 to have you back for this, our 272nd show of think tank Hawaii's human, humane architecture. And us is our bald triumvirate here with the first bald guy, the solo Brown in his Bishop Museum, the second one, Martin Despeng here in his Waikiki brand. And the third one, most important, our guest or we can say by now co-host being in the ninth show. This is met no blood or Boston banished booster in his Boston back in his Boston, hi Matt. So we wanted to get back to which we will to the building you show us and share us telling us that or showing us that biochromatic system medic thinking is universal and then depends on the region and the climate, how you apply it. But speaking of that and talking about eruptive enthusiasm let's get us to the first slide and you to sort of from here because you grew up with that phenomenon tell us what exciting natural system we're having here that actually the one on the left, don't worry we may don't make you to read it all. This comes, this is interesting in a global world. This comes first and foremost from our exotic escapism expert Susanna who knew before us from her Bayrecha Rundfung app here that about that happening here on the island which is the Soto. Well, it is the eruption of Mauna Loa for the first time since 1984. And while we're all very accustomed to the eruptions of Kilauea volcano also on Hawaii Island. The difference with Mauna Loa which is very important is that it is a much bigger volcanic system so it erupts a great deal more lava than Kilauea does. And while at the moment this new lava eruption lava flow is not threatening anything directly and it hasn't destroyed any structures yet. It is in danger of covering or cutting off the saddle road and the saddle road is very important across the island of Hawaii because it carries a lot of traffic and if it is cut that's going to be a big pain for everybody to have to go around the long way rather than be able to go the more short direct route. Now historically speaking what's also fascinating is Mauna Loa used to erupt a lot more frequently than it has in the 20th century. And in 1880 and 1881 it went through a very lengthy eruption that was threatening Hilo the city of Hilo because the lava was approaching very close. And people in Hilo appealed for assistance to Princess Ruth Kayli Kulani and she was a very high ranking noble woman or Ali'i of that time period. And she traveled to the oncoming front of the lava flow and she chanted to Pele who is the goddess of volcanoes and she threw offerings onto the hot lava and it actually did stop. And Hilo was saved. And so this time the lava is still a long way from Hilo but it is going in that general direction and we don't have Princess Ruth today to help us. So lava unlike other things like water cannot be stopped or redirected for very long by human beings and people have tried it in Hawaii and people have tried it in Iceland. And so if we are lucky the flow will stop before it causes a great deal of damage but if it gets into where people live nothing you can do except get out of the way and say goodbye to any structures, any infrastructure, any vegetation, et cetera. And that being said, that's a human problem I guess we have with that because we're in the way of Pele not the other way around, right? So it's a system that works to the right of that in the top right is a human-made system that's the artificial man-made machine. I just made it luckily back on time. That's our additional family mobile that is a German manufacturing. We will talk about that when we get back to our automobile and immobile show and that one tends to overheat and we go through this tremendous effort, right? There's actually little eruptions, explosions in there in the engine and then we circulate water to keep it cool, to keep it under control. And that is vulnerable to breaking as we experience here in these days. So there's one system that is perfected and the other one is rather imperfect and what's also perfect seems to be the human nature because at the bottom right is your second weekly German exercise, the Soto which we don't put you on the spot, don't worry but it says the winter in the Ukraine is facing a window less flats and units, apartments and we've been reporting about that. So Matt and I, we were thinking before the show if you could only do a heat transfer and literally speaking, right? That we give a little bit of that excess heat to the poor ones in the Ukraine who are now faced with the second really bad winter and people can't sustain their temperature behind these shattered glazings and getting us to the next slide, please on again a very sort of comfortable level and almost feeling bad to even talk about these sort of luxury issues but let's say we talked about architects like Foster are offering already to be helping to rebuild the Ukraine. When that happens, it might be in this matter here or in this manner, these are predominantly picture I took in the beginning of this year still back in Germany where it was cold and you see the center picture there with the two gentlemen who happened to be Joey and Lenny and they have puffy coats on and they're going towards what's just called the Stutt Tor, which is the city gates kind of the gateway buildings we're having when Waikiki disorder and the one left to that is the post tower for the German postal service. And above there, the show quotes is you guys met with the parliament in Bonn which is where the post tower is and then the Nord LD in my hometown and the Unilever building and we show the timelines and so not until I was there and the whole Putin thing blew up on us in Germany I became aware how innovative these double facades were at that time for us and if we would all have these back in the temper we could be pretty relaxed, pretty chilled. To the right is right next to the Stadthaus was this very cute, you know, Lanai where people sort of helped themselves and put up this shower curtain on a track and their vegetation on their Lanai and trying to do kind of a bottom up strategy which is what the emerging generation here at the very bottom down there at Saunders basically did at the beginning of the semester. And so, yeah, these are just I just wanna put into context Matt, please add to that how I think, again, you started this trend in Bonn with a parliament building, our most important building that the ones who run us work in and then to compete continued and that was still by Günther, right? And then when Stefan took over he basically pushed it to the challenge of the 21st century and saying, well, there's a social responsibility but there's also the solar responsibility increasingly. These are just my thoughts that I wanted to share from the beginning of the year to then maybe go to the next slide because this is then again the gensheim once again returning to it. And as we've been talking about the inner facade towards the courtyard and the heliostats and all that stuff pretty elaboratively let's talk a little bit about the exterior skin here, Matt. Yeah, so, you know, I think as you mentioned you started going back into the sort of roots of our firm where Günther Benisch had a very strong focus on sort of the democratic, let's say aspect of architecture and the social kind of aspect of architecture when our firm was founded in the early 90s it really sort of shifted that focus or I would say maybe it was sort of added to that the idea of how to build more sustainably how to sort of take some of these ideas that had been gestating for a long time in Germany for very logical reasons it's not necessarily that in Germany people are just more altruistic than they are everywhere else but to be honest, energy prices are very high and land is scarce and so people are very motivated to find reasonable solutions to driving the energy demand of a building down and I think the facade is an absolutely critical part of that how you solve and stop the forces that drive energy consumption at the perimeter of the building before they even get to the inside is a critical aspect of that so all the buildings you mentioned are the so-called double facade buildings and in some cases they've been done sort of with more technical precision or an idea that the so-called self-ventilating facade there's two ways to approach double facade design there's the sealed version and the sort of self-ventilating version ours have tended to be a little bit more pragmatic and that we know that it's important to have exterior sunshade on a building essentially to have some system that blocks the sun from hitting the exterior glass before it enters the building which is what creates the greenhouse effect you trap ultraviolet rays inside the building which re-radiate and create heat but the problem with those if they're flexible if you want to do them flexibly you need to protect them against high winds and things like that so that kind of gives rise to this what I termed earlier the kind of poor man's double facade that we have at the Genzai building which is really basically a second wall built inboard of the exterior wall the exterior wall is a single glazed facade and then inboard of that is the weathering wall in between them you can have the sun shading and daylight redirection devices and things like that but that does create this kind of buffer zone around the outside of the building it's unfortunately also tempting for smokers to use as a porch for their activities but for users it's actually a very nice space to step out into and be in a kind of in-between zone and you can see in that photograph on the right one of my colleague's son's actually operating a manual flap in the wall at the base of the wall that allows you to get more fresh air in your office if you open it so that's essentially what we're looking at and it reminds me of the precursor the Nord LB that I'm very familiar because it's in my hometown and I said I don't know of any other building that is so controversial by avoiding to say people love or hate it if they hate it which they don't really do but it's mostly which I found out because where I had my first adjunct coaching gig in Bremen a professor colleague of mine was friends with the big bank boss of the Nord LB so he was able to not only give us a tour but also show us a secret chamber that otherwise he don't see which is two people operating just like in Star Trek and their command chamber all the systems and so we basically saw our chance and we said okay what doesn't work in the building and their answer was do you refer that to that a couple of times before and this image here shows that they set the human factor because when people come in the summer and complain it's too warm when they come into the office they say well there is this manual flap that you open before you leave the office and it activates the night cooling which you have been talking about a lot and then when you come in in the morning it's cool but if you don't do that it's your own fault so and I think it was an interesting discussion that you said that people consider your buildings to be high tech but you don't consider that you consider them to be just exposed tech and participatory technology, right? Yeah I mean I think people tend to think of tech as sort of servo motors and lots of cables and wiring and intelligent control systems and so forth I mean I really think this flap that Philip there is opening it couldn't be simpler that's technology in the sense that we think about it it's basically things that we can do in a building to enable the user to be more in harmony with the way the building should function and to make it somehow also evident to them how it should function, what they should do to make themselves more comfortable rather than pick up the phone and call that secret chamber and complain to those people the goal really is to try to make the building as engaging for people and enable the work and the comfort that they seek, right? That they're trying to do. Matt let me ask you a question here does this sort of buffer zone function as a corridor or is it just something that's there and it isn't usually used by people to travel around inside in the building? It's not, I mean you could go from space to space on it it wraps around, it goes around not, it doesn't go fully around the exterior of the building but it is, you could in theory do that since it's essentially outdoor space, right? It's protected from the wind by the outer glass but like in Boston where this is it wouldn't be comfortable to use as a regular circulation sort of element. So it has more as a performance element which has the benefit of being sort of like a little breezed in porch for, people use them often, right? They in fact, the, I don't know today the company, the building has unfortunately changed hands recently but in the entire time that the Gensheim Corporation owned that and the Biomed Realty owned it they included that square footage in their calculations for the leasing rates, right? It wasn't considered extraneous or kind of non-leasable space because people saw the benefit in being able to open their door onto the, just basically it's a kind of lanai, right? In the way that we've been talking about it and the quality of the air and the way that kind of the environment that it engenders is very sort of unique and people were more than willing to pay the money for that because they were getting very positive feedback from their users. We've thrown a show, oh, sorry. I was just gonna say, so during some parts of the year this would be a comfortable space to be in not during the full, not during the full on winter but during the spring, summer and fall there might be very comfortable days where you could be out there. So it would be sort of a living space in addition to having the function that you've described as being the buffer between the outside and the inside. Right, right, okay. It's a bit technical in there when you go in. I mean, there's the flaps for the ventilation and so forth, but it's also this idea. I mean, what's always nice when you work in the same kind of space or live in the same space all the time, this idea that you can actually win a little bit of space just by opening up a flap or moving a door or something. It's a very nice feeling, right? We have a roof deck at my house that's totally unusable during the winter, right? We just packed it up, but when we reopen it in April or May, it's getting later every year, but like when we do reopen it, it's like adding a room to the house and this is such a great feeling and this is a small version of that, right? It's like in these months, you somehow break up the year by knowing that you've got this additional sort of buffer of space out there. This is also a way that people feel a little bit like they can kind of manipulate their environment and benefit, right? From the way the building is configured. Very familiar to us here in many ways to solar ride and show quote at the bottom right, this is what we said, if it would have happened that your wife's father, it was right would have been able to move into an elderly home. We wish he could have gone to the senior, social senior housing on the beginning of Kalakaua Avenue by Frank Slavsky, who was, this is the fenestration to the north to Malka where the winds blow. So he decided to in fact have a fixed glazing, single pane to just keep the wind away, but the air he wants. So the air comes in from below through this open flap, you can say. So very much again, similar thinking of very simple manual system, operable in sort of opposite kind of climate conditions, but the same thinking, right? Yeah, that's exactly the detail that the Little Strand House has as well at the top of the window, but also Malka side cool winds coming down the mountain. And he, Ossipoff introduced a little flap that you just reach up and open, and then it flows all the way through the building. That's an even better example. Thank you, which you to Soto are nodding in the right direction because he grew up in that and with that systems in an Ossipoff house. So even better because that one is even, has a hinge and can open and close this one here can. And so this discussion to be continued and we started already a show called at the top left. This was with Wolf Maia when he was visiting us a long time ago on the previous show, Urban Transcendence. And he before that was working for Christoph Ingenhof and who was another buddy who was working in the same direction. And I want to point this out there that not just within the culture of your guys firm ever since Günter, when people split off, it wasn't like considered to be like, what is it called moonlighting or something like that? Or there's a guy who, you know, to blame. And, but it's actually, okay, the more than Maria, I mean, there's Awa and Weber. There's all these people who were a spin-off, Spanish and basically spread the word. And so it is with this that, you know, El Modyan and Petsinka and Petsinka started out with Ingenhof and on the Stuttgart and then Ingenhof went on his own and Wolf worked for him. And we started this discussion about, you know, double facades, whatever you want to call it. And if, and I think we should continue that. It's not that easy as in many things, but it's certainly something to keep in the back of the mind. And next slide, certainly to engage the emerging generation in that because they might need or want to work under these conditions of the other 60% of the world climates. And this is what we have been doing here in the second assignment. And Michelle, your colleague was with us, thankfully here. And you both and Michelle again will be with us coming Monday when we rip up and see what they all took home from this coming back to that tropical climate. And again, doing things significantly different because again, the double facades as we built them over there, which might really, really help us now especially this winter might just be too much for here. And you could do, you know, more with less as me and others kind of like to say it, right? So that thing said. Yeah, and Martin, you and I have had these discussions about new buildings here, which have added sort of an extra facade, but purely apparently just for ornamentation. And here in a tropical climate, that doesn't do any good. It just creates a little greenhouse that adds a lot more heat to the interior, which we don't need. Yeah, it shoots back and we're referring to the Goldbond building on Alamona Boulevard when we drove out to the airport met, you know, that sort of moderate sort of tropical brutalism building with these concrete fins that some interior designer we found out was trying to upgrade it and was encasing a corner in glass. So he was turning what at least gesturally was sort of self-shading into thermal massing, which is the least we need here at all. And of course there was no shading in between, so. And embodied carbon, I mean. Yeah, exactly. Every piece of building you add that you don't need is just more carbon that you've committed to exist. Exactly. And then absolutely, you know, exterior outside in approach about a surfacial about the look versus which we try to encourage and hold accountable to the inside out gestalt approach that gets us to the next and likely last slide for this week because we only have five minutes left. But here we see what is the result when you have that inside out approach, gestalt approach in the Gensheim building, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, these are some well-selected slides because you see so many elements or I see so many elements that are so crucial to how we conceive of successfully integrating what, you know, as you called it before, the high-tech stuff with, you know, with the human experience. So, you know, gardens inside the building, you know, this kind of biofilia or the ability for people to kind of connect in nature, particularly in an urban context, that's critical. On the lower left, you see, in fact, that's a really very typical, like ACT like drop-in ceiling, but we specified the tiles with a reflective surface so that the ceiling reflects the daylight as it comes in through the upper part of the facade and brightens that room tremendously. And then you see how the clear stories, you know, at the walls between the various rooms, you know, allow all that daylight to really penetrate deep into the building exactly like right there. And then, you know, other things like in the lower right, you know, using, you know, curtains to generate either privacy or glare control on the outside, introduce color, but give people a flexible way to deal with problems, you know, rather than sort of like putting films or something on the facade that is permanent, but, you know, use that as an opportunity to introduce another softer element that people, again, that people could control. Soto, you wanna share the utmost compliment that colleague compliment, compliment from a colleague that met God from our mid-century modern master? I can't remember, what did, no, I don't remember it. I don't remember it. What was it? No, that was Ron Lindgren as our most loyal. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. No, he was, he was Ron, our good friend in Long Beach, California, very long experienced architect was very pleased with everything that Matt's been showing us and the interactivity and the livability. He had a lot of praise for it. And that's, I think, a really positive statement from somebody who knows what he's talking about. Yeah, and he's a temperate boy, you know, grew up close to where you are working now. And that he has left us with the finest, easy breezy biochromatic tropical exotic architecture as his masterpiece, utmost masterpiece of the Hale Kalani. So, you know, he brought this home and saying, especially I think he was complimenting the top left impression here with bringing nature inside, which again, you're deprived of in the temperate, you know, no leaves on the trees, everything looks brown, kind of depressing and just bringing nature in doesn't just, you know, obviously scientifically help as for really, you know, improving the indoor air quality, but it also psychologically improves, right? There's the people factor again, which I think you put it perfectly that to the sort of initiating, you know, very people-friendly based paradigm of Gunther when Stefan and Hugh added, you know, the planet-friendliness to that, that shows here how it all comes together in a really good way. And yes, DeSoto, we've been talking about curtains a lot as a very simple, but efficient and effective, you know, climate operating device that might be enough for us. So like the shower curtain wall that, you know, almost a desperate attempt, you know, in Düsseldorf for the winter on a london, right? But here it does work, right? Yeah, that's all we need. And let me also say, Martin, those types of covers really do work for plants in temperate climates during the winter. And it seems like it, how could that possibly do it? But even just a plastic, little plastic cover makes a huge difference in plants surviving the winter. So it really does make a difference. It looks flimsy, but it works. And it would make a big difference for us, you know, you can just, when a storm comes, we just got out of one, you know, you close the thing and the rain, it keeps the rain out. And when the sun is back, which is today, you just open the thing up. And it's very, very minimal material, right? It's, of course, you know, it would be good. There's a biodegradable version of that that NASA has been developing, biodegradable plastics and stuff, but you know, that's the whole circular economy and ecology, buzzwordy thing that's rightly so going on. But, you know, that's just for a more discussion, more refined discussions. We're at the end of the show, but next week we will be back and we will get to the other building that we selected from your recent body of work mat that we think might be even more to learn from for our climate and culture here. And we don't tell you more at this point. So you will be back next week. So see you then. And until then, please stay equally enthusiastically, biochlamatically eruptive. And out of the way of lava too. Yeah, there you go.