 Okay, we're back. We're live. It's Monday morning. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. Hooray! And we're broadcasting from our 3.1 studio at Suite 603 in the Finance Factors Center downtown. We are so happy to be here. Thank you, Eric, for spending the weekend putting this thing together. Okay, anyway, today we have a show on architecture. We're calling you to ThinkTech Tech Talks. Are we? And that means we're going to talk, make that community matters, community matters. We're going to talk about architecture. We're going to talk about a new arrival, who is joining the faculty at the School of Architecture on University Avenue at UH Manoa. His name is Kevin Newts. Hi, Kevin. Hi, Jenny. I'm honored to be your first guest. I hope we set a new low level to live down through here. I warn you in advance, Kevin, has a very sharp sense of humor, which is a good thing. We want that in order. It is an acquired taste, Jay, that a lot of people never acquire. So tell me, what is it? This is my first question for you, Kevin. Why did you come here to the land of Aloha, a stensible Aloha? That is a long story, and I wish you told me that before. To cut a long story short, I suppose, Jay, I've been wanting to come here probably for the last 20 years. My research relates Japan and its traditional architecture with contemporary non-Japanese societies. So I wrote a book about Frank Lloyd Wright in Japan, for example, longer ago than I mentioned. So even though I'm not from this part of the world, I've been looking at sort of trans-specific relationships for most of my professional career. So this was an obvious place. It was the closest that I could get to being in Japan without actually having to speak Japanese. I spent a lot of time in Japan. I taught there a lot of my research in Tokyo. Then I spent the best part of 20 years at the University of Oregon, which I thought was the closest I was ever going to get to Japan, and then an opening opened up here at Manoa. So here I am, but this is the place that I've been trying to get to for a very long time. Well, congratulations on that, Kevin. It was a worthy, it was something out of the Bible. You wait X number of years and finally it happens. Good for you. Frank Lloyd Wright had a presence in Japan in Tokyo. As a matter of fact, my wife and I, in our last trip, we stayed at the Frank Lloyd Wright Hotel there in downtown Tokyo, I guess it was near the Ginza, I guess. Can you talk about that hotel? Well, the hotel that you would have stayed at if this was in the last 40 years, Jay, it's in the same location as Wright's old Imperial Hotel, but the Imperial itself, the Frank Lloyd Wright building sadly was demolished in 1968. So there is a small exhibit in the lobby, but Wright's Hotel was a much more modest three-story affair. If you want to see the original lobby, though, it is preserved in the Meiji Mura Museum over near Nagoya. So, yeah, that hotel, it was on such expensive land that in the end, and it was decaying, that they had to demolish it, unfortunately. Not too bad. But Frank Lloyd Wright had a presence, I guess, in Japan. Can you talk about that? Yeah, right. He, for most of his early career, was under the influence of Louis Sullivan, the famous architect who helped to develop the high-rise office building in Chicago, and they were of the same opinion that America, or at the end of the 19th century, just stopped copying the old world architecturally and looked to develop its own unique architecture. So Wright rejected, Daniel Burnham was the big wheel in architectural circles at the time, and he apparently, according to Wright, offered him a free, all-expenses-paid trip around Europe, and Wright, in his autobiography at least, said that he rejected that. He said it was already too late. But his first passport took him to Japan, which was extremely unusual in 1905. So the irony is that in developing this new, quote, American aesthetic, not entirely, but a significant portion of that actually came from another remote source from the opposite direction, Japan, both building forms, not superficially, but also, and more importantly, a sort of philosophical attitude to the use of materials rather than direct copying of traditional Japanese built forms. With all of that, with your training in architecture in the UK and your experience in Asia, not only Japan, but Hong Kong, wasn't it? You've seen a lot. You've seen, I don't want to say eclectic, but you've seen a lot of sources of design, and you put that together and then you arrive in Hawaii. So, you know, it passed over the holiday in the spring. They always asked the question, why is this night different from all other nights? So Kevin, I ask you your question. Why is this architect different from all other architects? What is the special source about you, Kevin? Well, first of all, I wouldn't call myself an architect because I'm not licensed. I had a choice to be licensed, so I would go off and do research, and it took me a nanosecond to decide that I could make a bigger contribution through research and teaching than in practice. I would have been the world's worst practitioner probably. We'd like to have very classy guests on our show, Kevin. So, well, knowing your limits, I think is a gift, you know. So, you know, there are so many better people at practice out there than me, who have the patience to deal with clients and all the other myriad of things. And I feel that my contribution, if I'm going to make one to architecture, is in research and teaching, which is what I've been doing. So, but in terms of what I do that's different, well, I wouldn't say it's entirely unique, but I have a particular take on Japan, I suppose, that I'm not your typical Japan scholar, who are often interested in what is unique about that culture. And it is, in many respects, unique and fascinating, and I spend a lot of time, my daughter is half Japanese, I'm well connected to that culture. But I'll never be a Japanese, nor do I wish to be. And, you know, don't get that me wrong, you know, it's just that culturally, I'm still English and a little bit American. But I believe strongly that there are characteristics in Japan's traditional architecture in particular that transcend culture, that go deeper. And I think that they understood some things about what it is to be a human being, that architects anywhere would do well to understand. As a student of architecture, I used to bleep that, you know, the public knew nothing about architecture. And of course, it's completely the wrong way around that architects actually need to understand more about or remember more about what it is to be a human being. So that's kind of, I think, what I bring, that may be unusual, is that I'm more interested in people and what unites us than in the things, you know, that obviously are important, that make cultures and individuals unique. But I'm very interested in things that transcend culture. So that's what I've been looking at for in terms of the work on Japan. And it actually, the work that I did most recently, published most recently, Naturally Animated Architecture, started in Japan, not intentionally, but that's where the first thread picked up. That was a culture that seemed to have a greater sensitivity, not unique, but maybe unique in degree, but not qualitatively, in the natural environment. It's a kind of cliche that that culture is close to nature. So I was inspired to write the most recent book, The Naturally Animated Architecture. My examples that I was seeing around me in Japan, which I wasn't seeing elsewhere, and yet they resonated with me. And I thought, wow, this is something that everybody should be aware of. It can't be just me. So that's how, that's where I am today, Jay, with with the current work. Yeah. Is it like anime? Well, the only similarity would be the word animation. And I hesitated to use that word because I thought it would be misunderstood. What I mean by animation is simply perceptible movement. So our distant ancestors would have spent the vast majority of their lives outdoors in a constantly changing natural environment. And as a result, they evolved to become dependent on contact with nature, and particularly perceptible change to keep them alert. And this is sort of a survival instinct. And we are physiologically, some of us more than others, you know, 99.9% unchanged from from our distant, you know, Stone Age ancestors. And yet, according to the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, most Americans, for example, now spend well over 90% of their lives indoors. And most indoor environments lack two critical characteristics that we require for long term well being contact with nature and perceptible change. And if you look around you, in most of the indoor environments that I use on a daily basis, then there's no nature. And there's no natural change. Any changes is going to be artificial. So that's what I've been looking at in naturally animated is to say, well, there's this problem. A lack of contact with nature has been plenty of research showing that we need that. This is why we take hikes at the weekend. This is why we bring plants into our apartments and cats and fish and all those things. You know, this is the moment. South medication. But I've been looking at a more available source than if many people are not in a position to just get up and take a walk or bring their dog to work or whatever it might be. What do we do for them? You know, can we possibly bring nature to them in a way that would not interfere with their ability to work? You know, if you're working in a factory or in office, it may not be simple. So I've been looking at a source of contact with nature and perceptible change that's pretty much on the present, the weather. And the great thing about the weather is, well, two things. It's a few millimeters away from us, the other side of a piece of glass usually when we're indoors, if we're lucky enough to have a window. And of course, it's famous because it is constantly changing. So in a nutshell, could solve or can solve those two deficiencies of most indoor spaces, lack of contact with nature and lack of perceptible change if we can find a way as designers to bring that natural change from the weather indoors? Oh, you raised so many questions on this. For example, yes, totally, I agree. I get it. Very valuable to connect with nature. And we do so little of that. I mean, in the olden days, a generation ago, people hiked every weekend. I don't think they do that so much anymore. They stay indoors, they study, they read, and they watch the animation of the TV. That's animated, but it's not exactly what you're talking about. So anyway, so windows and nature. But if I live in the middle of a crowded city, I see 40-foot concrete escarpments all around me. They're not animated and they're not nature and not even weather. So how do I see on the other side of that glass? How do I see nature rather than man's insult to nature? Absolutely. So, and it's that person in the sort of notional high-rise, it's stuck in the middle of an open plan office that I have in mind or had in mind when I was looking at this work. I want to bring nature indoors. So we can't control our view. If you've got a great view, lucky you. But most of us don't have control over our neighbors. And so what I've been looking at is trying to bring the movement of the weather, and particularly the sun, the wind and the rain, into indoor spaces. And there are three ways of doing that. One is to enclose that, something that is being affected by one of those elements in courtyards, which is fine if you're building kind of low-rise, new build. But for high-rise, for example, the one that you just, the example you just mentioned, then a more practical method is to use projection of some kind. So sunlight can actually project movement onto translucent surfaces or into a space through a window. So I'll give you an example. I think you can see it. There is a plant on my lanai. If you don't have an lanai, there are other ways of doing it. But that movement can actually be projected. If the sun comes around to that side of the building, the movement of those leaves, the wind-generated movement of that palm, will be projected so that it actually feels like it's indoors in this space with me. And we've been looking at if you don't have an lanai, then can you put something on the exterior of a window, like a screen that moves in the wind that could be a safe replacement that would bring that natural movement of the wind effectively into a high-rise space. Clearly, a lot of office buildings don't have lanais and it may not be practical to put planting out there. But there are things that you can do, screening that doesn't obstruct the view, but moves in the wind and will project shadows and that movement into an indoor space. We talk about sustainability, resilience, we talk about climate change. We talk about extreme weather. We talk about wind all right at 90 miles an hour, that kind of wind. And so how do you do this? How do you expose the individual human being person to the weather and to the nature and let it in on his life without letting extreme weather in on his life? How do you do that? Yeah, it's a great question because most architecture schools, the first class you get is that architecture is shelter and shelter from what? Mostly the elements, too much sun, too much wind, too much rain, etc. So I've spent the last 10 years undermining that, although not. I like to be warm and dry just like anybody else and not too hot. So the key, Jay, is to maintain the envelope of the building, maintain the glass. That envelope, in an extreme wind condition, for example, can stay closed. Now there are situations where you might want to open that up, but you're not going to be naturally ventilating your apartment in a hurricane. So the key thing for me is that not to interfere with the envelope of the building to use remote projection, that sounds terribly sophisticated, but sunlight basically casting shadows in many cases or silhouettes onto translucent surfaces to bring that change apparently indoors without actually undermining the weatherproof envelope of the building. So it's a way of trying to have your cake and eat it, too. So I want to tell you a strange piece of, I don't know if it's architecture or just living circumstance. In the Hawaii Tourism Authorities Convention Center, there are a number of elevators and the elevators have nature scenes painted on them. But beyond that, if you ride the elevator there, you hear just barely perceptible sounds of little birds, birds chirping and chirping. And you say, my God, where did that come from? It sounds like I'm in the forest. It's realistic. So I say to myself in the context of this conversation, why don't I use modern technology to create an environment inside, which has the elements of outside? For example, I mean, you can buy now and at consumer prices some 82-inch television and bigger. And you can put it on your wall and you can put a loop. And we're going to talk about your loops in a minute. We put a loop of forest scenes there and then you can add the birds from the Hawaii Convention Center. And then you've got a pretty good emulation of what it's like to be in the forest. Now, this is not perfect. However, it's better than a 44-discarpment, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. And there's been a lot of work on virtual environments. It's huge growing. I mean, NASA, for example, has been promoting a lot of this because if it's true that we physiologically and psychologically need contact with nature and change, what do you do on a trip to Mars, for example, unless you're going to, how will people not go crazy in that kind of sensorally deprived environment? There's a reason why sensory deprivation is a form of torture because it is. So what I'm arguing is that our buildings or most of our indoor spaces unintentionally subject us to a low-level form of sensory deprivation, which is pretty appalling if you think about it. Nobody intended that, but it is a fact. So to come back to your question about, well, why don't we all do all of this virtually? You can. And we actually tested it with an artificial digital tree. And we have that digital tree set up, projected onto an interior wall. And in one instance, it was being animated by real wind from a sensor outside the building. And in another case, it was being animated, the leaves were being moved according to a mathematical algorithm. And I was absolutely sure that our subjects would be able to tell the difference, that there'd be some magical thing that they would be able to sniff out the natural from the artificial. I was shocked that they were completely unable to differentiate. And this was not very sophisticated software. So with the latest stuff, it's perfectly possible to fool the brain into thinking that it is natural. Here's the kicker, however. When we told them and on truth, we said that the natural one was artificial. First of all, we showed them both and we asked them to assess them. No statistically significant difference in their evaluations. But then when we falsely told them that the natural one was created by an algorithm, their assessments dropped, went right through the floor. And then when we told them falsely that the artificial one was natural, their evaluations went up significantly. So in other words, the mere perception that something is natural or artificial affects its impact on us psychologically. Yeah. So I had an accountant one time, and I asked him what he practiced. And he said he practiced psychiatric accounting. I said, what? Well, you know, there's a lot to do with between psychology and accounting. And I'm wondering, I wanted my next question, Kevin, was going to be, what are you teaching? And the answer might be in part psychiatric architecture. Probably. I prefer to call it experiential. I teach what I'm asked to teach. I teach a lot of history theory, but I also teach design. And even in the courses on theory, experience, human experience is a big deal. Every building, I like to say, ends with somebody walking through a building and experiencing it. So why wouldn't you begin designing it that way? Why would you begin with a plan when nobody ever experiences a building that way? You know, they experience it from their body moving through space, you know. So I encourage students to, and it's not easy to try to envisage how it's going to be, how they want it to be. Now, they're never going to perfectly get that, but a lot of buildings never go through that stage. And then it's no surprise when they're not great experiences because they were never envisaged as an experience to start with. So yeah, if you want to call it psychological, I call it experiential. You know, it's societal too. You know, what turned me on to the notion of public spaces was a talk on C-SPAN by a guy named Michael Kimmelman, who was the architectural critic for the New York Times. And he gave a talk at Yale explaining, and I really hadn't understood this before, is that the health, the nature, the characteristics of a society in general depend in large part on public spaces, because it's an interaction, just as an interaction with government, it's an interaction with, you know, the physical aspect of the community. But where does that fit into your special sauce? Well, I'm dealing with indoor spaces mostly, although they can be public, you know, large buildings have, you know, you talked about the Convention Center, I'm literally, to my right, a couple of hundred yards away from the Convention Center. I was going to joke that the birdsong you could hear, those are the same Java finches that bother me on my they're real. They're in my apartment. I mean, if I had the windows, they'd be in the backdrop to this shot honestly. But so there are public spaces inside buildings. So my, I feel that outdoor spaces by and large can take care of themselves in the narrow confines of what I've been talking about, natural change, etc. The weather is going to make itself felt in those places, whether we want it to or not. So I don't feel that they're, in terms of sensory deprivation, they can be improved. Obviously, you often have, you know, fountains and other elements in those spaces. And there are, there are certainly ways that you can make them more engaging. But the place that I feel that we are seriously deprived is, is those indoor spaces. So I haven't actually got into the Convention Center yet, but I'm told that it is cavernous, absolutely enormous. And I'm curious about whether it's, it's indoor spaces, you know, really do activate, you know, his nature in there because going back to your first question, you know, why am I here? I felt, well, I got confirmation in the first couple of days, you know, I saw like five rainbows and I thought, wow, this is a place where it rains is sunny and windy within, you know, two minutes, it can change from one to the other or one block. So this place, this environment is an incredible environment for the sort of thing that I'm talking about. It's a very perfect connection. Now, we only have a few minutes left, Kevin, and I do want to show one last video we haven't shown. Can you talk about what that is and then we'll show it? Yeah. So this is a sort of compilation, a little abstract from the book Naturally Animated Architecture, which came out in 2008, sorry, 2018. It's both a book and a printed book. The key thing is that it is a, it contains embedded video. You're just starting to see examples then embedded within the pages of the book, both the ebook and you can, on the physical book, you can download an app to play the videos on a smartphone. And this was kind of pretty new a couple of years ago, the combination of embedded video in the page of a book. And these give you some examples of the kind of thing then where the envelope of the building is being maintained. But look at the example we're showing now. These are caustics. You'd see them on the underside of building, underside of bridges and boats most often. But if you set it up right with a surface of water outside a window, you can actually get the wind movement projected into an interior space. So this is what I mean by having a cake and eating it, not undermining the envelope of the building, but bringing the change of the wind, the sun, the rain, effectively indoors without actually necessarily bringing the wind or the rain directly indoors. The example we're looking at is a 500 year example from Kyoto where they're actually using exposing rainwater. And one of the things we've not mentioned, Jay, that I should is that sunlight, wind and rain are the three prime suspects in passive environmental control for buildings, indoor passive environmental control. It's a way of saving energy and saving the planet. So this book deals with both how to improve human being in indoor spaces, but also how to draw attention to things like natural ventilation, passive solar heating, natural day lighting, evaporative cooling and rainwater harvesting, which are known as passive because they don't have moving parts typically. And that's one of the reasons that they don't get much public attention that a lot of these lead buildings, lead is one of the sustainable kind of hallmarks. You'll see it sometimes if you look, you'll see a plaque inside a building, but that's the only evidence that you see. And most members of the public, why would they know? The building really doesn't speak. It doesn't say what it's doing. And I feel very strongly that everybody uses buildings, everybody, you know, works in a building typically or interacts. And yet they are being woefully underused as teachers, things that could actually speak for themselves, start a conversation, somebody says, what is that strange effect? What's that about? It's neat. But that could be the beginning, I hope, of a serious conversation about, well, that's actually saving energy because it means that there's more daylight in here. We don't have to turn the light on. You know, that means we're actually saving the planet. So there's a serious side to this apart from the sort of cool effects, human psychology and the planet. Yeah. Kevin Newt's creativity, animated creativity at UH School of Architecture, making it yet to a greater extent a global school of architecture, a global school of creativity. Thank you so much, Kevin. Great to meet you. Great to have you on the show. I want to do it again. Thanks so much. Thank you, Jay. Thanks for having me. Goodbye. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Kili Akeena, the host of Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii broadcast network. Hawaii Together deals with the problems we face in paradise and looks for solutions, whether it's with the economy, the government or society. We're streamed live on Think Tech biweekly at 2 p.m. on Mondays. I want to thank you so much for watching. We look forward to seeing you. Again, I'm Kili Akeena. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Being a lawyer has many aspects, and I try to cover them every time I do a program of law across the sea. Not everything has to do with law or being a lawyer per se. Some of it has to do with the people you meet, the things you see, the places you visit. And that's what I try to combine in Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Thank you for watching. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's Vegan World, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor, and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is, so do tune in every second Thursday from 1 p.m. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Christine Lenders, a physical therapy specialist and the host of Movement Matters. My show is designed to teach you the simplest and most effective treatment strategies to get you out of pain and back to doing what you love. If you or someone you know is having pain in a certain area of the body, it would like a free assessment in treatment over media or in person, and then come on the show to talk about it. Email us at thinktechmovementmatters at gmail.com. Or if you have a topic you would like to know more about, please email us. My goal is to decrease pain all over the world, inspiring people to take better care of their bodies to enjoy life to the fullest. I look forward to hearing from you. I'm Jay Fidel of Think Tech. You know, we are very concerned about the coronavirus. It's expanding in geographical terms and it's very threatening to the places to which it expands and to humanity in general. It is traveling around the world. We're doing a number of shows on it. We think it's that important. From one end to the other, we're talking to people in various countries and various disciplines, including of course medical disciplines and infectious diseases disciplines, because we want the public to understand, not panic, but understand what's going on and what will go on. This is a dynamic event and it's going to change. It's going to change this spring and it's going to change after that too. One of the things that we're doing is a show with Sarah Park, Dr. Sarah Park. She is in infectious diseases at the Department of Health under Bruce Anderson, the Director of Health. And she's going to come on the show on Friday and she's going to talk about what it means for the state of Hawaii, how far we've gone with it, how many infections we might have or will have and we're going to learn a lot. We'll learn a lot in the future with other shows too. In the meantime, this came to my attention yesterday and it's worth playing for you just to show the level of concern, if not if not rational, then irrational in Hong Kong where people are lining up around the block. You'll see what I mean to get masks, some of which may not be effective in Hong Kong. So here, take a look at this video and see what's happening in Hong Kong and the same kind of thing is happening in other places in Asia. Okay, take a look.