is maximum repetition. And when every floor is different, you don't repeat, right? So that is critical because we're talking, we're not talking about the high end glitzy Howard Uzi stuff. We're talking about the real need on the island of social housing. So we need to look at things very serious. And that's why primitiva ended up being that straight. Extruded doughnut at the end that we see at the top right. You want to talk about the other one? And there was the other one. Yeah, the other one was in Cacaaco because Cacaaco is originally which one of our emerging talents had looked into the history of the place. And it was the salt pits, which Kamiya School brands their part as being salt area. Right. So she said, well, maybe I get inspired by that. And I said, I caution you, yes, look at that. But look at that performatively versus just formally. And then again, as we just said, you know, and this is the picture. The color picture in the middle there is basically the the location for the one on the left is basically way out West to stop the sprawl, correct? Because all these tenants that you already mentioned some and another one might be UH Manoa West, right? And not you know, UH, UH West, West, West, wow, exactly. So these could be the people who could basically sort of be compacted and comprised into that cone volcano, permittiva. And again, to, as you said, to keep the country country. And that's right. And do you do on the land? What we always did and we need to do again is planned food. That's right. Because we need to rather than building lots of small buildings. Again, concentrate people into larger buildings. Perfect. Yeah. So next picture is along the same lines of not getting taken away from form, right? Because what happened here? Well, this is was the original Honolulu Fort building on Alamoana and it's now a Chevrolet dealership. And it had those protruding rafter like concrete beams that are sticking out. But just recently they added these two supports on that we see closest to us, which again are tapered. So they are battered, but they don't really serve any function. They're just decorative. As you pointed out, that's probably nonstructural stone that's just sort of been slapped on to drywall or something and ornate with that ornated as you also saw, so perfectly called it. So next picture is another positive example of proposition here. Yeah. So what is this? Jungleism? What are we doing here? It's Jungleism number one. That was in Waikiki way back where our foreign exchange student, Liam Tran. Hi, Liam. I hope you're doing well as well as you did here because she was looking at the fabric and seeing water as being the new oil and being scarce. Right. And so she was proposing to add these sort of water towers. And the water towers are basically little power station, fresh water stations that are comprised of these horizontal bends in their troughs, which basically collect the water and distribute the water and they're spaced out. So you see this inside out picture where you got this sliced view of outside. And so again, it's from its sort of function and inhibitation design, sort of inside out design approach became a pretty interesting twisted pyramid. And that way twisting is OK, but it's not the formal twist. It's a performative twist. Right. Exactly. And what she's saying is that water is a resource to be kept rather than just dump on the ground and to flow out to the ocean. And we are rushed for the next four pictures in less than a few minutes. So let's look critical at that sort of urban fabric thing and look at that city that first did high rises, which is New York City. And when New York City began to build big buildings in the early 1920s, they came up with the idea of requiring setbacks, which will allow in more air and more light rather than having monolithic blocks. And that is why these distinctive early 20th century buildings were constructed in New York City because of that law. And next picture, do we have the same circumstances here? No, we don't. But we have some buildings. This is the Outrigger East Hotel and it's got that same kind of setback type form to it, but we don't have a jungle of high rises that requires it. Plus, we have air and light and rain all year long here. In our climate. So we don't really need to open up to more sun. We've got a lot of sun. So let's do another approach, which is next picture. And you will be visiting us here on the review on Monday about jungleism. And here we are with sort of sections of skinny towers that we sit in. And we basically, you know, designed from inside out. We check views, we check shading, we check few things. And then we might come up with solutions like this one here, Work in Progress, where you realize that when the bamboo groves and the palm basically groves, they get fuzzy up there because the crow's leaves where there's all sun and oxygen photosynthesis. That's right. So maybe buildings want to look into that, look into that, too. That can be pretty much naked down there, easy breezy, inclusive. But maybe they want to grow things up there at the top. And that would then look like next picture, a final picture here. This is our proposition of where we are right now. We're in that building somewhere in the middle and our monofunctional downtown Honolulu basically got invaded by skinnies. A lot of tall skinny buildings that look like a bamboo grove or a palm grove. Exactly. So we're going to look into that on Monday. I'll be there with us and hopefully we can get Jay on board as well. He doesn't know yet, but we will tell him soon. So with that, thank you very much for being here and see us next week. We're going to look into something. Yeah, we do next week. Don't look so surprised because I talk to doing every week until we do in the summer. Next, we want to look into Hawaii 5.0, which we have done already sporadically here and there. But we really want to dig in. I want to share with you what I split myself with because I got all the DVDs of the original series and we want to talk what a role architecture actually played, what an important role in that. So until then, thank you and yeah, stay jungly, exotically tropical till then. Bye bye.