 human-humane architecture. Today is the 4th of November in 2020. Yesterday was election day and we're still counting votes, absentee votes, like mine for example, because I was allowed to vote from away and we're still crossing fingers. But DeSoto and I decided not to get deeper into that and not making this an election show. We decided to continue to lift our spirits up and look into potential best practices because in a way we have actually bigger problems to solve. The pandemic, which we still have by the way, hit us harder than any other state and our unemployment rate is at 20%. So we desperately need housing for the many in need and so today we want to dedicate the show again, looking at a practice from half around the world that maybe we can learn something from. So hi DeSoto. Hello Martin, hello everybody else and you're in Germany and I'm Paola Lulu. And I'm happy to hear your birds and see your dog. There's a doggy. It's very comforting. So let's go to the first page here and we want you in the audience to think where have you been or as you said DeSoto correctly, have you been around at all back in this era that we share where we were at that time. And this is still picking up on having gotten political the last couple of shows where we said that really maybe the true, the last true, authentic, passionate, honest and tiger era might have been the early 70s and we said Steve Owl who we miss was certainly the best architectural embodiment of that and the politician at that time was Jimmy Carter. So here again we are just giving you examples of how we want you to think where have you been at that time and DeSoto explain a little bit the top part of the page here where you have been back in 72. Well I'm going to be looking to the side because I'm looking at the picture to be able to describe it to you. This picture of me in 1972 in the upper left corner and that's on Christmas Day and that's Christmas Day in Hodelulu, not Christmas Day in Germany where you cannot dress like that as you just pointed out. You also see me with my 1971 Volkswagen Beetle and you also see my mother's 1967 Mercedes that her mother ordered from Germany. Her mother never drove it because she passed away but it went to her grandfather and then my grandfather gave it to my mother in 1972 and that's an important year that's what we're going to be talking about. Then you also see the p.i.mobile belonging to Martin de Spain that is currently housed in the same stall at my parents house that 1967 Mercedes used to live in and then the rest of that is the youthful Martin back in Germany. Yeah and the light blue car just on top of the r.p.i.mobile is from the year the same year the project is from that we're going to talk about today the same year 72 and that's my 72 Plymouth Fury my Fury 2 but it took me until two decades later to be a student to go to the United States go to college there and afford this dream of my childhood which cost me only $600 and the gallon of gas was 99 cents so that was rather affordable and the picture on the right of that one is me next to my mother and my sister leaning to the car my parents had at that time that was another Mercedes from that era and that holds the model number W114. Architecturally the pictures below again what you are able to do Christmas being in shorts and t-shirts we were only able to do and we only are able to do that for the very few months in the summer but that's where you see down there this beautiful laid back 70s life on that outdoor living room Lanai that my father so so neatly all self-designed and self-built themselves and with my mother they were knitting these cushions there and these sofa pillars and that were sitting on and you have all the pretty mothers lined up in a row I think that was at a birthday party of us kids so I have nothing but the best memories of of the 70s being again as we said before pretty authentic and pretty sensitive times maybe the last ones of that time that we need to reconnect back to and that's what we want to talk about today so next slide is while you know I look rather idyllic and paradissel on our sky Lanai on our roof terrace a year before the project we're going to talk about today in 1971 my sleepy hometown of Hanover with as many or as few people as we have in the urban core of Honolulu which has half of a million which is not much they were thinking they got to come up with these megalomaniac superstructure here which was called the Ime the Ime center the Ime centrum and the Ime is a river that you see running at the bottom left picture running along but that was then and now is now and how did now come across to you the solo which we see at the very bottom right well I asked you about this and you said that this was a multi-use large development so it had living apart apartments for people live in it had office space and it also had retail space and so the picture that you see where the there's sort of a central plaza that was for public and unfortunately as you pointed out it's hit very hard times and this as we saw in the United States was a redevelopment of an economically depressed area I believe that's what you agreed to so it had its moment of glory in the 1970s and then it has hit very hard times and now it's either partly empty or it's in ruins or it's got graffiti on it and it does not look very good so its promise of the 70s has not been fulfilled in the 21st century absolutely and the the original picture from when it was freshly completed at the top left I have vague childhood memories must have been a team there when it was freshly opened it actually worked and it had this very vibrant you know futuristic forward thinking which again at the very beginning of the 70s was when that was phasing out in the United States ever since then Reagan were reactionary and think the past was better than the future will ever be and we're unfortunately talking counting votes we're continuously in that and so desperately want to get out of this so what has really made this fail there's also one clue you see this like yellow or orangey shading behind the windows 71 there was really little to no consideration of what we have we should care a lot about today which is environmental concerns there was no such thing in the early 70s so a couple of things must have been coming together and the gentleman you see hovering over the tower in the in the background on that top left picture is the at that time head of the city planning department hans adrian and he basically said well the best way to not having to look at that project is to live in it and I have you know vague again childhood memories of my father being you know lose friends with him and we've been visiting him and he took that privileged position literally and figuratively to to dwell on the very top floor so almost like the king in his castle and overlooking little people down there that didn't appreciate it as much as he didn't even so yeah it is I mean the picture from the bottom right is pretty contemporary and it's pretty it's it's a pretty desolate situate condition we threw in these two show quotations at the top left the central plaza of the pacific certainly being our most prominent piece of brutalism in downtown and then in the last show we found out about Steve ours heco building on ward avenue that is still there but both of them are basically commercial and and office typologies and not dwelling and so even in hawaii while tropical brutalism you know as we continue to investigate has been quite interesting and and forward thinking it hasn't been applied at least not in a large extent to housing and that's what we actually will look into because housing affordable housing is what we need these days more than ever so let's look at the next slide and what are we talking about here this soto we're talking about the olympics in munich the city of munich in 1972 and the picture that you took from your car from your car sticking your hand through the sunroof shows us the site of the olympics and on the left side is the this really strange interesting structure which you said is still standing in a good condition which was built for some of the sporting events and it looks like a sort of a big piece of fabric that's hanging from these large poles that's suspended but it actually isn't fabric you said it's actually acrylic plastic and there's also a picture of the the automobile which you still own which is sitting in the garage below me right at this minute which also dates from that same time period that the particular model of the mercedes yeah and the way and this is a quote from a mercedes benz website where they call this their car which they made from as it says from 71 until 89 rs is one of the last ones from 87 so two decades they left that model unchanged and that's where they called it an innovative evergreen and that's how you can certainly call this architecture which many including me consider to be if not the finest piece of architecture in germany and it's 40 years i should say young because it just looks as fresh as it has always been we always want it's almost 50 now oh yeah almost 50 yeah yeah exactly 70s turning 50 is the slogan the doko momo slogan thank you yeah right exactly and we also see something that i have childhood memory of which is that little uh mescott there whose name was waldy and waldy is that sausage dock very german and he's been sliced into these different parts and and they're they're color coded and we get to that color coding in a little bit yes but we're not going to talk about the uh the the sports center because again we're not short on that there's going to be the arena and who knows when they're going to replace that but that's another subject in honolulu i'm talking yes housing housing housing is the most pressures and so we're going to go to the next slide and look at what was the pretty much the housing part of that uh we can't get around you know yesterday we had a tragic um terrorist attack in austria right um of islamic nature we can carefully say and that's unfortunately also what happened in um differently but somehow similar back in 72 where it had been this project had been the stage for this what they call what we remember as the munich massacre where the palestinians were taking israelian um uh sports members of their of their team hostage and killed them and that that's that was a bummer and obviously very sad as an opening for games that by the architects fry auto and gunter banish was intentionally basically crafted to um be about as we were talking the vibe of the early 70s about happiness and and a hopeful future so bad start on that one but uh next slide um somehow magically i guess we can say or for good reasons as we will try to find out this project has not failed has not become not does not share the destiny with a tragic handover project and many others of that era of megalomaniac uh you know building housing on steroids that you don't give the time as uh you gave european cities that had the chance to grow over thousands of years and always adjust to changing needs he needed to pop it up from scratch instantly right and by the way the number of units in what we're talking about is five thousand five thousand people so um what are we looking here what surprised you well you pointed out these are pictures you took again when you were driving to this this olympic village area and you said that in one view from this large boulevard which is a divided uh street with three lanes on the other side you do get a some some view of uh urban area of a high-rise building for example which you pointed out is a hotel but you also see what looks like just a heavily vegetated area of just trees and my surprise that uh this actually is a berm it's an earthen berm that's been planted and if you approach these this complex from that side if you walk in from the street level you will walk across the berm and on a concrete a raised elevated concrete pathway so that's what the lower picture shows and as you said most people don't approach it from that side but if you do it doesn't look like there's anything there it looks like it's just a forest yeah but look let's look at how it looks like from where you usually approach it which gets us to the next slide and you did some research on that funky looking vehicle right well you pointed out this is a very meaningful vehicle to you and i'll let you tell the family history about that but that's a citroen and it is uh in some people in the united states some called it by its french name which is a douche vaux to horse and it was a very low-cost car was built from the 1940s up into the 1990s um it was sort of the the common person's vehicle in france it was um you know very low cost very tinny very you know basic but that's what's leading us into the important part of this complex which we are about to enter which is underneath but you tell the story of why that's important to you personally well without that car i wouldn't be because uh my father when he was an architectural student had one and then he was heading to italy and it broke down in austria when he was driving through and he needed to get a job to get it fixed and while he was there it was winter season he said i might as well he hit the ski slopes and he did and this is where he picked up my mom who is a austrian farm girl so the rest is history and it must have been his car his car was so romantic that she was she fell for him yeah just like an american graffiti as he were sending me that's right that's right for the show that's exactly right that's exactly if you want to see one in honolulu there's two that i know of one is close to here to our hood at the foothills of diamond head yeah there's a red one that's reported from um the netherlands i think recently but there's one of the early ones which was had we were talking corrugation with the the thing the vw 181 yes the early dosha vows had that as well the hood was basically corrugated and there is one on alawai it always parked along the parking on alawai bolivar pretty much towards the uh waikiki harbour so if you want to check out one in real in honolulu that's right check out these two anyways yeah that car happened to be there family history and again as you said when we're proud of our sl that was made unchanged for two decades this was made for half of a century for 50 years from the 40s to the 90s so they're very rare so i was lucky i thought this this is signed so i follow that one so let's see where it took us where it took me so let's go to the next slide and although we see um uh finest american post fossil mobility there in a tesla are being charged but you can see our little uh european pii mobile our french twingo which you can see in many ways as being the successor of the uh dosha vo also see a smart car down there it's pretty much the ground floor is all parking and we were comparing it to the alamuana mall in some ways of the parking which we will get to and i think the next slide but the difference is when i was recently before i flew back um i was visiting uh alexe in his place in 1315 alamuana boulevard and i thought my smart idea would be to park in the mall and we had too good of time so i got outlaid from his place and my car was gone and towed to some remote place on sand island and cost me 200 dollars or whatever that doesn't seem to be the case here we're saying because that bmw behind me uh seems to have so much dust on his windshield that it's hard to drive with that right so they're pretty liberal in allowing you to keep your cars there go to the next slide which shows us how you get up to the main floor uh which is the elevated floor and you get up through very a variety of different very artistically sculptured staircases or at the top right the staircase tower that gets you up to your unit and let's go to the next slide and this is the heart of the community this is the center and um how did you like that the soda when you saw that and we discussed it well we we talked about various things in the first place on the upper left corner there are these pylons these slabs actually you know what they look like they look like the slab in the movie 2001 oh that's right in 1968 and this these slabs are are were at the time very modern they had digital clocks in them that you could see what the times were throughout the world etc now that's not as cool because of course we all have a smartphone that can do the same thing but it's also this complex has got these weird large overhead pipes that really puzzled me when I first saw them and they're painted different colors and they're they're on supports and they run through the public areas now one of them that's that we see in the lower left corner has a decorative function of it turns into a fountain so there's water coming out of it it makes kind of a curtain and we also see that there is a similarity to what used to be at the center of alamoana center which was this decorative pool that had a kind of a pylon in the center of it with a tiled mosaic one different one on each side unfortunately that was destroyed way back about 1990 or even the late 80s when alamoana got remodeled and we wish that hadn't happened but it did but those pipes the colored pipes really don't carry anything they don't have a function as much as they are first a way to find your way through the complex you can follow that elevated pipe according to a certain color sometimes there is function to them there's lighting as you said and they may be wires in them but they're more they're not as utilitarian as that although they look that way they have other functions absolutely yeah and again again as part of us as doko momo supporters or board members in my case again when we have things they're unique they're keepers so again we really miss that original condition of the mall and we're really happy to see that have been conserved and kept over half of a century in this project here so let's go to the next slide and check it out even more so this is pretty much a picture I took of the two significantly different parts of of the of the housing development one is a rather more generic kind of stacked more conventionally stacked tower that you see on the right side where you have a rectangle and you just extrude that to the top but the left one is what mostly the the the community is comprised of which are these terrorist houses and you see the sideplane up there at the top right and see the north arrow so most of the units and this is a key to success is orientation orientation orientation they're facing predominantly south some of them have a tilt towards west or east but they're all facing south and that is that is what they are as they are laid out and that's really strategically laid out that way next slide yeah what was your feelings about this what do you see here on the main pedestrian walkways well again hearkening back to wall d the mascot who had different colors on him you do see that this color sort of coating is also extended through this entire complex and I noticed in some of the pictures the bricks on the ground are different colors as well as the overhead pipes there's also these water features and I looked at the water features in the two lower photographs and said oh they're not functioning anymore and you pointed out that no during the winter they don't have water in them but during the summer they do have water and and they are functioning so I was wrong but again I don't know what it's like in temporary climates I don't have to think about that well I was there I was there the first lockdown around the first lockdown in early spring and they hadn't activated them yet okay okay but there's also a photograph in the upper right of people who look like they're around a swimming pool but there maybe isn't a pool there we're not quite sure they're in their bathing attire there is a shower there but regardless of what they're doing they are enjoying themselves and they are using that for recreation whether they're whether they're able to swim there or not they look like they were at least they're relaxing maybe they're just in the sun because we like to be in the sun where it's cold and it's gray a lot of times exactly but I think that picture is perfect for depicting the 70s in this very sort of free and enjoying and and just you know living it up kind of mentality that we wish we would have still and we should reconnect to so next slide they're they're still doing they're taking care of it which is also something if you have a really good building you know buildings age so you got to take care of it and they do here I you know I was witnessing that situation and the next slide we're getting towards the end of the show we have two minutes left but we will stop here soon and then pick up from there next week but this is pretty much how the kind of the pedestrian streets look like on the left side is how the terrorist houses look on the north side and you got the kitchen there and you got a little table there where you can have breakfast lunch and dinner all very pleasant doesn't look very urban right doesn't look like in the city that looks like suburbia so they were very successful in bringing the quality of suburbia that supposedly everyone wants right in the urban core right so I think with that I think this sort of we might leave it there and and pick up from from here maybe we do our picture here let's see what that presents here as the closing note kind of picture okay get us one more yeah this one we have to talk more about because it's rather strange look kind of strange to you because it's at the bottom at the most southern end of the high rises is basically a very low rise but very dense community and that one has some some funky and funny background that we will then see you for next week to tell you more about it all right well see you next week for that okay we'll then keep counting votes and crossing fingers okay aloha everybody