 Welcome back to Fintech-wise Human-Humane Architecture, this is the 271st episode. And thanks to you, Eric, you're going to show us which accumulated viewer you are. Yes, Martin. Humane architecture is up to 14,620 views. All right, and we is our tripartite team here, comprised of two of us from our main island in Oahu, Honolulu, Hawaii, the city. And that's you, the Soto in your Bishop Museum, hi, the Soto. Good morning, everybody, or good day, everyone. And that's me and the Waikiki Grant. And from our main land, which is the Festland, as we call it in German. And I never reflected on that, Matt, because that's you, Matt Noblets, back in your... I was about to say Detroit, Michigan, now I'm getting confused, right? In Boston, Massachusetts, because you're always all over the place. Welcome back, Matt. No, I'm in Boston. All right, and you met our Boston-Banish booster that some of us think we might urgently need here back in Honolulu. So let's get the first slide up. And as promised, we're only going to have one slide of the weekly architectural criticism. This gets us back to our kakaako that we stopped with last week. And we see an aerial view, bird's-eye view of the same thing at the top left, which I'm going to conclude my observation from last week, doesn't make it better. It's still, or increasingly reminds me of the Stalinanliy-slash-Karl Marxanliy called now by Henselman, the architect, back in these GDR days, with his big boulevard and some rather frightening Einschüchtern, as the German word, makes you feel little human scale in between. And I mean, that's my, as of now, observation. And we promised, again, you guys will, because as fair as you are, say don't judge a book by the cover, but we got a closer cover page of the first architecture that they're unveiling. And that's by Kamehameha School. And that is in this aerial view at the bottom right of the rendered in green. You go figure animation there. And it's then shown as a rendering at the bottom left. We also threw in some numbers here and some analogies to what the Soto, UNI, wherever we get tired about architecture. And when we see stuff like that, that happens a lot increasingly, we take a break, our little yoga, relaxing, decompressing is going to vehicles, to mobility, comparing it to immobility, which is buildings. And here's the comparison. And now we talked about that our island seems to be dominated by Camry's and Corolla's as that supposedly were free, free cars. They're pretty nondescript and Toyota decides to over, to redo their style every other year to adjust it to the newest trends and supposedly demand and taste of the customer. And they become so much the same. They look all little different, but not really much, right? In architecture, we said they have an undercut here or there, but they're pretty much of the same species. Yeah, and thanks, Eric. And I crossed out the, because this is not a Corolla or Camry, this is a Prius, which is generally the better direction electric, but these buildings don't even have the equivalent of an electric engine in there, right? Because there's still fossil fuel. So what I'm missing is next to it to the left when the Honda inside came out, which is the one on the very left, that was at least showing you, okay, I'm sort of different. I'm streamlined. I might have a new technology under my body. And so, yeah, the architecture doesn't do that. And remembering the soda you read to us last time, what word bitch they use and which word. And one was one princess. I think that's the building sort of in the back of their rendering at the bottom left. And the one at the front is their torch. So I mean, what again, what does this have to do with the problems? We just got Senator Chang's timely newsletter. I glimpsed through it. It's all the major headline is like, although sales have fallen, prices are still up. So how is this helping us? And we put the price tag here, right? We have from their website studios are around 300,000, one bedroom, 500, two bedroom, 600, three bedroom, 700. That might be like, okay, some say, okay, I can secure myself a unit and then I'm safe. But it's like with the Corollas, right? And with the Camrys, I'm sort of free, right? Because I'm still stuck in traffic. I'm still having high gas builds. I'm still having high, so it's kind of a worry free. Is that, I mean, I leave it with that from my side. Oh, one more thing. The show quote at the center then is the project on state land right next to it or behind it. And so one is Kamehameha school. The other one is state. And they're both like your legacy, the soda, right? So I'm hopefully enough provocation to get out of you what you think about it and you met as well, please. Well, as I said last week, there's a difference between a very grand open space and a small cozy space. And you did just mention earlier, very large open spaces in some cases, feel exhilarating and freeing, but in other cases, you feel small and insignificant and they are difficult to traverse because they're large paved expanses. So what is gonna happen between these buildings? Is it gonna be another Stalin Alley as in East Berlin? Or is it gonna be something more livable or something more desirable or something that's more attractive to make you wanna go there? We're just gonna have to wait and see. But I also did wanna add too, when you were talking about buying into this and you're now free because you have your condo and you have your Corolla or your Toyota in general, you've also got monthly condo fees that are not insignificant. So it's not as though you're off the hook once you've paid for your condo, you will pay forever for your condo. So, yeah. As you have when you buy your new car, you likely have car payments, right? Yeah, that's right. They end, you do come to an end theoretically, but you'll never stop paying your condo association fee. Yeah, and that's like the cultural side. There's also a climatic side. And I mean, the Karl Marx Alley as they more correctly, I guess, try and call it the former Stalin Alley, right? Right now we're heading winter again, right? So what we, you know, there was a little relief if you can even say so, because in war there is no such thing as relief, but at least, you know, you didn't have to worry about being, you know, killed by weapons. You didn't have to worry about killed by a frostbite, which is coming now in the Ukraine again. So buildings that still have fenestrations, at least, you know, keep you from that. But that is the architecture is wall architecture that we don't need here. And the torch, you know, might come in handy over there because it keeps you warm. But I have no idea. I can only imagine, and I'm really scared to have these men almost traumatizing us postmodern, us being the children of the end of postmodern architectural education, that what they think this has to do with a torch is the top of it, where it's sort of like getting lighter. And that's where the flame happens. But this sort of, this reminds us of, this is Stanford Carr, by the way. He's building pretty close to that where it wears this Kamehameha like top thing that does nothing else but covering AC. So this is like the worst postmodernism that, you know, should have been over about half a century ago, I believe. Okay. There we are. Let's maybe turn from the dark to the bright because the second part of this page here gets us our spirit back up because there's a car I used to refer to your guys architecture met, which is the Uptara, which is shooting for what Musk, we believe, conveniently was not doing, shooting as far as to say, I want to make a car that never has to see not even an electric charging station. And that's what the Uptara tries to shoot for. So this is driven by performance, which you guys do. And then it generates a form. And that sort of is, that form is pleasant because it's derived by natural forces. And so as the architecture, again, top right, an example, because we don't want to compare, you know, apples with oranges because we're in residential architecture, the gensign that we're going to reconnect to is an office building. But top right is your Marco Polo Tower, that your former partner Martin Haas invited me to see and we checked out under construction, obviously. And you might now say, okay, this is, I put that in all fairness, the price text there too. And it's even more expensive. It's high-end as luxury, which the other one doesn't claim, doesn't even claim. It says it's for the workforce. So this is more for the ones who have made it. But I have to say, and I should have quoted, and you guys should look it up. Even on Realtors website, they really sell it not just by surface, by substance and by biochromatic substance. You really get something for the buck. And for example, to make us jealous, you get an awesome lanai all the way across it that you can use for the few months of summer when it's nice and the little bit of spring and fall. Which, you know, that is what the torch should be. The torch should be that. So I would almost like to switch that, although I don't wanna, you know, smother my nice neighboring, you know, big city from my, away from my hometown of Hanover. Because even, you know, there, I don't wanna see that torch. That torch is just quite ugly, I'm sorry to say. So anyways, what else do you have to chip in now, Matt, that I provoke you with this analogy of a Tara and the Marco Polo Tower? No, it's interesting. I mean, Marco Polo is also interesting because really every one of those balconies or those lanais are unique at each floor. So I mean, this was obviously targeting a very, a rather high end, at one point, those are the most expensive apartments in Europe. But for that, I think you also, you got a very, there was a unique experience, you know, spatially associated with each unit. It did have a rather friendly posture towards the climate in terms of natural ventilation, possibility, I mean, all of the glass walls open up. You could kind of naturally ventilate the unit. It did have a cooling for the summer months, but it was a solar powered cooling system from the roof. So also, you know, relatively sustainable for those spaces that needed it. It's a different approach, right? It's just a fundamentally different way of approaching a building project. And I think in all fairness, we should compare it and we can still do this in the future to dedicate the slide to it. I think the one pairing it to and comparing it to is the Anaha by Howard Hughes and Kakaago because that's exactly the same market. This is high end residential and they both have funky, fancy forms, right? They're both sort of hula dancing, swoopy, curvy. The big difference is one is driven by performance by biochromatic performance. That is the Marco Polo Tower. The other is driven by surfacial extravaganza, right? And with a high price tag of hermetic fossil fueled, thousands of dollars you have to spend for burning fossil fuel to keep it cool inside. And add that to it, right? We all know that and remind the generation that at the end of its life cycle, the resulting building cost is eight times as much as the initial erection cost. And that is due to maintenance and heating and cooling. So Marco Polo gets cheaper over time because of the natural systems and Anaha gets more expensive. That's the additional strategy of that. Let me ask a question as a lay person that may be stupid but it's relevant. If you are constructing a building, is it cheaper to make everything the same? Now, say it's poured in place concrete, you're gonna have to create the forms for every one of the concrete pours that you do. Is it actually more expensive to create, as you just said, math, a different concrete pour on every floor because all of them are different? Is there actually a difference in cost? And if so, why? Because you're just doing the same amount of work, right? It's a complicated question. I think in the case of Marco Polo, the ballast trades on the outside, to pour the slabs in a different shape, I mean, they have to go up there and build them anyway. So I would say that's negligible. The ballast trades are precast concrete, which we actually kind of figured out a system to reuse shapes by rotating them and shifting them around so that the overall impression as you go around the building is one of variation, but it's all made up of rather systematic kind of pieces and parts. But no, I mean, definitely we're in a different place than we were 20 years ago with computerized fabrication. It used to be that a guy had to go out or a woman had to go out and lay out a whole jig for each individual shape that you wanted to build. And now you send basically a roboticized plasma cutter out and it does whatever you want it to do. It doesn't really, it doesn't care whether it goes left or right or up or down. Yeah, and just to further prove to Soto that this was, there's always a very smart question. I refer to that last piece that we haven't talked about that traces back to a discussion we had before with you, Matt, that you said, why aren't there nothing but electric vehicles on this island because nowhere are the conditions as ideal for it. And I say one, there are only convertibles and you put the two together, every nature has its beasts. And so here this article, which I read, I found interesting was the fact that there aren't very many electric fueled convertibles is because the battery is heavy and at the middle and supposedly below the passenger or the driver, so in case of a flipping over which you just Soto have, you know, experienced, having been on the Star Advertiser title page with your beetle from way back, then this battery could crush you. But at the same time, this is less likely to happen because your gravity point is lower because there's more weight on that car. So it kind of goes both ways. But again, this is like, if you're thinking as you like to say this Soto out of the box which is here literally and figuratively speaking with the appara, you know, you got pros and cons but that's what evolution is about, right? I mean, we're now shooting people back on the moon, right? Although we had some tragic experiences, right? We're still doing it because there might be, you know, it might be worth it. There might be more to discover. So you're still, you're taking up the risk. Okay, so that being said, and again, while your Gentzheim building next slide is in another climate zone and another culture but we want to remind the audience that the principles of biochromatic designs are universal. You then just have to adjust that to the very specificities of where you are. And this is a temperate climate. So we're kicking back in what we've been talking about last time. And I always say to the emerging generation and that's only true for innovative architecture for reactionary not, because I say if there's one drawing you should choose. If you can only choose one drawing, I always suggest the section. But if it's like a Stalin Ali double loaded corridor, that's as boring, you know, in section as it is in plan and in reality. But with really cool, literally, and figuratively speaking architecture, you know, that is why you guys are so high on sections, right? Matt? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think also from the perspective, from the perspective of understanding the sustainable qualities of the space, you know, the section is always a very informative drawing and tells you, you know, kind of how, because a lot of those, a lot of the things that we're concerned with, light and air movement are deeply dependent on the kind of vertical aspect of the building. So yeah. So explain us what we see. So these are just some, these are some rather early kind of, almost collages on the right and more of a kind of a hand sketch on the left of this internal atrium, which really evolved because the master plan for the area that this building was built in in Kendall Square in Cambridge here in Boston was extraordinarily deep floor plates. I mean, most developers in Boston and on the East Coast insist on, you know, floor plates that are no less than about 40,000 square feet, which is a massive amount of horizontal area to be able to daylight or naturally ventilate if that's what you're trying to do. And so what we proposed here was to kind of punch a hole through the middle of that and add a couple of stories on top of the building in order to replace the loft square footage with the goal being to drive natural daylight down through the center of this building using as many techniques as we knew how to use. So one of them is the actual dimensional characteristic of the space. Another are the heliostats that are mounted on the roof which are basically sun tracking mirrors that reflect the light down. There's a sun tracking mirror that reflects the light to a fixed mirror, which then reflects it down into the space. And then within the space itself, there are vertical lamella that rotate and sort of animate the light at every floor, flanking the elevator shaft. There are lighting fixtures that are configured in such a way as to sort of also, they have a kind of a reflective component that works also with the daylight. And then there's this chandelier in the middle which kind of animates the whole thing, this prismatic chandelier which kind of turns the whole thing into a very dynamic experience. So the goal here was really to try to, was really a reaction against a poor planning decision relative to the sort of the building dimensions and to show how you could manage a building with those kind of perimeter dimensions. And I just wanna add that this is, as I said before, actually a very old technique that was developed for modern buildings of the late 1800s and the 1890s. And Bishop Museum's Hawaiian Hall uses this exact same technique, not because of, well, more by necessity because they didn't have electricity yet. So the only way you could light interiors was by opening up the center in an atrium and then putting in skylights and windows. It's not a new thing. Even though it seems new, it's not. No, and a lot of, I mean, to your point, DeSoto, a lot of the things that we advocate for today and that we sort of try to get people to pay attention to are really, as you said, they're not new ideas. The only, the problem is that technology, building technology has basically allowed us to ignore things that we knew intuitively many years ago, right? So cheap energy has allowed us to basically over cool or just to cool buildings without really having to pay attention to how much, to natural ventilation, electric lighting and all of the bells and whistles that come with that allow us to ignore daylight. But all of those come with a huge energy penalty that we haven't ever really had to pay for yet. Yeah, and listening to you, this could mean like, okay, I go back to the cave, I go back to the good old principles and I abandon technology at all, but you guys don't do, you do the opposite. You're saying we embracing technology of our times, the most innovative ones, which is not fossil. Fossil actually has never really been innovative. And so we're, and go to the next slide for that. We're really embracing the best of these days as these heliosteads here that we see there. They're really high tech and they're legitimate because they help us to save energy overall. And that's why high tech is very legitimate in this case here. And again, Boston is just like in Germany called winters, you know, dark long days where really you need, you know, you need natural daylight to thrive. I would say also that the technology though in our cases, it's not, it comes after the first principles, right? I think we don't, we're not really interested in technology for technology's sake, but you know, something like this is only augmenting a building that would already be, I think more inhabitable than, you know, a business as usual kind of offices were played. Yeah. Matt, how do they work? Explain just basically how they work. So if you look at that kind of sectional diagram right there, yeah, you see these kind of, this is now this is just architects drawing stuff, but I mean, conceptually those yellow stripes coming in from the upper right down to the lower left are hitting those mirrors. Those are the tracking mirrors there. And so those are positioned and they rotate around their vertical axis and also, you know, relative to the plane of the earth and they're programmed to basically track the sun. So they, you know, we know exactly where the sun is going to be at every hour of every day of every year. And so they simply rotate and they catch the sun at an angle, which allows them to then reflect that light over to on the right-hand side, that fixed mirror, which is the one that's kind of angled downwards. And then that reflects the light down angle of incidence equals angle of reflection, right? So that 90 degree bend then in the light, it's off the second mirror goes through the skylights and then into the building. And during the summer, do they not function? Do you turn them away or do you want the light coming in regardless? And does that cause more heat? You do, I mean, there is a concern there. You don't, I mean, I think it would be worse if it's direct light, since this is reflected light, you're already, I mean, there's a sort of a degradation of the radiant energy. But there is a, I mean, there is a, there are filters, you can see these kind of mat or these kind of, this is kind of a glass tile that can be rotated shut to just filter that light and knock down some of the, any of the heat energy. But since this is a very tall space, most of that heat energy gets kind of trapped in the upper part of the building, the upper part of the atrium above those glass tiles and can be evacuated out without making it uncomfortable for people inside the building. Yeah, heading towards the end of another exciting 28 minutes. Still give us the next slide, which illustrates why in the world would this have, would be interesting for us in Hawaii, so far away, such a different, because again, you need to go out in the world, understand, experience different climate zones. And this is what these two young gentlemen's who are recent graduates of our school, Chris and Siraj have been doing. They were part of the Copenhagen exchange and they came over to Hanover and check out Met Your Guys project there. And there you go. And again, with the cars, we drove there with our old little Twingo and then they were excited to see the evolution of that which is the Twizy, the Twingo is a fossil car, but a very fuel efficient one, but then Renault went the next step to go to an all-electric car. And a reference which we made before this photo at the top right, there is this island, another volcanic island as part of the Canary Islands where we had a big eruption, similar to the ones on the big island recently and we periodically reflect on that. The difference is that this island made itself off the grid with hydroelectric power, high-tech as we're talking about and favoring a post-fossil life and they only allow electric cars on the island, predominantly the Twizy. And next slide, we should wanna end on saying hi from Joey and Clara who had just been in Bali and pretty much said, oh my God, this is as screwed up as in Hawaii with all this traffic, all this consumption, consumerism and they escaped to these ghillie islands which are between Lombok and Bali and here you go, it's car-free, it's bicycle-based and it works and people then will say, I already hear them will say, well, that only works on that small scale. No, sorry, I just said where Siraj and Chris were is Copenhagen, that is not small, that is big as big as Honolulu and it works there too. So with that, we're at the end of the show. This was by the way our Thanksgiving show so I'll be thankful for being able to give and see you next week. And until then, please stay a reciprocal altruist. See you guys all. Bye everybody. 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 and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.