 your host Martin Despeng is delighted to have you back to think likewise human human architecture and which happens to be our 248th episode and you are our 13,168th viewer, thanks for that. And today we're gonna do something that is a tradition in our show to get us out into the world and using me as to look above and beyond our Pacific Island isolated horizon at times. And so that gets us to the first slide. We had sent me for that reason to near Zürich, Switzerland. And this is in some ways a follow up on what we have done already about three years ago where we went to the same region here which you see as the more specific location here is Esslingen, which is in the outskirts of Zürich about 20 kilometers away. And I'm here thanks to the hospitality of our friends, Uli and Kordi. Thank you too for having us here. And we were venturing out and seeing what's new and what we can learn from potentially for back in Hawaii. So let's start with, I guess, the urban on that slide here. And yes, at the very bottom right, you see a new development which is called the Europa Allee which is pretty much where the train station, it's sort of a terminating train station here that doesn't go through sort of a dead end rail, a central rail station and to the southwest of that as an urban renewal project, this city, new part of the city was developed. It reminds us quite some of Kakaakau. So it's sort of former railroad tracks in that case Kakaakau was former industrial land. There is mid to high rise here. There's a mix of the goodies of dwelling and working and obviously through the pandemic a little bit shaken up. And at the bottom floor is retail. It wasn't quite as accepted yet from the people, the population, but now when we went there and on the accordion invited us to a Korean restaurant has quite some fare. We went on a special day, which was Saturday and Saturday is the going out day anyways. And we here in temperate climate, the temperature is rollercoating or rather in the chilly kind of fifties right now rainy. But on Saturday we had a Hawaii night with up in the eighties, beautiful warm day when everyone was out and they all pulled out their fancy upscale cars. There's a lot to compare between Switzerland and Hawaii. Both are paradises for other people in the world. They both have Maoka and mountain ranges of different sorts that both have water. There's the Zurich Lake here. All of that we talked about in the previous show which we see at the bottom and the middle at the bottom which is almost like a hundred, more than a hundred shows ago because it was three years ago. So a lot to compare, we compare it to geology and geography as I was just recalling but today we wanna talk a little bit more about that prosperity aspect again that not only are we privileged as from what nature blesses us both in Hawaii as in Switzerland that attracts a lot of people and then we get competition and obviously as it is in the human world the tougher one survives and so the richer ones sell out the islands and here the little tiny country of Switzerland which only has 41, a little bit more than 41,000 square meters with roughly 8.6 million living here which is quite a lot and that's why we have quite some density here and that's something that we know very much from our islands specifically on Oahu where land is scarce and limited and so the more people wanna live there the more density we basically get. So the circumstances of our times being three fold of being climate change, coronavirus and civility under a threat by wars and crimes against mankind if we wanna do the check on these how Switzerland is doing here starting with the climate change according to the Swiss themselves on a website called Swissinfo.ch which stands for Switzerland. They basically say regarding their CO2 emissions they say small country slash big footprint. So they're not doing too good and that's as they explain elaborate on their website thanks to consumption. There's a lot of consumption here and there's a lot of import and so that leads to a lot of waste. Also again in terms of transportation although as we will further get to and the last two shows some 100 shows ago were titled transit oriented development which is the topic on our island as far as developing out West with public transportation. There's still too much air travel here and also the recycling isn't figured out the way it's supposed to be. There's a lot of homework to do and that's a similarity, right? You think of this here being a very scenic natural part of Europe which it undoubtedly is but people here don't seem to treat it equally to that sort of being blessed with it and that's something that sounds very familiar to us because that's what we increasingly talk about feeling the same as in Hawaii. Coronavirus, there is no mask mandate here anymore. It seems like Corona has never happened and we will see where that is going as far as civility has to do with prosperity. Again, which we already zoomed into the car at the middle of the right column there. This is a obviously an American car. This must be a Cadillac El Dorado fleet with El Dorado from the early to mid 70s somewhere in that range. Usually the cars, the one in the middle there in front of the museum that we're gonna talk about now which is the Kunsthaus in Zurich. This is a Bentley convertible. The fleet what there, the Cadillac fleet what sort of reminded us of that Switzerland for several reasons seems to be what America was in its best days in the last century. A very prosperous land with putting all its people to work having a pretty low unemployment rate. Everyone having been able to afford a house that was a promise of the United States to its citizens and Switzerland is in fact able to still do that to make us more jealous. The average income is roughly around almost 10K Franken which is their currency because they refuse to join the European Union at least so far. There's just recent attempts again of the equivalent of the Democratic Party to potentially change that. But as of now it is like that. But there is currently with the currency differences there isn't much difference to the euro nor is there to the US dollar anymore. So it's pretty much in the same range of US dollars and the amount that you need from your income for housing is way less than we're used to in Hawaii where it can be like a half or even more and same in Germany by the way. It's only one seven which our exotic escapism expert Susanna found out for us who has a degree in business and then speciality and hospitality but also in her interest in her own experience is the department of the very in-home lens how she calls her own housing situation in the area where again, same as in Hawaii with the department of Hawaiian homelands where this eludes to ironically as a term that we create people from the area have a hard time making a living because of the high cost of living there. So this is an issue not so much in Switzerland. So when you come here with foreign currency and with foreign income, it's quite tough and it's quite shocking what things cost but if you are here and from here and you live here, it's a different deal. So the museum we see on the middle and left part of this slide here is the Kunsthaus by the architect David Chippafield that we're referring to quite a bit at the top right from a show with Jay called Cynical Classicism where we use the work of David Chippafield as the point out cultivated classicism as the positive contrast of that and myself calling Chippafield an informal mentor to me and we occasionally and frequently check out the newest work of him. So the Kunsthaus in the middle and to the left is a one competition. Another thing that's very different to America where it's normally directly commissioned jobs or very sort of competition like a competitive process between few architects, they're handpicked by the clients. There is a big open competition in Europe. This one here was from 2017 where Chippafield won amongst a little more than 200 competitors and he won that bit and then took until the end of 2020 for the museum to be completed ever since it's open to the public and we have been visiting it. Talking about neutrality. So we talked about prosperity and the Swiss like to play a neutral role. So neutrality is the term for that one and say, well, we don't really wanna take a position neither for this side, neither for that side. That sometimes presents a problem as to at the bottom left you see a book that is available in the bookstore of the museum that is titled doesn't need much translation because you can figure it out, contaminate. It does contaminate the museum means the contaminated museum. And this author here, Eric Keller points out that the large part of the artwork displayed is by an art collector with the name Buerle and Mr. Buerle has been heavily sympathetic with the Nazis and many of the artwork has been stolen from the Jews. And this is obviously a very, very touchy subject here that's very controversially discussed in the general public here and in the museum and is a hot topic that unfortunately is sort of clouding a little bit the otherwise pretty nice museum by David Chipperfield that we might wanna maybe refer to and show you a little closer in future shows. Obviously this sort of, I guess, leading to the problem of integrity has also a contemporary dimension that's related to the threat to civility on a geopolitical scale. Because of that attitude of neutrality, the Swiss have been a paradise that we're going in another comparison to our paradise and in a way that it attracts a lot of investors because it's very, very easy here and also it's the traditional one of the utmost traditional paradises of the Russian oligarchs that now one is dealing with as a problem and finds it rather challenging. First of all, we might remember the Swiss even wanted to stay as neutral to even not join the sanctions of the European Union country, fellow countries of course there aren't part of the European Union but that was sort of a too lame of an excuse. They realized that themselves and decided to join the sanctions. So fittingly, I guess in the museum as a place for education and communication not only are they criticizing their own building or the exhibits in the building but at the top left there's a big banner of an international artist campaign by the late Yoko Ono who turned 89 years young this year. So John Lennon's wife who used to be an artist before she met John and continues to be one and her initiative of imagine peace couldn't be more timely to be displayed right now. Her exhibit is not up anymore but this sort of post exhibit proposition posters are basically still up. So this is sort of in a nutshell there's lots more layers here as you can tell of sort of touching this and challenges that it is sort of a paradise probably not just on surface but even below the surface but again the foundation of that paradise is not unproblematic. As far as homeless again talking about numbers and statistics on that very tropical night there with all the fancy upscale cars out there we spotted few homeless which Ollie was saying we were lucky to even have seen them because relative to the 8.6 million citizens in Switzerland statistically only 2,200 people are formally statistically recognized as homeless but 8,000 more are basically endangered are on the verge. So a total of 10,000 which is still sort of as a number relatively small compared to and they're not visible as much the Swiss basically keeps up there their big let's see facade with and discussions with Ollie I was told that once you might end up there because you lose your job, you get sick and you're not secured enough it is equally challenging as it is in Hawaii unfortunately. So the empathy to continue the why at the end why words doesn't go that far unfortunately with this with either to make sure what the Hawaiian kingdom by the way just to remember that everyone was taken care of no matter how weak you were in society the culture pretty much took well care of you. Again, the shows in the past some hundred shows ago at the middle at the bottom Michael if you can go there one more time the first show was pretty much about Zurich in Switzerland sort of in general and the second part was more zooming into the transit or in the development because that means you wanna connect neighborhoods or parts of the city that were in previous connected and so that gets us to the next and second slide. This again at the autumn right there is the scenic view from Molly and Cordy's place which is comprised of sort of a multitude of elements in the foreground you'd see something that is very familiar to us while having talked excessively rightly so about the work of Edward Killingsworth and Ron Lindgren and there is Stricker and the work where they're building integrated planter trough balustrades and here we have one this building is from the late 70s, early 80s very nice vegetated guardrail where all in Cordy are growing their herbs and spices in there and below it's open and naturally ventilated and then we look at the distance at this little bluff it's a little hard to see but there's actually a cow there so this is really out in the countryside although that red thing there is a train this is a commuter train that you can hop that if you are a stupid foreigner like us and you wanna hop the train and you pay at the ticket machine it kind of rips you off but again if you're from here or if you're a little smarter than Ollie and I were talking you can get a weekly rate or things like that that also applies to the museum by the way if you're smart and you kind of book bundles or again if you're a local and take a year pass or something the price is rather low if you're like us and go there unprepared it costs 30 bucks per person but again that's just us and maybe it's okay for people who just come here and wanna enjoy and nothing comes for free kids up to age 16 it's basically free so again public transportation is a good backbone here this train here the red train that we see there driving by is a traditional train that we talked quite a bit about in the past show and the thing on the left the large picture is what in the few days we had here we were blessed to have here is actually the most impressive piece of architecture that we found that is telling Lee not in the city the Europa alle that you remember from the previous slide at the bottom right is architecturally a little bit disappointing it is more or less fossil formalism again the Switzerland has to do some more homework on putting its building stock off the grid so the buildings might have been geothermally powered but otherwise the consideration of orientation and passive solar because this is temperate climate gets really cold here we are at the foothills or in the view of the beautiful view of the Alps here so one could see more of that the project here was really amazing because we were walking up this bluff and Ali showed me this project very low-key, very understated it's a plinth of concrete with the building then constructed on top of that out of solid timber which is something we have talked about a Kelly Keano's thesis project trying to do that out of coconut lumber on the island and then we see something that the Soto will like hi to Soto who had to take a break today that is the sort of fenestration that we always say should almost be the mandate for Hawaii where glass guardrails should be abandoned as we say and instead using could be chain link fence and this is in fact the chain link fence a little bit of a nicer little more upscale version that one of the tenants in the building was happy to tell us about that that took a little while to be brought in from Italy but by the way, Italy isn't that far away Italy is pretty much next door here to Switzerland so that's not a big deal and the building is a very sort of integral part of the landscape and again will soon be taken over by nature because all these plans basically intended and welcomed by this chain link fence to basically grow up on the building so very nice sort of nature integrated very nice community kind of blurred boundaries between the private and the public we were welcome to walk through they have their own little herbs and vegetable and fruit garden there in the building it's comprised of as the tenant was telling us of rental units that two of them are owned and the architect must be so happy and that he's brave enough to live in his own building that he designed that I know from tradition can be problematic because then again, if then something goes wrong in the building, the door to knock on is just too close so this could be rather stressful for an architect but only for the one who's not convinced that his building really works so in this case, that seems to be the case who's also living there seems related to the person we were talking to is the client of the project so a really nice, almost like co-op-like community again, that just feels right that's the quality we wish we would have seen in Zurich itself and that's something we continuously talk about that in order to convince people like our Gothic escapeism expert who is a country girl and loves her country to convince her and others like her to basically go and move to the city takes us architect and urban planners to make the city like the country and again, we continue to share propositions polemically provocative propositions how to do that, this is a good example here how to successfully do that so I think that's it from my side about updating you from the other end of the world in an area that has many similarities and geographically, you know, geology-wise, prosperity-wise, profitability-wise, right? How do we basically deal with being a privileged place that draws affluence and then how do we keep it livable also for people who are less fortunate? So a lot of things to compare between Switzerland and Hawaii, of course, keeping in mind that one is tropical us in Hawaii and this one here is tempered making it more challenging, by the way. Supposed to be making that more easy for us in Honolulu, I was on the phone with Senator Stanley Chang who kindly takes on that issue to provide more social housing for us in Hawaii and he's taking a delegation of experts to the neighboring Alpine country of Austria for that reason in September, so that's great. Stanley, thanks very much for doing that. Okay, that's it for today. We're at the end of another 28 minutes of reflection and we hope to see you back. The Soto already confirmed and we look forward to having him back to keeping all that in mind, go back to wrapping up our volumes about the area of the Alamoana and its midtown development as they call it. Okay, until then, have a good week. Stay happy and healthy and keep working with us on a planet and people friendly environment. Bye bye. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.