 Think Tech Away. Civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to Human-Human Architecture, broadcasting live here from our Paradise of Honolulu, Hawaii. This show is dedicated to finding out ways for human-humane architecture, basically meaning being a planet and people-friendly here on the island. And so we're going to talk about how we're going to do that. And we like to dream wild, but also every once in a while you've got to face reality and do a reality check. But for that, you need very sort of open-minded visionary people who are grounded but as well have visions. And we have one of them here today, one of the big thinkers, and that's Socrates Britachos. So thank you very much for being here. Well, Martin, thank you for having me on this show today. It's a pleasure. So can you talk a little bit about yourself and your background? Okay, Martin. I'm an assistant fire chief in the Honolulu Fire Department. And I'm the administrator of Fire Prevention over the city and county of Honolulu. And over the training and research, which is a training for all of 1,200 or so firefighters that we have in Honolulu Fire Department. I've been in the Fire Department this short of 31 years. And I've been involved in fire prevention codes, et cetera, for about the last 10 or so. All right. I'm very happy to be here today. Thank you. Thank you. We're happy to have you. And what you just said, the Building Code Council meeting. That's actually how we met and we can get the next picture of the first picture. This gentleman here got us together. That's our colleague, showmaster Howard Wiig, who's running the Code Green show here. Show guys, you got to check that out. And Howard basically got us together in one of the Building Code Council meetings. That's true. Howard's a great colleague and a friend. And I served on the State Building Code Council for eight years. Howard came on, I think, a little while after me. I even got to chair that for a year. And I timed out, but I go to the meetings every once in a while. And I stay in touch with the folks there with Howard as well. So it's a great place to learn about all the different factors that go into building, including building, plumbing, electricity, energy, and fire safety. And I was surprised, positively, if we can get the next picture, usually to be honest, architects are afraid of people like you guys because we have these crazy ideas and you guys just shut us down. And you say, you have to say, sorry, that doesn't work because of life safety, because of code. Not so much in this case. We actually, in a meeting, we were questioning things and not just agenda items so and so all approved. We were critically looking at something that is actually, some consider that me, including as the root of all many problems we'll have is something invasive. That's the IBC, the International Building Code, which is made for the mainland. And so in one of the meetings, we were talking about this and we were talking about that due to the mainland code, the fire escape stairs have to be enclosed, which on the mainland, New York City, if there's a fire in your building and you try to get the hell out of there and then you break your neck on an over-iced metal grating of an exterior fire stairs, that's a problem, but that ice thing we don't have here. So, Brian? Well, you don't have that here. And so the International Building Code, like most of the other codes, a consensus standard that covers the whole country. Well, we've got different geography, different weather, different cultures and it's also supposed to be adaptive or we would say the code amended for different locales. And Hawaii is quite a bit different and so is Honolulu and we think that an outside stairs is good. After all, the idea is to go to a safe place where you're separated from fire and smoke and you can breathe and make your way all the way down to the ground and there's more than one way to achieve that. You don't have to completely close up that space. In fact, a little wind coming in and air going out is a good thing. That's perfect. And can we break that picture number two, which I took that on my way to work this. So we bring them back because we actually had until mid-century we had these pretty, you know, fascinating. They're so fascinating that the Soto and I are going to do an entire show about these easy breezy exterior staircases that have been, you know, from a building sort of art point of view. They're very spectacular and sort of ascending and descending in a building, not to speak about the health effects, you know, that it has on your body when you like to walk the stairs, you know, it keeps you in shape and all these aspects, they all play into each other and that's what we come from different angles. So the head of the DPP at that time, also being in the meeting, you know, was convinced and basically said, okay, let's basically adjust code. And next picture is another example. He was almost close because we keep talking about fixed glazing and being, making buildings hermetic. He said, I get you guys and maybe we should penalize fixed glazing but then he realized he went too far and we said, oh, this is, you know, you should write this down. We should record it. But the sheer fact that he said that means it's on our minds and maybe the change is coming and you would be very happy if you wouldn't have to deal with that sort of fixed glazing, right? Well, we think that might be another hazard and really air flow is good if there's a protection. So I notice in that building, those stairs went up so it was a safe way down but the exterior walkway was an overhang and that prevents fire from going up which it wants to do and go in the next window. That means you can have windows that are open in that unit. That's a good thing in a place where the weather's good and the trade winds are blowing, right? As it's here. And that's next picture, which is all a permanent background picture is pretty much a project that the audience has seen a couple of times and you were on the final review, right? Yeah, that was fun going to your class and my wife came along with me. Really, we were impressed by the architectural doctoral students and the project they put together and they were doing some real out-of-the-box thinking. They were thinking about what it means to live in Hawaii, how our community could be like. I was pleased to see that kind of thinking coming out and because I'm a fire chief, I did point out some practical concerns that we want to keep in mind. Which we actually want to share with the audience now if you can get the next picture. This is illustrating what you were talking about and we see the staircase here being at the very edge of the building so it's similar to what we talked before. We see gray, which is concrete, which is a product you like because it's noncombustible. But there's some brown stuff there and that's sort of stereotypically something that people of your sort of obligation are sort of skeptical about because that's pretty much wood. But before we get there, bring the next picture because tall buildings are iffy and the students were thinking about how to evacuate the building and they came up with this. You want to explain what that device is they found out? I think they've got something that's a backpack that's anchored to some secure point in the wall and lets you come out. Other countries have got chutes and lines that let you come out and ladders. To be perfectly honest, firefighters would rather you just go to the closest stairs and go out but sometimes that might not be available and there's another option. It was fun to see the kids thinking of different things. Just provide more options because the more options you are, the less trapped you are because once the staircase is clocked for whatever reason or fails in parts, you want to have different means and ways of egress out of the building. The next picture is showing... What I really appreciate about you is the sort of holistic thinking you have. You're not just thinking about your field but you're thinking you have the big picture and you were interested in live on a smaller footprint, things like that and here we got the material of wood which is usually from a fire preventive point of view. It's like wood can light up and so basically it catches fire so it's to be considered problematic but again, you have a different view. You have a more reflected, more progressive view. Well, wood does burn but when it's heavier structure or heavier timbers it tends to char and then still keep its integrity where engineered lumber that's used these days or even steel trusses does not it'll fail quickly in a fire so we're not necessarily against wood for structural members we say that it should be designed properly and really it's the stuff that we all have as people and that's the things that burn and we need to keep a little better control of it. And the next picture is the students taking this to their heart and proposing actually the partition walls of the units not out of concrete because that would have been too heavy and too sort of concretey they looked into like what kind of wood we have abundant and available being albecia or eucalyptus and basically sort of cross composing that I say at this point and you get a bit of fighter rating sometimes for sure than with steel which always compared to spaghetti which is pretty sturdy before it's cooked before it's boiled but once you throw it into the boiling pot it basically has no structural integrity anymore. Yeah, typically what we see is CMU or drywall between units and we're going to go over that a little bit later so CMU's got a stronger fire rating and does drywall I'm not sure what the wood is but I can tell you it's better than some kind of lesser material. Well and I can tell because the next picture shows a project that I've been doing some many years ago which was a school for mentally disabled children so these are the most problematic to basically evacuate per se and this was a 40,000 square foot school that we basically after a long consideration of getting to know handicapped people we said we can't build the usual drywalled way that is so cold, that's so neutral it needs to be haptical and tactile and touching them literally and figuratively so we proposed to make it out of solid timber and our public German clients stared at us with eyes wide open say you guys are nuts you probably need more treatment than the kids and we said let's make our case and we got the most renowned German fire rating consultant Dr. Hass involved and we basically convinced the client and here's the project, you know, widely published and because the fire rating of these solid timber walls and ceilings, you know, surpassed conventional construction and we have to say in all honesty it's a one-story building it has lots of courtyard so you got basically doors to the outside, plenty and so you need to look at each project sort of individually and then judge with in that case the effect that what we wouldn't claim here and couldn't expect for a high-rise but at bare we have no sprinklers in the building at all we have smoke detectors we have two parts partition doors they're closed to basically prevent the smoke from entering one section to the other one but that's pretty much it through a similar, you know, dialogue we have which we call integrated project delivery where you bring all the people involved at the table at the very beginning and talk very openly and honestly about things and create trust in each other, you know and say together we can make that even though it might not be conventional because you're very progressive and think about the future your own children and how do we move on and evolve on the island then getting stuck and basically just sort of are sort of, you know, behind ourselves we need to get ahead of ourselves and try to bring the future to us as soon as we can sometimes we need to bring the past to us because there are good ideas that we haven't used for a while and there's many ways to make a building safer from making sure you have more ways out to keeping them maybe not as tall exactly and talking, you know, one-story buildings if the camera can get that big piece that you probably have seen on the table already this is some research this is a DRX project by Nick Civitano I hope you're doing well that he proposed for single family residences we're holding it up because this is basically the detail of the roof structure where you basically cross composed boards of local wood and at the beginning of that time I was sharing with him a product that's by a German company, Hundegger who were basically having like a robot table and that robot was basically nailing them because originally it was cross-laminated but laminated as glue and we don't like glue because in case of a fire it burns toxic and you know, you get, you know not clean burning material all these composites are potentially hazardous and they're off-gassing all the time so try to avoid that and so the aluminum navels were the first step why aluminum? because you can still cut openings into it with a wood saw but it's still a foreign material so the actual stuff we're using now is a company here back fasteners who makes this lignolock and lignolock is a a beech wood dowel that has no thread and so you put it in with a shooting gun and it's basically going to be glued to the wood without glue through what you call friction welding if you take your hands and you rub them really fast you create heat and if you do this to an extreme extent you basically weld the lignin in the wood together so we would do that and so on top of that we would have a water member and then a baton and then horizontal boards which purpose is only to prevent the membrane from getting hit by UV so it basically improves the longevity of the roof so as a result you get basically an all-solid roof that's out of one material that if it's thick enough basically is going to last as in that school 90 minutes or 110 minutes and this is sitting on some properly sized rafters actually here that was intended to be a solid slab so it's structural you have a solid slab you don't even need rafters and we're thinking Nick actually came from this means your comprehensive thinking because I was impressed when you started talking about your own family and you taking care of their health and saying healthiness not in case of only a fire we don't want them to inhale all this toxic lemonade stuff but also in case of when there's not a fire which we hope will be the forever case right and this is where Nick come from Nick basically came from from a tragic family experience where a close family member got sick that he said I want to make a building that keeps my family healthy so it's this sort of comprehensive thinking that life safety isn't just not preventing people from getting killed but it's also keeping people healthy to begin with our house we have a little house in the country but we have a lot of windows and the wind and the light comes through we have bamboo floors we have solid wood and we have a nice garden with fruits and vegetables outside and we think those are some pretty important features of life for being healthy exactly and that's that comprehensive thinking I love so much about you the picture is looking at that project primitiva from the outside and so what is basically the bare bones is the naked structure that you see and it's basically these very industrial twin tees double tees that you use for parking garages at Walmart and at Home Depot and at Costco and we flip them and so if you can get the next picture the little detail on the left is showing that due to that the flange is projecting out and then pushed back is the web so the fire is basically you have to crawl around it and you say this is perfect because it prevents by nature of the tectonics the vertical fire spread that's good whenever there's an overhang, a walkway or an eyebrow that is going to prevent vertical fire spread on the exterior so the next picture is because I wish we wouldn't have to show it but we have to show it because there was a recent very tragic event here which was the Marco Polo Building basically on fire and I know you guys are still struggling with saying for new buildings fire sprinklers have to be installed but also to me encouraging is that you say also don't do the automatic enclosed hallways and trapped spaces because that is trapping us and trapping people right well we did tell the city council when they asked us to prioritize the building which they had said the taller the building is and the more units it has per floor with an enclosed corridor throughout the building those are going to be risk factors really and now you've got to overcome that the compartmentation of materials or fire protection and notification systems and a good safe egress path and it's not easy to do all those things and it gets expensive but you make it easy for the people which with a great innovation that we're going to close the show with but before that we want to keep dreaming for a little while longer and the next picture is an element that we all know that's so abundant here and that you guys love which is water fire with water and so the next primitiva project that you're part of is the next picture we call it well the curtain wall we have a problem because it's glazed but what about a water curtain wall and of course we come from a poetic angle as we were saying you cut out the poetics it's not a building right so a waterfall here in Hawaii or my partner Suzanne way back in Brazil in a waterfall she's the muse and inspiration of the project and so the next picture also pragmatics inform the project which way back on the expo in 2000 in my hometown the whole main screen where they're projected on was a water curtain wall where the landscape architect top right picture is the World Trade Center Memorial recently opened and the goal was to make it look like Niagara Falls but use the least amount of water and they got it accomplished and last but not at all east down there in San Francisco the Mbacadero Center has a water feature where the pool overflows and it gives this totally clear and crystal you know water screen that you think it's glass which I checked out with a Nathan Toothman or a hero with his elevated structure so next picture and last picture of that sequence hopefully then sort of the building that comes out of that isn't so sort of postmodernly you know want to look like something you know from the culture and you know of the but but it's sort of more logically does it right so not just on the surface I want to look like why is the Hawaiian term for water and so that's the name you know of that of that glass tower we showed at the building but make a building that really uses water and hopefully in multiple ways we can generate our irrigation maybe our gray water and other things and as an aside effect you got your whole interior envelope basically sprinkler right that would be cool I was just thinking well you make it through that water and you're safe you just got wet you can't catch on fire it's going to stop whatever is chasing you so let's go down to the you know ground a little bit because these are all great visions but they're supported already by something you came up with and we start with the next table and go for the couple and please explain what that is okay so I'm not going to take credit this was started by Graham Dan away who is one of our senior fire protection engineers in the state of Hawaii he did work with me and some other members of the residential fire safety advisory committee that was formed at the urging of the city council and we looked at well how could you decide if an existing high rise building was safe it's really a problem across the whole country they put up high rises back in the last century in Hawaii really from the 50s 60s on and the big tall buildings and they're staying there and then we have a big fire like the Marco Polo or the interstate building etc and how could people know if they're safe so we made an evaluation on the first page on this table one we looked at the first thing you got to look at is people's ability to get themselves out are they fast are they a little slower do they need assistance and or can they not move themselves now that's pretty extreme that's like a hospital right and that's where this idea came from this rating was developed so you can figure out if a hospital is safe and we're really looking at the occupants who live there and the firefighters who come to rescue them so you can input some scores the next thing we're looking at is the occupant load and that people live on each zone or each floor if you're a skinny building got four units you might only have 12 or 15 but if you're a big building like the Marco Polo that we showed earlier you might have 50 or more people some Asian countries might have hundreds of people on that floor that's a challenge and lastly we looked at where the fire might occur and this is really height you're going to see this in another video on the following slide we're looking at where the fire would take place and the higher the building the harder it is to work imagine the elevators got to take people at top and if the elevator fails firefighters got to climb and that's what was the hardship at the Marco Polo firefighters have to climb up all the floors wearing 100 pounds of gear several times and that's what we look at we had about 17 safety factors and I'll cover some of them that's on table 19 and that's on table 19 or I can even look at it from here and kind of go through it we look at the construction type the building is fire resistive made out of concrete or protected steel it's less likely to burn now it's the things inside the buildings that burn but really you don't want the building to fall down and it's more important and at what height the next thing we look at is interior finish of the corridors and exits and we're going to say you have something that is listed carpet and paint it won't let flames spread quickly and which we avoid in primitiva purposely right and you avoid in primitiva and by the way it's worse when you have an interior enclosed place so you're going to hear this a few times smoke and fire to dissipate you want water to put out smoke and fire you want air and wind to put out smoke and fire you don't want to collect it and let it build up so that's the same thing with corridor walls and unit separation so of course if you got concrete between units and corridors well that's going to stop fire longer than drywall will but solid wood is pretty good too if you've got holes through that you've got a problem or if you decided to lacquer a nice bamboo panel with something you picked up to the hardware store that's not good and then there are the doors to the corridor this is very very important and any high rise building you've got to have a solid door that stays closed and that means you need to have a closure that will automatically close it there's nothing that helps spread a fire faster then open doors either to a corridor or going out to the stairwell those are all meant to be closed exit access the first thing that firefighters look for when they check a building is how do you get out the longer the way that you have to get out the tougher and so you don't want any problems with the way out you want it clear and you want it short as possible later on we'll talk about lighting you want it lighted you want to know the way to go vertical openings are something that everybody doesn't always think of but plumbing chases or other construction that was left unsealed can leave holes between floors if that is not sealed up and that's what the elevator chef in the stairwell is of course too and that's why it's very important that they are separated from the rest of the building absolutely it must be sealed up tight absolutely and that's where unfortunately getting to the end of the show although I could listen to you much longer and that's the exciting part of that we can make this an excel sheet so we can make this available and it's available because it's intended to be used for people so since we run out of time can we have the last picture because I want to thank you again for having been here I want to thank you already for being with me tomorrow again you going to visit us? yeah I sure will I'll be there I'm going to put in a plug for fire sprinklers they're really a good thing and they can be beautiful you don't have to hide them I'll probably be telling the doctoral students about that tomorrow not to forget I'm looking forward to seeing you first sketch which we saw they were already in there that was when Les Campers our buddy came in and basically did the first class and now the students are so excited to present to you where they are and get your great input so thank you again so much Socrates I really appreciated all your support and being this great teamwork of easy breezy no human humane inclusive planet and people friendly architecture on the island that's so much appreciated your great inspiration and motivation thank you we're all a community together we live in a place that's based on aloha remember if we all aloha each other we'll be in an aloha community exactly well thank you so much and see you guys next week back with the Soto Brown we're talking about what we were talking about it's going to be tactical tectonic decisions on the island how we build and until then please stay cool like chief sock see you next week