 I want to welcome to the human-humane architecture here on Think Tech OIE. I am this program's co-host, Soto Brown. I'm the Michigan History and we're going to be joined in just a second by Martin Desbang, this program's host who's going to be speaking to us direct from Germany. But in the meantime, if you look in the back of me, there's a fistfight going on there. Violent fistfight, what is that all about? Well, Martin, join us and tell us what the fistfight is about in the background. Well, it's that I'm going to look forward to another crime-prime-time TV evening together, playing pretty much in our capitals of our tropical exotic on the Lulu, Hawaii, and Munich, Germany. Yes. If we can get the first slide up, that will explain more. As we were talking in the last show, both MagnumTi and HawaiiFight all are rebooted. Here are the studios, one in your front yard in Diamond Head and the other one out there at Barber's Point. But in fact, as this slide here shows, both Honolulu and Munich are actually one of the safest cities in our cultures, in our country. So they're kind of making this up, right? Yes. So let's go to the next slide. We want to quickly fly over an update here on a crime show that is playing here, one count over in Rosenheim, which is towards the Alps, just a few miles here. And as the two top-rise slides reference that in HawaiiFight, oh, architecture, especially in the original, from the 60s, architecture has played a very active role. And we're very happy to see, have seen at the sunset at the beach, the season premiere last summer, that they're continuing that because the Kahala Hilton was a major actor. So we're happy to see that. Next slide. Our office home has been an actor in one of the Rosenheim crops features. And so now we have been in there again. And these are the next slides you're going to see. Every other slide is going to be like this one, a screenshot from the show, and then every other one is going to be a picture that our photographer did. But when we talked yesterday, what did you get out of this image here? What do we see this though? And there's your German, your daily German word. Yes, my daily German word. Well, what we see here is traditional Bavarian architecture as you pointed out, which is a stucco wall with a wooden framework, the red geraniums in the window boxes. And the man in the picture, who's one of the actors in the Rosenheim cops show is wearing what you pointed out is a traditional Bavarian jacket, which is called a young cow. I did it right. Very well said. Thank you. And that gentleman is the inspector and he has to stay warm in winter. And by the way, it's still chilly here. And you told me in Denver, too, they had graduation and throwing, making a snowball Yes. So so architecture and people have to stay warm and be sort of heavily dressed. Right. So it's wall architecture and young cow fashion people. That's right. Next slide. While last time it was the office home, this time it was the private residents of our business partner, Isabelle Schlutmann. And here you can see one of the suspects in in that building. Next slide. And and here again, here are the pictures by a photographer where you can see the architecture is pretty clean, clean light. It's more about space than anything else, framed views. And only the inherited family furniture here is is nostalgic, is historic, is sentimental, if you will. So about the good old times, but the architecture is not. The architecture is a modern interpretation of the legacy of the culture. Next picture we again, if you want to know more about we don't have time, we want to spend more time in Honolulu today. But if you want to know more about the building, you watch a show from the previous show, Urban Transcendence, where I will send out my very first summer to be a one man band show man. And so I portrayed the building so you can look into that. So let's just jump quickly over the next sequence of slides here. Next one, here's the main living room. Next phase next next slide. The inspector here in front of the stairs. Next slide that we were using cable instead of anything else to keep it the most clean and the materialized next slide. Here, the investigation going on in that living room. You were asking, what are they doing to prepping for shows? Quite a lot. They were like cleaning out, switching out stuff. That table wasn't in there originally, then the ability to keep it in. They cost some damage. There's a lot of there's a lot going on. You know, it's quite the undertaking next slide here. This is this is the living room facing south. You got that cat out one night, which is shading the glass front. Next slide again, the kitchen is an open kitchen in the back. They didn't walk up, so I threw in a couple of images from my previous show where I will walk you up where I walked you up. And if you want to watch it again, I walk you up. Next slide. And this is one from upstairs. Again, materials left, pure raw, important place, a board from concrete, window frames out of wood. And then again, the old historic furniture nicely sort of being staged in that sort of, you know, wide open, clean space. Next picture. On the exterior, it's been some years since it's been built, so it's been aging. The wood is left untreated. Next slide. You can see how it looked original. This is he treated popular woods. That pool has some evaporative cooling effect in the summertime because hopefully we will get summer soon. Please, please. Next slide. Here is detailing again of the heavy threshold, the facade, and the structure needs to be insulation, and there is a rain screen. Again, thermally modified timber, we continue to suggest for Hawaii as well. We call it the new Hawaii Woods. There's a show about that with Patrick Donahue at the very top right. Next slide. And this is how it looks when it's cold. We don't have snow anymore, but it could be snowy because I think it's one degree below freezing. So if there would be humidity, it could freeze again in mid-May. This is sort of global cooling as our current president foolishly would say. Of course, it's related to global warming. It could be either hot, damn hot or freaking cold. Here, the north facade and the east facade kept very close to not lose heat to minimize the openings. Next slide. And again, this is obviously what we like to talk about. We suggest for any kind of culture and Hawaiian culture in particular is the evolution of the tradition of the necklure and not the mimicking. So next slide. And location is very important. I have to say our project is in the outskirts of Munich. So it's sort of in the Burbs. You can compare it to maybe couple A. And one thing that's similar, there is a light rail station that's been here for a while and that makes it so attractive, especially for younger families who in this equally gentrification problem that we have here, same as in HoloLulu, can't make a living anymore and buy a home with their kids who have a little bit of lawn and so they move out and they buy out the land here. And we probably talk about that in a couple of shows because this is one of the bitter pills. I have to swallow here during my sabbatical because we're currently and, you know, for the last half year and continue three more months. We do an even more than we already do cosmopolitan cultural correspondence. Communication, me being here in my native Germany. So while, you know, this is a suburban community or in the outskirts, all the infrastructure is here. So from a sustainability point of view, it's not quite as bad. However, what is lacking desperately is density. So we make a cut here and I pass it on to you with the next slide because we're going back home to our crime capital, Honolulu. And from here on, I let you talk about a project that has recently been featured in the rebooting of Magnum TI that we see popping up all over the place. And we reference upright tropical tourism expert, Suzanne, here, looking over the guardrail of our classical mid-century piece of Waikiki grand that we reside and then seeing them filming outside of the doors. So which new member to the actors team of architecture are we welcoming to Honolulu, DeSoto? We are welcoming the How-Only Lofts building. This is a brand new building, which opened, I believe, last year. And in this view, which is looking down like a Google view, you can see where the How-Only Lofts are located. They're on How-Only Street, that's the name of the building. They're in the Makkully Moiliili district, and that's bisected by Makkully Street, which has commercial buildings along it. And this particular neighborhood is a remnant of older Honolulu, where there are a lot of single family homes. If you look at these roof lines, you can see that there are a lot of small buildings, but there are apartment buildings. And it's a place that is probably going to see a lot more redevelopment and high rises as we continue through our city's evolution. And why don't we go to our next picture? And now we're going to see, there we are back with Magnum, with the Alamoana building in the background and the old Magnum. And on the top right, the new current Magnum from the Magnum PI show. Looking from the How-Only Lofts building, you can look at the high rises in the distance. But in the foreground, it's still low rise, and there are trees there. One of the things is, there are big windows in this building, and that's a big feature of it. Let's go to the next photograph. So, yeah, and again, the same sequence to sell the ride. We're going to see an operation of screenshots from the show, which was the last picture. And this year, provided by the architect, every other one. Yes. And this was provided by the architect's head post studio. We're going to introduce them more later. Yes. But here we see what we can call a party shot or a money shot done by a professional photographer. This glows so well, because it's taken in the sunset at sunset time. And sunset happens to be a problem in Honolulu. If you're facing west, you're going to be faced. So the architect are introducing a biochromatic device that we, at the very top left, already complimented on in the previous show, where we're talking about these things, pretty much, right? Right. And how three soles can have to shave. Yes. Yes. The building. Exactly. And that is something we've talked about before on this program. But you see these vertical ribs on the side of the building that we're looking at. That is not only a strong element of the way the building looks, which is decorative, if you want to say that, distinctive. But it also provides shade to that side of the building. And one thing we're going to talk about a little bit more is the exterior walkways and exterior stairways of the building. Now, I think this is a place where I can point out that when I first saw these pictures, I thought this was a mid century building that had been rehab. And in fact, no, it is a brand new building. But for various reasons, it resembles those classic buildings of the middle 20th century. And I think we should go to our next picture. And so when we look at this, we see we're seeing the second story of an individual apartment unit. We'll talk about that more in a second, but they're all two stories. Looking out from this top mezzanine level, asked where the woman is sitting at her easel because she's supposed to be a painter in this particular episode. You see those giant windows that we're looking through in the distance. But at the bottom of those windows are jealousies. They are not all fixed windows. And if you look at the top right, you'll see the show that I did with Don Hibbert here on Think Tech Hawaii, which was about jealousies and how popular they were during that mid century period. Next picture. Yeah. And if we if we remember the Google side plan, the architect at Paul's Studio put in something and Bundeskanistekon, who is one of the principals in the firm, is teaching introductory courses at the University of Hawaii School of Architecture. So he teaches what he preaches and he preaches what he teaches and he practices what he teaches and he teaches what he practices. So he put in the north arrow in that plan. So this building is positioned because he usually would take a big glass front or a no go in the tropics. Well, they can be done if you orientate them correctly, which is if you make them face north, they won't overheat and if you allow cross ventilation. And we also another thing that reminds you of mid century is that the type of this building is a single loaded corridor. So he brings back the luxury of this biochromatically perfect typology and with jealousies on both side, you get the cross green. Right. And if you look at this particular view, you'll see the upper part of the window is fixed glass, but the lower part down where the people are is jealousy windows. You can adjust those, but you're also getting the air movement down where you are on the floor. So this is very clearly thought out. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of energy went into figuring out how to do this in the best way possible, which we'll see in just a second. Next picture. So there's our fist fight again. And the fist fight is going on in front of what looks like a solid concrete wall. It is a concrete wall, but unlike what you might think and what I assumed, this is not poured in place, mold form formed concrete with rebar in it. In fact, this is recast concrete panels and Martin, tell us about the company that makes these and where it is. Yeah, the reference is on the top right here. We've done a couple of, you know, references to pretty specific working mountain precasts. Who's out in couple lay again at Campbell Industrial Park. The top notch architectural precast and prefabrication of and that only makes sense because the difference is back in the days of glory, mid-century that we loved so much labor was relatively cheap and material was so you were able to afford, you know, high labor intense poured in place concrete, not so much these days anymore. So if you want to be cost efficient and effective, which is building very much is at a pretty tight budget, you got to go to prefab to make it possible to afford it. Go to the next slide here, bundled and his business partner, Janice Lee, we're providing these construction pictures here and you can see how the big panels, they just got lifted from a truck from a flatbed that was coming over each one and trucking them out, put them on a crane and put them together like a house of cards. Right. So this is the technology that it was that it was implementing. Again, this is an evolution of a tradition because concrete has been done quite a bit and masterfully, you know, I am paid East West center and many others. This is our local material. But again, we have to do it differently these days than we have done in the past. And along these lines, I think we can go to the next slide here, because there's another element here that has a tradition and these are tropical screens that we dedicated to show so that she has a very tough ride. Again, here they were using a similar and this building here is the what was it called on King Street, King Street Center, right? Right. Exactly. The whole building is basically enclosed in the second skin of perforated metal. So Bundit and Janus were taking this as an inspiration and basically using it for the infill of the guardrail that you hear. Right. That you get a certain sort of camouflaging of what's going on behind, but it's porous enough to let our natural AC, the trait went through, right? So again, it's an evolution of tradition on the islands and jumping to the next picture here is showing the building on the right. That is the north facing facade that we're talking about. And on the left picture is its side, one of the two sides. So we again, the building is facing north so you can make the big glass. But these these hallways, again, are serving multiple purposes because, first of all, they're giving access to the unit. But secondly, in the very early morning in the very late afternoon in the critical seasons, you get some sun on the north facade, which the picture shows. And then the overhangs help the shade again. Very cleverly done, very essential approach. Just doing the necessary and no more. So this you were saying yesterday, there's no decoration. There's no ornament, as you like to say on the building. It's all performative. So that way it's like nature, right? Which is all performative. But it's very appealing because it works so well and we like to think about it. And this is a good place to point out, too. There's a very important thing that Bundit told me, which is that the walkways and the stairways are cantilevered out of the building. And legally or by code, this means they're not counted as part of the building mass. This allowed the interiors of the apartments to be larger because they could occupy more of that site, if you will. So not only does this look nice, but it also means that the apartments, the units themselves are bigger and more accommodating for the people who live in them. Clever, clever. And next picture, along the same lines here of sort of celebrating a very utilitarian thing, we're pointing out in the school that we referenced at the top right that tropical circulation, so exterior, egress, staircases has been a mid-century feature. And that's another thing that probably reminds you of these good old days. Absolutely, yes. And Bundit and Jen, we're re-celebrating that, the circulation here. And it's great to see pop culture, Magnum PI, dwelling upon that. You see J. Hernandez, the new Magnum, chasing the suspect here, the painter down these staircases. So they're obviously getting it, they're getting how special that feature is and they're portraying that. And pop culture is where you get the message to the mass. Absolutely. We have a very sort of, we have a nice program, but we have some cliques, but compared to people who are in front of their TV, we're talking a much bigger audience. Yes, that's right. So we're very, very happy to see good architecture re-featured again in pop cultural media. Right, right. Go to the next slide. This is the other side. This is the Southern facade here. This is pounded by the sun all day. This is why they, the opposite of what we do in Germany, we have to keep the North and the East very close because we're a temperate climate, which is very moody. And here we're year-round, we're rather the same. So here you've got to keep that close. You've got to keep the opening minimal. And again, you've got to have the jealousy so you can get the breeze through. And we see these little eyebrow things here. These ledges sticking out and they help to shade and they help to light our eyebrows to channel the water if we're under the shower so we don't get the water in the eyes. That's right. Similar thing, you know, it's how bodies work. It's about skins and this is very cleverly interpreted here in the architect here. We want to share a little bit the methodology of how the architects are working. And I get this to the next slide here. We see a diagram and this is what Bandit is teaching his students so well again, you know, up front by climatic essence into the design process. Do it, base the nature of your design on it and it will be integral to the design and it doesn't have to be applied. It doesn't have to be licked and sticked on some lead things. Now here it's inherent in the substance of the architecture. You see sun studies here, you see wind studies and that's what it's all about. And very well deserved, we can say and we show in the next couple of slides how well received the project was in literature, local magazines. Next slide here is the why home and remodeling and we see that space that we're talking about and again, they were putting in, you know, quite modern furniture and mid-century furniture in there because that's what the spirit of the building continues to be, right? And you know the other thing that I think we wanna talk about and I think let's go to the next slide from this one is, first of all, each one of these units is two stories. So the height of the building could be that perhaps of a six-story building but it actually only has three floors because every unit has got this large grand interior space. They also had custom metal work done for the railings of the interior stairways as well as the exterior which we were talking about that porous metal and as Martin just said, these stripped down austere interiors look really nice with modern furniture but of course as you saw in the first pictures you could put traditional furniture in these as well. Next picture, so here you can clearly see the two levels that upper level is kind of a mezzanine because it's open and it has a bedroom, has a bathroom. These are rather large units. They have three bedrooms and two bathrooms each. They are mid-range in price. Now that means in Honolulu that they're up around a million dollars which is not necessarily inexpensive but they certainly are not luxury apartments like we're seeing being built in Kakaako right now and there was a lot of thought put into fitting all of this onto the ground space that they had in this particular at this site not only in the ways that you saw with the sun studies and the air movement studies but also how to situate the building, how to make the most use out of the property as it stood and how they had to work with. Next picture. And there's also got other amenities in this building. There is this, there's this lanai that is common for everybody to use and again only nine units so there aren't a lot of people here but also there is photovoltaic power that's being generated that is distributed to all the apartments and also each one of the apartments parking spaces is set up to accommodate electric car recharging if the tenant wants it. So they were very careful to be thinking ahead and to be as Martin has said as lead as possible, as energy efficient as possible. Next. And this is the apartment, the building as we see it. This is as, as you can see how it is all set up to make it clear that each one of those floors accommodates what would normally be two floors but is actually very big tall apartments with a loft and a ground floor. The parking is underneath and they also gave a lot of thought to the views. What can you see through all these big windows that they had put in on the north side of the building which is also facing the trade winds so that's where we've got the jealousies that are the main bank of jealousies that will allow air movement through. These apartments don't come with AC. You would have to install it yourself if you wanted to unlike with most buildings that have central air conditioning these specifically were set up not to do that so that people could just rely on natural ventilation if they wanted. Next picture. And we're on that diagram, right? Okay, no, we just, I'm sorry, we just went back. Yeah, you wanna go back to the diagram? There we are again. Yeah, that would be great. Because again, I wanna commend my colleagues here about collapsing everything that the building is and needs into this one beautiful drawing here. It's a section perspective, shows everything you talked about, it's all integrated. And so it's just like with nature, you know, it looks like, okay, wow, it works. And then you can start to think about its components and its systems. But again, it's all integrated. And it's a natural organism just like nature is. And here you can see that there are people in there. So it's all designed around the human being as the actor again, in the sort of scene of everyday life. And if you go to the next slide here, where does this all come from? Bundin and Janice are great, well-educated people who have been studying all over the world. They come from different cultural backgrounds from Thailand and from Hong Kong. And they have studied in Harvard and all these things, but they're very, because of that, they're very down to earth people and there's no bullshit in their thinking and making. And they like to, you know, suggest things that they have experienced themselves. And their main inspiration for this project here isn't some superficial architectural theory, but it's their own experience in a building that has been built in Honolulu, not that far away from this new building here, at the end of the mid-century era, the good era in 1970. And the architect, I like to say, my sort of bridge is John McLaughlin, but it's George McLaughlin. And since you're the local Hawaiian, what's the name of that building? And the building is called Kahale Mo'i, which means the king's home. And it too has two-story apartments. And so the apartment that Janice and Bundit live in was the inspiration for what they designed at the How Olde Lofts. And I think these pictures here show that original apartment that they live in, but if we go to the next picture, there are Janice and Bundit in one of the units, and that's one of the units that they designed at the How Olde Lofts. And so we're just about at the end of the program. Why don't we go to our... Not forgetting to mention their dog as their partner. Absolutely not. You know, I've been in business here. And I, Janice is having their doggy, and I like that a lot as well. I'm a dog fan as well. I think our next picture, what is our next picture? Well, there we are. It is our last one. It is. We want to phase out because we also want to use this show here as to congratulate both of them who have been active, devoted, loyal members of the coaching team of the architectural emerging generation at QH School of Architecture for many decades, we can say now. And now more than well-deserved, Bundit came on board more permanently. He just got appointed assistant professor tenure track. So he will get a regular paycheck at way more decent than sort of his adjunct donations that he got, which he can't make a living on. Because I have to say, again, we also should mention the developer Wei Fang here without a great client, without great architect. You cannot make a project like that. And you for sure won't make any money. He is reinvesting all his architectural fees into the building culture of this project here. So again, he's been a great teacher. So the compensation for teaching will help him to continue to do such great projects. And I can't wait. And this slide here shows how excited I am to have him on board and to do things together. This here is the courtyard country, Kibana CCC that we might want to collaborate on in the future with John Henderson. Very excited about that. We want to close and extending well wishes for his recovery to Richard Lowell, who is working hard to get back to health and keeping his happiness. And he's prepping to be back on the show in early July. And I can't wait for that because he's such a rich source and eyewitness from the glory days of mid-century that you are going to do another Dokoomo show, I think. And that brings us both to the end of the program. Thank you all very much for joining us for Think Tech Hawaii's Human Humane Architecture. I'm DeSoto Brown saying goodbye and see you again next time here on Think Tech. Aloha. Bye-bye.