 to this, our 306th episode of Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. And we is three of us, and we're broadcasting live from three different locations. The first one is you, DeSoto Brown, Bishop Museum Historian, but you're up in your Ossetov designed diamond head home. Hi DeSoto. Hello everyone. Me, Martin Despang, back tucked in his bathroom and the Waikiki Grant, not far away from you. And our guest is usually with us as well on the island, but today for good causes, he is out in the cold where we both have been before DeSoto and actually not far away of where you spend some time in your childhood. And that's in Detroit, Michigan. And that's our guest, Martin. Hi, Martin. Hello. Hello, García Riz. Hi, Martin. Hello, hello. Very nice to be here. Thank you for being with us. And what we wanna do today is we have a slightly different format that we're gonna try out with you, but it's also now the eighth or ninth time we're basically staying in what's on all our minds in Hawaii ever since the beginning of August when there was a fire destroying Lahaina. And it happened when I was shortly before coming back and our exotic escapism expert, Susanna charged me and us with doing something good about it. And that's now after DeSoto had been showing us the history of it at the very beginning. Then we had our exotic tropical met noblet with us from Danish architects back in Boston, which is very close to where you are right now, Martin, flushing out ideas for potential suggestions how to improve the situation. And then we send you DeSoto out there in real to capture the situation. And now it's about time to bring hope. And that's what we brought you and Martin because for the only few weeks into the semester, which is a fourth, we should say you actually had this ready already two weeks ago, but then we sent you out there to DeSoto. So what we will see here is now when we have already the slides basically running through behind us, if we can get that started. So we're gonna go through the entire slides that we have a chance to talk about today. So you will see in the background what we will talk about. But while these run through and give you a certain clue already, we wanna talk about the general scope of what we're doing here. So, Martin, please share with us these few weeks into the semester and what was on your mind during that. Yeah, but first of all, we were talking about a housing belonging and Martin asked us to develop a study about any tropical area. Of course, it was very clear that the right area was to talk here about Lahaina, about what happened and what's still happening in Maui. And the first approach was in a very simple way to say, okay, what is happening there, what was happening there before and what is happening there now. And the first thing is that there were many things as we see in this slide, we will talk about it later is that in Lahaina there were many things going on before the fires and these things are mainly related, of course, to the territory, to the geography, agriculture, tourism also in Lahaina, but also about people. And we started to think and with you, Martin, about what can and could be in our conceptual and as well in a very pragmatic way, the future development of what will be done in Lahaina. The idea that we developed is this structure that is touching as less as possible the ground, learning from the Tungkuan development. This is in China, this is a vernacular architecture which is what I think architecture should be, how architecture should be done in the future on which people live under the ground. So the idea is very simple, is to generate a new, a second ground floor, to think about what is happening in the real ground floor as one level and then a second ground floor on top of it. And we can talk about it a little bit later. The tree structure have proven along history in modernism, in vernacular architecture, in nature to be a very, let's say, intelligent way of developing. And this proposal is basically to develop trees, develop these kind of tree-shaped structures that can hold, as we see in this slide on the bottom left, a garden on an artificial container and a landscape underneath on which and on top, that on which we can, with this structure, live all around. Different ways of living, different than the most modern ways of living, more vernacular, more attached to ground, more trying to make this old idea of, let's call it the tribe, the community, the life, which is more organic than the more artificial, almost Christian idea of family. And the proposal is to generate a structure that can be lived organically, that can be divided organically from, like in plan, so from the top and in section, so from the side. It is very simple, as you see here is to develop this structure and then to generate modules to provide services, to provide security, to provide the resiliency, to provide accessibility, and then to leave people in an organic way. So here we see how this could be done. We could have units for a small, let's say, family, household, whatever we can, however we can call it, that are composed by one quarter or a half of this new tree structure, or it could be as big as three, four, five, and so on, even for other uses, different than houses because we have proven part of the success of Lohaine is that there is people living there and actually now that I am in Detroit, but we can talk about that later. The proposal is to develop a wooden structure that, again, has proven to be very, very resistant and very resilient, even if this is, of course, is something that scares us a little bit about what, after what happened in Lohaine. And again, in tropical weathers as in tropical, any tropical area in the Pacific and the world, that's in my hometown of Columbia, what we need is a shadow. We need a good shadow, we need ventilation. This project that we can also talk about it later that we developed in Columbia where different strategies for bringing shadow and leave the air pass through and just live under that, no? I am here now talking about urbanism. In the, I was last week in New Orleans, now I am in Detroit, learning a lot and talking about resiliency, about urbanism. This is probably the main theme. Of course, we are all vulnerable as New Orleans was with Katrina, as Lohaine was with the fires as every single community is being now. And I think that we, what we can create with this program of Lohaine is a beautiful example of resiliency. There are communities in my home country that are much more vulnerable on which an event of the Lohaine one or a flood could take the life of thousands and thousands of people. And I think we have to think differently, no? Because modernistic, post-modernistic ways of living cause so many problems. So again, here we see the model of this umbrella structure that again can provide that works as trees and can provide the second floor that provides again shadow to protection against any kind of natural disaster, flooding, fire, earthquakes and so on. And the, is a structure that provides from this, let's say, top-down, on a top-down urbanistic strategy, these elements and then as in the beautiful, I won't call it a house, as in the beautiful duel that we are seeing in this picture. We should leave people live in an organic, abstract vernacular way. That's a very good sort of comprising everything that we've been talking about again in a few weeks. So this is kind of always, you throw things out and then people say, this is rushed. We think at this point, I wanna share that over the weekend I have been invited by, who you know, DeSoto Dennis, my German honorary counsel and we were celebrating our reunification anniversary and we were up in as, you know, kind of pine forest. You can get here high up in the mountains here to get the setting and then having non-alcoholic October fest beer. Is this appropriate to talk about when we talk about the tragedy in Lahaina? It is because I now also have met basically people who got impacted. There were two couples, older couples who have been living in Lahaina since the 70s. They were still there, so they were safe but they also lost everything. And so I should say to you guys, especially to you Martin, they look very much forward to the show because what they want is hope. But they do not, what they don't want is, I asked them about the response that you DeSoto got. You had a lot of rightly so, you know, viewers and clicks, 2000s or something like that but you also got a lot of comments that were as these people I asked them, they were not helpful. They said conspiracy theories are not what we want. It's not what we need because what we need is to move on. And there are people whose job it is to find justice and they need to find out who was all involved and who is certainly also to be in some way taught how to do better next time. But they said for them, you gotta give us hope in terms of providing us with suggestions of how to get back to life in the best possible way. So that's basically what we wanna do here in this show. And from my side, I wanna go back to the slide too quick because the best I can provide to this regards is when I was asked by my hometown, when we were asked by my hometown to make the first decarbonized as we like to call it in these days, we always changed terminology first it was green and then it was sustainable now it's decarbonized. It all wants to mean the same thing to design the first off fossil fuel preschool. There was a pre-existing building that we see at the bottom pictures there. And this building was so run down that kids got sick and they got mold no one died. So they don't get wrong. Any kind of comparison can always only be wrong because it's not the same case. So you have to differentiate and abstract that. But what I try to say is that finding out who was responsible for the kids to get sick might it have been deferred maintenance, might it have been the owner, might it have been some roof contractor, might it have been whatever, right? We could not wait for that to be found out to rebuild the building, to build a new building to then heal the kids. And we see on the slide three, we see that was the attempt to do. So this is a building now. We should also not forget to say we have the war against Israel in big times on top of everything else that we already have the war and the Ukraine, the war and so many parts of the world. We got the war on climate. We got all of that and we get more and it's not stopping. This project here can give hope as well because this is saving the world as far as climate to be off the grid. And next slide, probably equally important if not more important than these days. It's also trying to save the world as far as securing peace because the director of the school who we saw on the previous slide sitting there on the floor is having, in 15, she got a lot of immigrants from Syria at that point. In the last year when I revisited, I always go back every year if she had lots of them from the Ukraine and she has, as you see in the picture, you see a borka there that's a teacher. So you got the United Nations there living that whenever there is an argument about, oh, I'm better than you. She says, no, let's sit down and discuss this. And they come out with a compromise. So they for me, Ms. Savitsa is the director's name. She's my hero because she is practicing climate peace and people's peace right there in the smallest unit. So yes, architecture can have the power, although it might be small and your project, I believe, and that's why we're here to discuss that, can have the same powerful impact on, again, having the other experts parallel to us figuring out what we can learn from it, from a jurisdictional point, from an organizational, from an energy point of view, us Europeans, of course, it's easy for us. We've been, I guess, getting too arrogant over the times and saying, oh, why don't you put utility under the ground? That's how we've been doing it forever, versus Americans still seem to be on the wagon train thing and putting the wooden poles up there and then forget about it, right? But so let everyone in their capacities and in their areas basically trying to do the best. And so that's what we're doing here. And you can see the solo in many of the show quotes, Martin was building his hypothesis upon many of your examinations. And the slide eight maybe we go back to because you just made us throw this in last night. So let's go there and have you explain why the solo. Well, there are several reasons. Obviously, being the historian, I always am looking back to the past to see what worked, what didn't, what do we wanna repeat, what do we wanna restore, things like that. Excuse me. And I think that this is the perfect opportunity to bring up. And I know Martin already in some of the slides that I've seen has addressed this, but the natural environment where behind it is located has been altered a great deal by people over time, over centuries, because the Hawaiian started to do it before the Westerners came here and outside people began to change things as well. And one of the things that when Polynesians came to the Hawaiian islands, they brought particular plants with them to help them survive. And one of the plants that they brought was this, this is Ulu, this is the breadfruit, which has grown throughout the tropical areas of the entire world. And not only is this an important source of food, but it also is a beautiful plant, a beautiful tree of itself, aesthetically beautiful, and it also provides food. Lahaina in the 19th century was known for its extensive growths of Ulu trees. So Hawaiians had already grown, were already altering the environment to not only survive there, but also to cut the effects of the sun. Lahaina, the name Lahaina means the cruel sun, meaning that Hawaiians always acknowledged that this is a very sunny, very hot and dry area. The more trees you have, the more you are reducing temperatures. And Martina already mentioned that shade is very important as part of the things that you wanna create there. But I also wanna say, this is something I've said in the previous shows that I've done and this talks to something that you just said, Martin, the regrowth of plants, the regrowth of trees, the regrowth of greenery. And let's go to the next slide because this really illustrates what we're talking about here. That regrowth of greenery is also something that's very important for hope, for people. And one of the things that's been brought up a lot has been the regrowth of the large banyan tree in the center of Lahaina. And that's what that small picture is at the top. That banyan tree was badly damaged by the fire, but it did in fact survive and it has in fact regrown. Well, in the three photographs at the bottom of this slide, we see Lahaina before the fire, we see Lahaina after the fire, and we see Lahaina as its potential future self, meaning that with the situation or with what Martin has just proposed in terms of its redevelopment, you turn Lahaina into a solid canopy of green through what he's proposing. And again, not only is this more pleasant for people to live in, not only does it provide shade and comfort, coolness, increased humidity from the tree, giving off the trees, giving off water, all that makes life more appealing and more pleasant for people, but it's also a source of food, as was said, if we are growing fruit trees. But again, the mental benefits of being around greenery, the mental benefits of being around plants are also part of it. And the regrowth through the replanting of trees, again, it's very important for people to have hope because the simple site of new greenery growing is something which is uplifting in what is now a barren, burned out environment of ash that's gray and black and brown to reassert greenery to restore growth is something which is gonna be mentally very healing for people. So I think there are emotional and mental benefits as well as physical benefits to what's being proposed. Yeah, can we go back to the previous slide one more time because I wanna throw in one thing that I thought I cannot hide because it just popped up on my phone looking at why news now, news on my phone, because there's ethics, right? I mean, there's aesthetics, mostly people think we're all about aesthetics, right? But Masimalano Fuxa is in around the turn of the millennium was at the Biennale and I know Martin you're also interested and affiliated with in various ways was talking about aesthetics and ethics and ethics and aesthetics. So right now, while the audience might say, well, you are sitting comfortably in your spaces and places and we are out there and are vulnerable to be evicted, being kicked out of the hotels that you said the sort of rightly so we're good to have but now they're kicked out, which is not good to have or now the dark side of capitalism picks in as we see here as people take advantage of people's pain and tragedy and rip them off with $3,000 for a studio, right? So that is highly unethical. That needs to stop. And I think we should talk about your proposal and Martin and wanna pick your brain on that one. Also, we always get Stanley Chang's newsletter just before the shows. I really don't, I send it to you but I did not give you, he does not give us time to, maybe I should ask him to send it an hour early or a day earlier so we can really take it in, you know but he was sharing a project that afforded to you. I said, well meant but wrongly done, which is again and I think you point on without shame, Martin called it the Christian way. This kind of hermiticizing way and taking advantage for your own benefit for your own profit. So let's talk a little bit more, maybe along the slide of maybe 17 we bring in, we bring back about that sort of socially ethical aspect of it, Martin. Can we pick your brain a little bit more on that one? Yeah, I mean, we have the, we have here again an amazing opportunity, you know and the diagram is very simple, you know the diagram is just a structure and a service unit. So it is almost, I have in other moments developed projects with this idea is just providing the only basic needs that architecture can provide which is a roof, so again a shadow and services. This is almost a camp, so we can do it in a more permanent way and I mean think about it for being permanent, which I think it should be. Or we can also do it very fast. This could be built in three days. It is a prefab structure that could be built and could cause people very, very rapidly. And then the hammer piece is the simple symbol of this, let's call it provisional readymade shelter. As it happens, one of the things I arrived very recently to Hawaii, flying from Columbia that have a lot of similarities and probably this is my research about but this is another discussion is how people pop up huge super complex structures on the beach every day, every weekend. So tents, barbecues, generators, chairs, hammocks and they build a habitat and then they dismantle. And this is beautiful because we can start living like that, we can find new ways. I mean, we talk now about digital nomads. Tourism is that, tourism is just to arrive to get provisional belonging to a place and then to live on someone else's fields of belonging on this plate. But why don't you think about an architecture that can be adapted to that? Absolutely, and then there are only two minutes left and we're going to continue next week because this is too exciting. But I think we want to make clear again to all the suspicious conspiracy people out there that we might still have. We are not smart city supporters, although we think, Lahaina was actually in many ways already pretty smart and it was a smart city. You just should have been taking the cars out and so there is nothing to actually make smarter because it was inherently already smart and maybe yes in the tectonics as Yuda Soto pointed out last time, you said wood as stick frame construction was okay back then because we had the cash crop side effect of plantations that kept everything relatively moist and wet. So it was okay for that. But once I was the witness with one of your colleagues, Martin, who on the side was doing charter helicopter flight for tourists and had a German one and he got me in as a translator and I saw the last chimney smoking of basically the sugarcane cash crop and that was it and after that things dried up so we have to rethink. So from next week we're going to explain again why in the world are we proposing here wood again which one might say based on your observation the Soto that might have been a no go and we move on to other things but as you perfectly said, Martin, things are not and they shouldn't be overly simplified. They are very complex but we can achieve basically a very satisfying solution out of a very complex kind of an addressing. So with that, we're done for today and we look forward to much more because there's so much exciting stuff here to talk about so thank you again for having been with us. Thank you Martin, thank you to Soto. See you guys all back next week and until then I guess as we just contemplated about stay aesthetically ethical, ethically aesthetical. Bye bye. Bye.