 human main architecture with us here on Think Tech Hawaii, the 320th time already. And we're gonna do it differently this time than we have never done it before. And if we can get the first slide up, we gonna have the, as the School of Architecture, we have a guest in another fellow German, Thomas Auer, who's gonna teach and talk with us how to design buildings as we had them in mid-century and we want them back again, which are easy breezy buildings and he knows how to do that, so we have him. And so here he is when we zoomed with him to connect to him and also I picked him up from the airport and we had our Mai Tai's beers at Arnold's, the Tiki Bar. And we hope you, when you watch the show, you will have been with us in the auditorium and listen to Thomas in his talk. And so the way we talk amongst each other is we, as on the show today, Richard Lowe again and Bandit Kandikakon in the background that we caught us last time that we were basically operating with each other as we were trained as for the sort of the prime time in life, the productive prime time in life, which is the core where we work and we generate income and we pay taxes and all of that. So everything seems to be conditional to that. Until then we train ourselves to get there and once we're not anymore, once we're retired or stopped doing this, we are in a different mode but we still treat us that way. So that's how you Bandit and I felt with you Rich that we were kind of having you on a leash. And according to the titles of the previous show which is themed after what you Bandit always meaning, well, say is let's go Mr. Lowe, but that means let's go somewhere where I want you to go based upon these previous paradigms. And we thought this might actually be not helpful due to what you all have to say to us Rich, where you are now, where you don't have to be felt obligated to all these things. So this is why we call the show now Mr. Lowe, let's go. So we let you go Rich, wherever you wanna go today and to get you going, get the next slide up and what's your thought about this guy, Rich? Oh, he's pretty ugly if you ask me. I think I must have been a fan, someone must have turned on a fan on my right or left because I'm looking like a ghost with the hair sort of blowing all over the place. But, you know, you can't always look beautiful in life. Well, and isn't beauty highly subjective and relative, Rich? Yeah, it is actually. I'm glad you said that because it clears me of some of the fright that I might experience being. Do you remember who captured you that way, who took that picture? No, I don't, I have no idea. So this is one of the many mentees that, you know, really appreciate you being around and sharing you what you were thinking and what you're saying at this part of your life. And that's Walker Mason, who's been, you know, with you and Bandit recently quite a bit and he took this picture of you. And I'm pretty sure because he's a very nice young gentleman, how you perceive this, I'm very sure it was not his attention because he's a nice guy that he would never put you on the spot and say, you know, I will depict, you know, Rich as an ugly man. He, you know, when talking to him, he basically said, I want to capture Rich in the moment that I found compelling. As not being sort of dressed up, right? And no makeup on and not the hair being made. It's just be who you were at this moment, right? Let's try that. And wanting to be real and honest, I put you on the spot, Bandit, in the background because you always said, oh, the Frankenstein picture. What I would like to do is to discuss one element of cleaning in my garden that's particularly defining. And that is, let's see, can I put a, I'd like to put something on the screen. Yeah, so Michael, can you try the next picture and you Rich, let us know if that's the picture, if that's not the one we go to other pictures. Is that the one you have in mind? That's exactly the picture. All right. Yeah, it's the sort of three buildings of a royalty kind of nature. The building on the left, which is maybe 20 floors high or something like that. That's called the Prince building. And then to the right of it are two higher rise buildings which are the King and the Queen of Queen Emma Gardens. But what I think is so fascinating about it is the site plan that supports these three buildings. And you can see there's kind of a heart shaped thing on the, it would be the west side of the King and the Queen buildings. And I think that those are particularly meaningful as a picture of a very pedestrian area for the people who live in these towers. And then on the left, on the right rather of the Prince building is a circular thing. And that is a swimming pool. And that's quite exciting to me. But because it gives people a chance to wander around on all the pathways that have been developed along with the buildings. And it shows how interesting a good site planning effort can be. I have walked on all of those pathways and hundreds of other people have done the same thing. And they are the people who live here and want to get out and kind of lubricate their joints by sort of wandering all around the Queen Emma Gardens. And yeah, it's a very orderly site plan. And the King and the Queen buildings which are on the right and left of the two buildings on the right and the Prince building on the left are particularly restrained and yet they have a lot to offer in the way of being in those buildings they can look down on the site plan and say to themselves I want to go there or I want to have my wedding in that little cottage on this side of the King and Queen building. And the site plan really defines a number of purposes that can be fulfilled by this complex of buildings and walkways and gardens and waterways and so forth. And that's something that I felt worth mentioning because we don't always get that in our city. So I'll pull that slide away for the moment. Yeah, and go to the next one maybe? Yeah, let's go to the next one. Now this one is if we want to get into the vocabulary of Kevin Lynch who was my sort of advisor at MIT and who defined various parts of the city as worth defining. And these, of course, these two towers which we can see at the right side of the slide are a marvelous depiction of where Queen Emma Gardens is. And you're coming down here from the Polly Highway at undoubtedly too high a speed. But you can see these two buildings standing there between the ocean and yourselves driving down the highway. I think that those are very telling ideas that I learned about and were somewhat defined at MIT which is always looking for meaning in everything. It's interesting as you introduce them to us as they were naming them as the royal couple, the king and the queen and they had a baby, the prince, the little kid tower, right? And here you also see the little kid tower to the left but you sort of don't see it, right? Because the parents, so to speak, are in your face and in line with the Polly Highway, right? And the little building guy, the prince, is there but he's like on the side of the parents. That's what you made me think about what you previously said and what we see here. I think that's a great description of what's before us and of the making of babies in general. Yeah. Which you were sharing with us that your personal baby grew up here, your first one grew up in the building. Actually, that's true, absolutely true. Yeah. My wife and I moved into Queen Emma Gardens which at the time you paid rent to move in too because they were all rented out to various people like me and then my late wife and children and people walking around on all the walkways of Queen Emma Gardens. It really is very nice to have in the landscape something like this to perhaps memorize about the nature of the city. So you want, speaking of which, having lived in there, you want to walk us back in and maybe go to the next slide? I do. The next slide is a corner of one of the kitchens of the apartments in Queen Emma Gardens and it's kept to a very simple system of wood doors and wood sort of movable walls and that sort of thing. And that kind of an aesthetic has been utilized throughout the building, whatever the room may be that we're looking at. And the second slide is a little larger scope than the previous slide. And it shows you how you can make the kitchen an attractive event even though it's just a kitchen in which people cook and serve. Yeah. And what you were pointing out, you inspire me to go back and sort of in more shows to kind of reflect on that. But what you said is that the kind of the moving walls and the shoji screen that you can see here, they allow you to actually transform in a multitude of ways. For example, in the previous slide, in the one before, there is a sort of paravant thing that you once, you have all the dirty dishes in the, Michael, if you can go back to the previous one, if you were lazy and you have all the dirty dishes not washed yet, right? And everything is piling up, but you don't want to do it yet, right? But you don't want to look at the dirty dishes. You pull that thing closed. And then you are in your nice sort of bar area that has, when you go to the other next picture, Michael, that you can sit at your sort of elevated table there, a high table and have a drink or a coffee or a Diju's thief, as the French call it, the drink after the meal. And then with a shoji screen, you can also then say, well, I don't even want to see that. I want to be in the living room and not see a kitchen at all. So you can actually, as you've bonded, call it an open system. You could do various things and basically make your still rather sort of, you know, not opulent space, as you said last time, rich, but very sort of efficient and effective space. But you can multi-purpose that and multi-function it. And that certainly, it seems to me that what Kevin Lynch kind of talked to you on a large scale, as sort of a, you know, a city as a large building, also then holds true within the building itself, that you can turn it into sort of little different, small kind of scenarios, cities. Well, that's true. And that perhaps the next slide could be shown. And that is, it looks like a master building of a great big apartment, but it's not. It's a part of the living room. And it has the usual glass doors that allow you to look out at the, at gardens and cars and parking lots and walkways that you would want to know are there. This is interesting because, you know, at that time, talking prime time of life, you were in your 30s when you came here. I was not, I was barely born. So for me, this is something that, you know, this is the America that I had dreamed of from pictures like this, but it took me many more decades to actually get there. But this is when you were in your prime time and what people call the prime time in life, you know, when you're sort of half through adult tree and you're the most productive, you're also the most valuable for society because you can work the longest hours, right? So this is all kind of that kind of time. And so it is the America that I, you know, as a little kid only dreamed about and thought this must be the holy land because it's for me kind of a total piece of artwork in how you, you know, create livable spaces and it's all very sophisticated. It's all very elegant. And, you know, the thing is back to the very, the slide of you, Rich, I allow myself to say I see the similarity that both have aged and grazed. They're not, you know, any more as they used to be because that was then and now is now. But you are both around and you, you know, aged well and you're both real. And actually the wind, you know, that blows through your hair, also blows through the building because it's a building that, as you taught us, told us was not with air conditioning. That was an option, but it was primarily without. So I see actually, you know, the two of you, the king and the queen and their prince as buildings and you as sort of, you know, zeitgeist companions. I think that's a marvelous description of what we were at that time. And what you still are, that's maybe as important or maybe, I wouldn't say more important, you know, there's things that were great, but they're not any more, but the things who last, you know, these are the ones who we know they work well. Well, thank you. I mean, I decided to consider that a compliment. That's how it was meant. So I was successful too. So do you think, can we bring that back, that kind of, you know, where America was at its best? What do you think? I mean, we know someone who says, make America great again. I don't know if you want to go do there to him. Well, you can't beat that idea of making America great again. And if it could be done in terms of the architecture of our cities, all the better. And I think that this point, Van Amma Gardens is a picture of just that. It's a picture of doing things well and effectively. Yeah, good point. And, you know, when you say, like, make it great again, means it used to be great and then it wasn't great anymore, which is certainly true to, you know, many things as, you know, objects that many of us say culture, like cars, for example, you know, there were like the crappy 80s and 90s where things were falling apart and not meant to last anymore. But you and this building here is actually an example for that America has stayed to be great. So we actually don't need to make it great again because it was never not great. You know what I mean? I'm not certain that I know what you mean just yet. Well, when they say, and when Trump says make it great again, that means, oh, it has gone bad recently. So we need to make it great again. But I'm saying you and Queen Amma Gardens have never turned bad. So we just continue to have you around you as Richard Lowe and Queen Amma Gardens as the building. And maybe we go back, you know, the interiors these days aren't like that anymore. We showed some in the last where the furniture is kind of bulky and kind of clumsy, kind of obnoxious. Maybe we need to sort of rediscover, you know, how you furnished something like that, you know, more delicately. Well, I think we do. I think the doing of the interiors of a building like these three buildings are is very valuable as an asset in making it very special. Yeah. So we have three minutes left. So we want to talk what's next because you inspired the Soto Brown to be back because you poked him with Kevin Lynch at your Civic Center. So he got him going. So he will basically next week is spring break. So it gives us a little break as I understand we can go to the beach and party wild as kids do right over spring break. That's certainly an option. And that time to Soto will work for us as I understand it will sort of be inspired by, you know, your thoughts about, you know, the Civic Center and Kevin Lynch and do kind of a pitch presentation. And then he will actually bring you both back as the started discourse and chit chat about it. So that's basically what's next in the game. And until then, you know, tomorrow we will see you at Thomas ours lecture. I look forward to Thomas and Thomas we're giving us clues about how to sort of keep that tradition of easy breezy buildings in these days and ages, which are anymore what they used to be because everything has changed but keep up these kind of values and and, you know, you do the same we have to go to our to keep us, you know, say we have to see our dermatologist who we share. I mean, we don't share what we go forward to the same Janice dermatologist and she has to check on our Holly skin right and and that's what you have to do. That's what the queen and the the king and the prince have to do right. You constantly have to see and do little touch ups and little patching here and there right. But other than that, you just stay who you are. You meaning the buildings and you great. Well, thank you very much for I've always wanted to be have a building named after me to have it the king and the queen and the prince. That's a superlative. Evaluation. Well, thanks so much for letting your your brain and so to speak and roam around more freely and let's continue that. So let's see you all back in about a week with the sort of brown picking up on your Kevin Lynch poking so to speak and then the week after you guys are going to be together. Well, I'm going to be sneaking back around the world to James Germany for a little while and then we'll be back with Thomas. So we get some business to do there. Hey, so until then stay all healthy and happy of course and stay aging a top and a long agility as you reach. If you liked this show, why don't you give us a like or subscribe to our channel. Thanks so much.