 I'm delighted to have you back to Think Tech Hawaii's human-humane architecture. This being our 278th show, and thanks to our producer Michael, he will show you down there which accumulated viewer you are, the 14,834th, which we appreciate very much. We is, this is the Boston-Banish Boost Volume 15 already, and we have Mr. Boston-Banish Booster McNobled with us from his Boston, Massachusetts, and more specifically today from the building that we are analyzing and have him share with us because he just came out of a class that he taught in the engineering building in Harvard, in Boston, Massachusetts, and we have me, Martin Despeng, today in Mülheim, on der Ruhe, and we will hopefully have back in our Honolulu and the Bishop Museum, the Soto-Brown with us soon when we come back in a second. Alright, Matt, for the time being, it's just us, the temperate guys, in pretty similar temperatures, not quite half around the world as from here to Honolulu, but far away enough, sort of just around the freezing point. And before we go back to your building, that greatly you moved into it for today's show, let's do some little bit peer review and get us to another city here in Germany, which is your buddy Bundet's favorite city, which is Duisburg in Germany here. And Mülheim, we should have added an der Ruhe, and Ruhe is the river, and you call this area, the Ruhe Pot, or the Kohlen Pot, because this is where the heavy fossil industry at least used to be a heavy steel manufacturing, sort of like the Pittsburgh of Germany. So we, there's a building here, I'm here with Joey and Lenny and their ladies, and Joey used to go to school to do his master's in automotive management here, and he lived right by this building here. And so let's share that a little bit with the audience, and I have the chance to, thanks to the management of the building, they let us in me with my iPhone and with Zoom, and I have the emerging Hawaii architectural generation to check it out tomorrow from inside out, because that's most important. And as just promised, here he is, our wishes came true, DeSoto is with us, hi DeSoto. Hello everybody. So before we go back and see what we can learn from your building in Harvard, Met, for us back in Honolulu with our endless summers, we want to take advantage of us being in, you know, different places, and me in Germany here in the Ruhe Pot, in the Kohlen Pot, and this building here, it's a little provocative for you and I, and Met, because we went to architecture training school around the same pretty dark days of the just demise of postmodernism in the late, you know, 80s, early 90s. But there's always exceptions to a rule, to that bad rule of the bad times back then. And this is one of the buildings that was pretty hot and pretty fresh back then, dates back to 1993. This is by Lord Foster, Norman Foster, and it's here in DuSport. It's the business promotion center. And yeah, let's bring you into DeSoto just to quiz you on which are, which are things, I mean, you've been in Boston back then as a child, but you rightly so. I mean, from your point of view, said, OK, I'm never going to go back. So you have memories, but we're freshing these memories from the terms of climate and we're assessing things in terms of the criteria of skins or first skin that we're bored with the second one that we put over, which you don't have to unless you sit in your chilled museum office there. And the third skin, we also don't really need so much as we need it existentially here. And that's that's obviously the point. So what what do you see DeSoto that sort of makes you think about, you know, things, differences and similarities to back in Honolulu? Well, these are four photographs that I'm looking at right now. I see in the bottom left corner, a traditional building in the distance, which has a stone or brick exterior of some kind that's hard. And that's going to be something that protects you from the cold that insulates you from the cold. But in that same photograph on the right, we see a fully glazed just glass wall made of large glass panels. This is not a substance that's normally that insulating unless you have several layers of it that have two or three barriers of other air that's in prison that helps keep you from being too frigid cold. And I see on the right, there's also just what looks like one pane of glass, although I can't clearly see there may be two with lines behind them. So to me, that suggests that this is not a very frigid climate, although I know in fact that it is. So something is going on that I don't see here. There has to be some kind of insulation that's keeping everybody from freezing to death. You just proved yourself wrong once again. And a good way to sort of because you keep saying, I'm not an architect, but you just proved you are pretty right on. Matt, what could we add to that expertise? Well, I I assume we're looking at at least a double, if not triple glazed wall system with sunshading devices or lamella between the glass panels that keep the sun from reaching the interior and overheating it, which would be a fairly typical installation for for Germany in particular. I don't know whether I'm on the mark there. You're the only one of the three of us who's actually touched this building. So you have to. Yeah, I know for the report, because I will be in it tomorrow with the students from inside out, which is more important. And we also have the floor plan here that we fished from the from the web. Foster after this, this precede his most iconic and sort of a hero for high rise, the comat's bunk in Germany in Frankfurt in Germany. So not that far away from this where he inverted and basically took the circulation, you know, outside of the building and freed at core, which is something that you're building in Harvard is doing a lot. And he was doing this with the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank already in earlier in the late seventies. And here he's sort of probably because of the typology being rather sort of developer driven or small, actually engineering firm that sort of drove this, that maybe from the plan, it may be not as innovative as it's from its envelope, which, yes, very much. It is a which we call a double facade. There are two facades, two glass envelopes on top of each other. There's 18 centimeters cavity space in between. And that basically the one in the back is double probably double pain at that time, because triple pain wasn't around. And then there's a single plane layer at the very at the very front. And we also see indications of transportations in front of it. Right. We see on the right, we see light rail, which we should have back in Honolulu as we keep talking about because you had electric streetcars, just like that on grade. And we need these back. And we're also at the picture at the top left is borrows from our to be, you know, recontinued comparing autos and arch, the texture, the mobile and the immobilia. This is Lenny's newest car, which she bought for around a thousand euros. This is a polo. Have you this solo ever heard or seen a polo because you're a VW expert because you had a bug and a rabbit, but have you ever had a polo? No, but I heard of the polo, but at the moment, I cannot remember much about it. But before we talk about the polo, just below the picture, you showed the floor plan of this building, and I want to do that. I want to talk about that quickly. It's very unusual because it looks like a lens shaped building that comes to two sharp points on either side. And I'm wondering what the rationale was or why it was built in this unusual form. Is the is the lot or the location very skinny that required this? Or just was it because it looked unusual and interesting? I think we leave this up to the audience to do more detective work because we can only guess so. And I've been on Foster's Web site and you guys should do this, too. But I think that's good homework that we assign to the audience here. And I want to go back to mobility. And I want to go back to that cars here. They're actually more than ever in Honolulu. Also important to keep to give you a climate zone because you turn the heater on because it is cold, right? So way more than anything. This is the polo three. Right now, the newest version is the polo six. And they've been around since seventy five and comparing architecture and automobiles. That was also the year when Foster did one of his first buildings, which was the Willys-Farba and Dumas building in Ipswich. And you recall that one from the history lessons met. And I do. I do. Yeah. Do you have a picture? I don't. We have to leave this up to bring it next time. We probably do. OK, next time we promise we show a seventy five polo and show the seventy five, which they just call Willys building. And I mean, the Willys just as a sort of an appetizer for that one was also a curvy linear in plan building that had an all glass envelope. In that case, it was, I think, a single layered. And then he basically moved to double layered. And you see these pretty heavily coated people there, which means and you also don't see much sun there, right? So in this situation, I will ask the management tomorrow. Why don't you move the blinds up? So you can soak up whenever there is some sun out there. You can soak it up and then you create past the solar game, right? And that's that's the point. This situation you will never have. And so Lulu, as we know, we don't have to worry about that. However, we have glass buildings, right? We started talking about if you could do if you should do basically these double facades in Honolulu again. Again, for me, it seems a little bit like too much like if you wear hair, wear a puffy coat and then have a hat that has a wind turbine and a thin film PV that runs the fan and drags it out of your puffy coat. It seems to be too much. But but again, it's it's at least better than the current buildings because we have predominant, you know, double pane glazed high rises that have nothing over it, right? No external shading, no nothing. So and one reason you met explained to us how you sell this to clients is that the maintenance of these shading systems, they're very vulnerable to wind and then keep breaking, you know, is you extend the lifetime of that one. So there is a return of investment for investing in an additional layer of facade, right? Let's go to the next slide. And because this is when we were there in about half a year ago with a whole crew here and see us at the top at the bottom right in front of the building with including our exotic escapism experts, Zana and the whole bunch here. Otherwise, and this is the situation you could imagine. OK, this is Honolulu all the time, right? And in this situation, you would basically bring the shades down and bring the bring the blinds down, right? So then the sun cannot transfer through the inner thermal threshold and it will keep the building cool. You just somehow have to manage to get the heat out of the cavity space. And your firm, Matt, has done this quite a bit, quite a lot. And many of the project is almost like a signature of the office. These double facades are not just with a gen sign that we looked at last time by tracing back to the Nord LB in my hometown and and the Unilever building that you can obviously name mentioned a couple of more. So again, we just want to keep this discussion going about glass envelopes on the island. Again, you know, this is at least keeping the building cool on the inside. If you go to Foster's website, they're rightly so promoted as a very, very pioneering, biochlamatically ambitious building. And so, yeah, it's just good to revisit something from these days that were not really that interested at that time. But but some were as them. And if I'm not mistaken, I looked it up again, Matt, the office of Stefan and you guys started out around that time. It was in 91, right? That correct? Exactly, right. Exactly. So so there you go. OK, let's return to Honolulu next slide and pick up on the because after all, and perfectly, Matt, that you sit in the engineering building as we're talking, we recognize the green curtains. So let's remember that, so what is the sibling? The equivalent of that on the UH Manoa campus? We have an engineering department there, too, right? Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I do not remember which one that is. And shame on me, but I don't remember. I'm not a person who is at UH too frequently. You might be in good company. So all the other guys who have this sort of senior moment as well, you need to go back and just watch the shows that two of us did about it. That's exactly right. So the art, the architect is a very iconic, traditional firm in the United States of America that Skidmore Owings Merrill. That they basically designed it and Skidmore Owings Merrill. We know for a lot of work and there's one other project on the island that is also by SOM that is preceding the UH Manoa building. So you might say there were some smart people who said, hey, this is actually a pretty cool firm that we might want to take advantage of their expertise as well. And which is that other building that we just looked at? Now, see, you're you're putting me on the spot again. I just I just got older day before. And now I've forgotten you. That is OK. Yeah, happy birthday again. Thank you. Thank you. So that's the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, which we see there. We are right there without without a friend, Ron. And the top right is a preview of a show we have to do about it when we sent me there. And that was the first time I saw it. That one is working titled Liquid Stone, Hawaii or something like that. So we just want to, again, point out, you know, smart, you know, universities, they have their eyes out there and see, you look for innovative practices. And that's something that we keep saying we need to do again, as far as you age, maybe back to a faster one, one more time and one last time. The Pomer, the Kommerzbank Tower in in Frankfurt for me always is sort of a a variation of what for some, including me, is one of the most innovative SOM buildings that that's within the show quote at the bottom left, sort of in the middle, that sort of column of three images there. That is the National Commercial Bank and Jeddah and Saudi Arabia, which is also basically, you know, infusing these these atrium spaces in the building and then, you know, spirals them around the more you go up in the building. And that's something that the Foster's Kommerzbank also does here, of course, because of the desert, the hot desert, the exterior facade, entirely opaque in the in the Kommerzbank Tower in Frankfurt, rightly so they're more open because we have this tricky, sort of ambivalent, kind of schizophrenic climate. So that being said, again, just as a little bit of a reminder to our administration, to my employer, you know, watch out for these practices who've proven themselves to do well. So that gets us back to the next slide in your building that you're sitting in. And as we promised in the last show, although we will return, which is also circled in here to these very, very cool breakout spaces, but we said after all, it's also a building where some serious research has been done and conducting in laboratories. And that's what we like, would like to talk about now. And we will see them in the next slide. But maybe you want to add something organizationally or so on this slide, Matt. I mean, I think just to kind of situate what we're looking going to look at the the main part of the building is divided into three blocks. The entire building is about 500 feet long. And so it was important to break the scale of the building down by by expressing it as three separate building blocks with the research laboratories inside. So you can kind of see along the top part of this picture where those three divisions happen. And then in between those laboratory blocks are where the collaborating spaces are for scientists and researchers and engineers to come out of the labs and be in a more temperate environment, let's say. Is that, Matt, when I'm looking at this, is that the area on the left that's labeled area area lounge? Yes, exactly. That's one there. And then on the other side of that central gray block with the with the labs in it, there's the other one between the other two boxes. Right. And Matt, I'm just looking at let me just quickly ask, Matt, I'm looking at the room that you're in with the green curtain and the distinctive ceiling. But I'm saying is that is that acoustical tile on the left? Or what is that? Because it looks like the kind of acoustical tile we used to have in buildings back in my youth, which is many years ago on the wall here. Yeah, yeah, with the little holes. Yeah, yeah, it's actually perforated drywall. So it's OK. It's the same thing. Yeah, and it has an acoustical backing behind it to keep the sound. It's basically for sound purposes. Right. OK, that's. And so this is a this is a quiet room. Sort of. This is like an eight person meeting room, basically. OK, conference room. And that's OK. And that's in the area lounge section. It's not too far. So just below that, you see a kind of a white triangular area. Yes, atrium. That's the atrium that's behind me. OK, so I'm I'm we're looking at the fourth floor plan and I'm on the fifth floor here, but that's the space. We're going to the next slide. Is is that the room at the bottom left that you're sitting in? Or one a lot? No, that's that room is way down on level two. OK, but it's all part of the same space, which is this atrium space or these atrium spaces run up through the height of the building. Yeah, yeah. And we also see the lab. So where the people do their hands on research there. And so I can see that the lab spaces are big and they're full of a lot of perhaps solid surfaces. So maybe they're noisy and maybe the room that you're in is to get away from that noise. Yeah, partly, although the acoustic control throughout the building is a big was a big concern of ours. So of course, in a space like I am, this is intended to be very quiet. But the laboratories, even though the general level of noise in them is higher because of all the machines that they have running in there and so forth, the steel decking that we use to create the floor slab, which is the ceiling of those laboratories is perforated as well and has a crystal insulation in it so that acoustical control in the laboratories is as good as as you can make it, you know, in a space that's like that. And then just over my right right hand shoulder in that atrium space, you can see sort of above me these Lamella this Lamella ceiling, which is also perforated with acoustical insulation inside of each of the Lamellas to control the sound in the big in the open public space. That's fascinating. Thank you for telling me no. I mean, honestly, because I would never have known that. And it's a big and it's a big topic in a big public building like this. How do you create open spaces that all spill into one another but still give people the feeling that, you know, they have a certain amount of control over their environment and they're not buffeted by noise or by cold air currents and so on and so forth. Yeah, and to illustrate that spilling in open space, please, the next slide. That you see this very, very clearly here in that section, how that sort of volcano erupts through the building as to use a Hawaiian theme familiar to us. The volcano again, yeah. And again, how, yeah, I mean, the the labs have to be more sterile. There has to be there's all these requirements, right? So you can't really do much. But that's why you contrast it so lively with with these with these semi public spaces here in the building that whenever people, you know, get out of there, out of there, then they get, you know, all the other senses activated. And one of the most important ones is the social sense, right? And people and not just, you know, working next to each other there, but focusing on the work. But then, you know, people talking to each other and exchanging. That's what a vibrant university, you know, should should foster in their in their own self interest, right? Yeah. And even in the laboratories, we try, you know, I mean, you're right. They are technical spaces. They have a lot of technical requirements. They are so intended to be highly flexible and the nature of what's built in them changes quite often. But at the same time, people have the same kind of human needs when they're working in those kind of spaces for long periods of time that people have everywhere, which is the ability to see outside, to connect with nature, a lit environment and the ability to see their fellow, a low sort of occupants. So that's those are important features of those spaces, even though they themselves are fairly technical in nature. And so in looking at this side view, there are two levels below grade. But on the left, is that an open area to the to the sky? It is. It's an open court. We cut that into the old foundation of the building precisely because we were going to put occupied spaces below grade and needed to be able to give people again that connection to the outside and to daylight and to air, as well as an opportunity to come out of the below grade spaces and just go outside for a few minutes if they wanted to do so. So that's exactly what that is. Yeah. And also in the section coming back to the sort of beginning of the show here today on the right side, we see that sort of indicated something going on as a double facade. But in this case, a little different. And we see that sort of section perspective cut on on the left, that stuff that's kind of fading out. And since we're at the end of the show, we still bring the next slide up just as in to mouthwater you for discussing this further next week and to find out. And so what's in the distance there? This is what we will pay attention to in the next show a lot. And for the time being, we stay inside and enjoy one of these breakout spaces here. They're just really, really pleasant, as you say, connecting with nature, looking outside, having a tall, very tall ceiling there and still with all the little tricks that you don't shove in people's face, but you cleverly and elegantly integrate into everything. It's just a really feel good, well-being place and space there. That, yeah, unfortunately, unfortunately, the photograph was taken right as in the middle of covid. So the building was not able. We weren't able to have people in the photographs, which is always furrable. But also those spaces, I mean, the nature of the furnishings there is such that they can all be kind of pushed away to one side. In that space used for other kinds of events, speaking events, there's projection and AV in these spaces. They could have cocktail parties, dinners, informal social events and things like that. So really, it's about trying to create social spaces at many different scales throughout the building to accommodate all the diversity of uses that happen here. And this just shows another difference to other practices because the other architect, probably including like big nollie you worked for before, they always want to get their money shots, party shots without anything in there, without people and, you know, the banish practice being the opposite. It's all about the people. So you want people in there. So, yeah, we're at the end of the show. So we look forward to see you next week to discuss more what kind of mysterious stuff we saw in the background there on the outside. And yeah, you have to get back to us to find out what that is. And until then, please stay a people and planet friendly, planet and people friendly as you guys. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thanks, Martin. Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.