 I'm delighted to have you back to this, our show, Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Human Architecture, this happening to be our 308th episode, and you are about to be our 17,000 viewer, as you see down there, which we appreciate. Us is the trouble triumvirate again this week with Yuta Soto Brown, Bishop Museum Historian, but now in your Ossipov designed diamond head home, Yuta Soto, and we got you, Martin Anselini up there in Minoa, and we got here the other Martin Despang, a little further down the hill from Yuta Soto in Waikiki. And we are on our second, seventh time of membering Lahaina and thinking about what could one do almost, I wouldn't say impulsively, but spontaneously, because we're sharing what you have been coming up with, Martin, during the first couple of weeks into the semester in our DR program here. And while the slides are already running through and your tropical exotic birds are entertaining us, Yuta Soto, let's get started talking about what we're gonna talk about today, because we added several slides to the show. And I would like to kick it off and try to talk about the human factor. So how do we basically inhabit the whole thing or how is the whole thing gonna get inhabited? And we somewhere see in the 28th, the president of yours, Martin, and we also somewhere in the slide nine, 10 and following, we wanna talk about that. In slide 12, if we see this later, I wanna chip in mild childhood experience of having grown up in something not unsimilar, which is what the conspiracy theory people have been jumping on because they might feel there's something too good to be true about it. And that is the 15 minute city where you can actually do everything without having to drive your car or go through any other effort, everything that you need to do in your life, you can do within walking, but then again, you can get out, you don't have to be stuck there. So I pass it on to you with this slide because you just provided that, Martin. So tell us what we see while the slides are moving on, but we remember this one. It is simply the human factor, as you were telling before. We need to recreate or to keep in what will happen in Lehighna the people on the street. What is like this, we were talking previously about this organic factor of people living freely, spontaneously, and this is what makes Lehighna, Lehighna. The cities that are just an image, we're also talking about the musification of cities, are very vulnerable to disappear. Now, Lehighna, even if it is destroyed, it's still existing in memory. Of course in archives, but mainly in memory of the people that had a relation with Lehighna. So this is what have to be recreated. Probably not exactly the same as it was, this is a big question that I don't feel with the authority to answer it, but in any case, it should keep the human factor. And the human factor in terms of urbanism is people in the streets, simple. We need to generate, bring ice to the streets, like ground floor open market, commerce, people buy, cars don't buy. And then what was shown in this previous image in slide 10 is that we can also, in a more, let's call it radical approach, generate a macro infrastructure that can provide shelter and services as resiliency that we were also talking about here, to guarantee these basic needs to people and also to make the people starting to negotiate, let's call it negotiate, but interact and build a life. Martin, let me ask you a question, because Martin just said that, and this is very important, he grew up in a city where transportation was mostly by on foot. And of course, many other countries have excellent other types of ground transportation as well, including Germany and urban areas. So it's not as hard-dependent. What is the transportation outlook for your plan for Lahaina? What transportation is there and where does it run? I would go to keep the cars out, probably, and it's simple. It's like providing good shape, providing a good, let's call it circular, circular public transportation system, Lahaina. And even Waikiki is small enough to be able to satisfy the needs with public transportation. And then biking and walking. People will make exercise today. There will be a big event here in Honolulu about a walkability, and this event will be promoted by the Department of Health. So it is also related to health. And then, of course, we need to provide the right, we need to provide services, food, and so on. And this could be delivered in some hours, in some specific moments, even with bikes. But we can also, or people, for example, ambulances or fire trucks or the cars of people that cannot ride a bicycle or walk, could also have access with some kind of, let's call it restrictions. That would generate a very idyllic environment on a point of view. And let's say you're actually attending an event this afternoon with people of the Department of Health. And that is about that. I will also add that a colleague of yours that was with us so many years ago, he came from a fellow Latin American background and from a city in Mexico where the mayor used his right to basically do that overnight. He had his staff people basically put up barriers, block the streets, and make it walkable. And there was a big cry out first from the business world. And they were all, I'll say, you are killing us. It only took a couple of days, he told us, of that flipping in understanding, feeling, I experiencing that actually people who walk shop, people who try to desperately try to find parking as here in Waikiki, as you mentioned, they get upset, they get ripped off. They have to pay 50 bucks for parking for a couple of hours that they could actually spend for in the city, in the shops, in the stores. So it has proven in that example, in that case study to actually work. So that in mind, we should look at other experiences and practices and let them be comfort us and motivate us and inspire us, absolutely. Let's talk about this slide here while it's rumbling by. So this talks about the human factor in the second way because it seems inherent to human nature that what you just talked about is one thing, is being out and about and being social. But there is times when the human being seems to wanna have and wanna need to and wanna want to do the opposite, is basically be hiding away from others, be by yourself. And this part we actually seem to over dwell on with the dominant post contact architecture that this is what Western architecture does because it also has to do it for climatic reasons to not get a frostbite. But here it seems to be predominantly done because people don't even eat on the street anymore but they're all either inside and they're all gonna dwell inside. So what is your counter proposal for that based upon your experience and share the project and while the slides will have been running so we can actually go back to 28 and 29 but start explaining to us. The concept is simple and then the story of that project is fun is architecture have the solution. We can provide alternative enclosures different than the wall, the permanent wall. There are many ways of, and these, the Lanais are that sometimes, and then also in like, if you start looking rural housing, rural housing normally was very enclosed in many cases without any windows because people was like feeling part of the landscape and the moment of sleeping, of having intimate moments making love, whatever was or is a moment of which you want to be enclosed. But this is why where architecture appears and the approach of that project was just to understand walls as doors. All the time we are moving architecture. We are opening doors, opening windows and in that sense we can also manipulate the whole structure. So the idea could be to generate a big structure that again was providing these basic services but all the rest could be just flexible enclosures that could be manipulated by people. In that project, the solar decathlon project for Latin America that we did in 2015, it was fun because we didn't have enough money to build a light pool enclosure. So we did a material that is called the sterilla which is basically the bamboo. They opened it like this. They opened the bamboo and it is like kind of a permeable, vegetable surface, very cheap, very, very, very cheap. And we use that to cover the whole building. And then the termic performance of that building was the third within 15 projects that had this super ultra sophisticated enclosures. So the lesson is very simple, is we can generate enclosures that can leave air pass and be open. For example, we're closing the facade, the East facade in the morning and then we're closing the West facade in the afternoon. So we're controlling heat with the human factor again. So people just, this is the project where we are seeing it here, the architecture was very flexible. Even the kitchen was what we were able to move around the kitchen. And there were models that were moving around depending on the time of the day. And everything was full of hammocks and the mezzanines and so on. And that was the argument, no? And the jury gave us the first price in architecture because of that, because when they were evaluating the project, our students were there sleeping in the house. They were using the house. The other houses were closed because they don't want it to lose heat and blah, blah, and they said that in the report, no? This is a good example of flexible architecture and again, human factor, no? People are manipulating architecture. And look at that again from the inside out, next slide, 29 again, please. That's again, when we were looking at the hammocks as a proposition recently on a recent slide, probably people would have said, well, that's sort of very kind of romantically envisioned. And some people say, you know, when you have a vision, you see the doctor, but this shows that you can make this reality. So because in all respect for all the emotions and that are going on still and will be forever about the tragic fire and having killed people and burned people's places down, I think what we're bravely saying is that we should bring back all the good stuff, yes, but we should maybe not repeat the not so good stuff. And what also went with Lahaina as the solo, as you pointed out by surveying it and going there and finding out, and Martin, there is also people from your cultural background there and they are not on the upside of society. They have the low paid job. They have places there where they pay two big rents and now they get ripped off by predators, capitalist predators and $3,000 for a studio. That we don't wanna bring back, right? We wanna bring back the good parts, but the bad parts. So this is trying to solve the bad parts in trying to eliminate what I like to call the terror of tropical territorialization where you get stuck in having to own and paying a mortgage for the rest of your life or you're stuck for the rest of your life with too high rents and you're always fearing to be evicted. So this is trying to go against it, but it is not that easy. Well, it is actually easy, but you have to make that shift of mindset of letting go to bedrooms, having let go to bathrooms. And there will be services for that. Don't worry about it. You will be served, but in a different way. Use the term freeing yourself, right? You wanna expand on that a little bit on top of my interpretation of it? I would just compliment saying that this way of living or this project would also provide a very ready-made alternative or what is happening now. The image of this very finished house will require more amounts of money, more time, more time for the people living in the uncomfortable conditions that are living now in Maui. So probably this strategy could provide a shelter while or maybe that could become permanent if this is the decision or just understand it as a provisional shelter that could be navigated meanwhile and then dismantled, let's say. I don't believe too much in dismantling things because it's like useless, but it could also be work as a provisional structure easy to build. This could also, yeah, go ahead, DeSoto. I was just going to say too, Martin, you mentioned earlier the number of which I was surprised, the number of Latin American citizens there were in Lahaina at the time of the fire because I didn't realize that there were that many people there from particularly Venezuela and Argentina. But the point I wanted to make was this type of living is somewhat communal. In other words, there's a lot of interactivity with individuals rather than people being off in their own individual rooms. And that actually goes along with what has been happening in Lahaina because many, many people are sharing the same homes, sometimes related and sometimes not because housing was so tight and was so expensive. One of the things that you could do under this type of system would be to say, okay, everybody who isn't part of a family, if you are an immigrant and you don't have any family here, let's put all of you together into one or two structures where we can put all of the single people who don't have a lot of money and who need obviously shelter just as everybody else does. So in this way, you've got more freedom of people being able to move around between different structures. If it is not as structured, if it is not as compartmentalized, which for the workforce of Lahaina as it currently is or was right before the fire, also allows you to take care of the people who are, as you said, Martin, at the low end of the economic scale because they're doing the jobs that a lot of other people won't do and they don't have a lot of money and they need places to stay but cannot afford the regular rents. Communal living would be for them very, very good because they would be paying less money to be sheltered. Yeah, and if we go to slide 32 quick, I wanna say something hot off the news of our school here also, we're talking education here by the way. There were some emails sent to separate colleagues, ours from the great Shigero Ban, who we all admire. He's a Pritzker Prize winner from 2014 and he reached out and has indicated that he will be engaged in rebuilding Lahaina. We were very excited about it and we now maybe make the pre-conclusion, well, probably not, but he's probably invited because he had made himself a name amongst many other things of be a disaster relief architect, predominantly known for his work in unbelievably using cardboard tubes and he's been doing this all over the world. Also, he has done a nomadic museum out of cargo steel shipping containers but I collected these two because I think these have to do with your project. One is the Curtin House here on the left side and one on the right is 10 years later in Zurich where he was using a very heavy tectonic timber and that's where you are going. And one would hope again that again, it's not just, you know, the way the students, the university will be involved is actually in a way that when we go back to 28, as you guys were involved, Martin, as you really trust, you know, the power of the emerging generation as you did in this project here, slide 28, Michael, thanks for bringing that back and we should share because the audience might not know what the Consolidate Castle on it. So it's a national competition program that architectural schools, predominantly from the U.S., participate but then there are some rebels from other countries as yours and the Germans have been provoking and having won consecutively twice with the University of Darmstadt as well. And it's a great way of what Wundern Foster is called, we call design built where you figure something out and then you also make it actually happen. And there is a faculty mentor in our case, one was supposed to be the sort of week touched on that here and there, David Rockwood was spearheading that and because of politics, unfortunate ones, it didn't happen. But this should also again encourage us to actually not just quiz sort of wisdom and people who are established but also take advantage of the breeze of fresh thoughts of the emerging generation and basically trying something and maybe along these lines of risking as well. And for that reason, I wanna share and motivate you with the slides 33, 34, 35 and 36 if we can have this one through because that was me pretty much where you are right now, Martin some now many years ago where we had the expo in 2000 coming and we won like you a competition for talking transportation which you were asking DeSoto to go to the expo and design these tram stations. And we were so brave and again, young and crazy that we wanted to make what you try in your project too to make the salt fly. You make it even more crazy with this stuff here which is our basalt core that we guessed from Christian Kleiner up at the Austrian border in Germany. And Christian just sent us an email this morning and said, hi, how's it going? And so it's going well, Christian we will send the show to you in the previous ones. And it was not without doubt and not without risking because by that time which slide 35 shows and there's sorry, no comparison there's when it comes to tragedy you cannot compare, right? I wanna get the straight to begin with but somehow strangely the same number of people have been killed in an event at that time, half around the world and that was this tragic train accident with a high-speed train ICE that killed around a hundred people. And the guy in charge of that was also in charge of us. So while I also encourage all of us pedagogs to encourage you guys and not default back to playing it to save because my professor in school at slide 37 actually also in addition there Professor Tokatsu I had as my structural professor he was encouraging me from the very beginning if we can get that slide 37 I didn't find he's so humble there isn't even a picture of there not Tokatsu out there but he was my professor in school and he encouraged me with having been the auditing engineer on the project but when the guy above him had to basically then step in and some of the basalt pavers started to crack both of them basically were calming down and cautioned at the client and saying don't go too extreme don't go to paranoid because it's gonna be good because we know the system is meaning that there's a crack doesn't mean there's a failure and in fact never any of the pavers fell down and someone could have been hurt although it's only three feet it never happened but it needs this sort of oldness and braveness of people who know what they're doing and encouraging the emergent generation to explore and that's what you're doing and that's I wanna pass on that tradition now and do that now in your case that yes it is very brave what you're doing and very out there but you come with your heart at the right place and you wanna try something with fitting the show a human humane mindset and that's why we're here to endorse that and support you, right Soda Soda? Absolutely, yes and I think that, well, Martin did you you started to say something and we went on another tangent but you wanna complete that right before we come to the end of the show? Just adding that disasters will keep happening all over I was recently in New Orleans that was dramatic but it's happening all over we were also talking about what the vulnerability in all the Pacific region Manila, when I went to in Colombia and Mexican coast also, I mean, of course there are countries in the global south which are more vulnerable because they are not ready but also could happen in Hawaii could happen in Japan could happen in the mainland US, in Europe and so on so we have, of course, we have to prevent and for attending the post disaster situation which is dramatic because it is basically the first thing to attend is people, no? The people that was like that is in that situation we are talking from the outside in any case but we have to act creatively, let's say we have to use this, I won't say as an opportunity but as an emergency the word emergency is interesting because we can make ideas emerge we have to think differently about how to react to these crises and in the same moment to be very pragmatic because we have to act fast to use the money, put the money where it should be but also to stop doing the things that we were doing that caused the disaster the disaster is not happening because of nature it is happening because of our relationship with nature so the more creative and the more pragmatic we are which is not contradictory it is actually complementary, the better it is on that great closing note but we feel this needs another round so see you back for that next week and until then, please stay bravely bold, boldly brave bye bye