 This is Sting Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Welcome back to Human Humane Architecture here from our tropical exotic, this time Kapahulu, Honolulu, Paradise. And we're going down to the straight core of the show, which is human humane. And we're going to stay at home in our hood. And for that, we have Eileen and John here. Welcome for being here with us today. Thanks for having us. And our hood is, if we can get the first picture, is in sort of the conflict that we have on the islands is that, for example, my partner, Suzanne, hi, Suzanne, she loves nature. And next picture, I love architecture. So this is inherent conflict, especially here on our sort of small islands we pretty much have. And our hood is right sort of in the hinge of that, I would like to say. And so, yeah, the next picture shows it from a mapping point of view. And this is our hood of Kapahulu here. But way nicer portrayed is the next picture. This is Eileen, how you sort of make us see the hood. And there's another conflict between Suzanne and myself that she loves more sort of literal art and out of more abstract art. So you're the perfect mitigator and moderator between the two of us in many ways. But before we go sort of home, we want to go on a little journey where you guys come from and we're going to start with where you come from, John. And so let's walk up to where that is and then we'll be the next picture. Where's that? It's on an island in Northwest Washington. It's about 15 miles below Canadian border. And the stairway is probably about 100 years old but still holding up. And it used to be a cannery, a salmon fishing cannery. And it was purchased by my parents in 1938. And you said what, like 86 steps or something like that? 83 steps. 83, and it goes to the outhouse. The outhouse is down in the bottom. There is a cabin at the bottom, the old cabin. And then at the top of the stairs is a newer house from the 1980s. And we live in both, basically. But the one below is at ocean level on the beach. It's one of the rare places on this island where the meadow goes directly through the ocean. So it must have been a campground from prehistoric times for anybody in the neighborhood. So we're still there. And while we walk up, which will be the next picture, this reminds me of my urban experience that where I grew up, we had 96 steps up and down to everything. It was a five-story walk up, no elevator, nothing. And our neighbor from way back, she just turned 100, as I hear your dad. So I mean, there is something about staying fit. And you guys are the best. And you guys either run or you surf. You're big surfers. And we'll get to that later or soon. And the show is called exotic enclaves. So we're talking about real estate and sort of there's a French word immobilier. So it means like real estate. It's a way more poetic term for that, right? It means something that's not mobile, immobile. So these are all rather sort of nondescript, rather gritty places, right? Well, surfers consider the wave to be the real estate. And sometimes it gets pretty vicious. But this house, the cabin, that's a 100-year-old cabin there and still holding up pretty well. My nephew came to visit and he was trying to get a beer out of the refrigerator. And his foot went through the floor. So we had a little repair. So it's doing OK. Doing OK. Well, you can still put it back together. And the view we see on the next picture, and this is how you most likely like to be dressed, which I appreciate a lot because this is the easy breezy way. We had a hard time making you wear a shirt here today because you're just like, why would we in the tropics, right? No, but in Northwest Washington, you're talking about very rare a month or so in the summer where you can act as though this is somewhere in the tropics. It's no longer the tropics. And go to your next step. And actually, we have to say that all these places you're still associated with and still going. So this isn't like, OK, one after another, these are all accumulating in parallel. And the next one we go to the next picture is, Trace is back to, you went a little south from there. And this is where you're from, right? Yeah, this is Laguna Beach, California. I mean, from California. This is where Eileen's basically, her native base is right there in Irvine. And this is my home of going on 60 years in Laguna Beach. So this is the real old footprint, except the prior one in Washington, which is even older. But we don't live there full-time. This place was a full-time resident. And that's my studio in the greenhouse. And some people would say, well, when is the architecture coming? Where is the architecture, right? We go to the next picture. These are like another term we can maybe to use most respectfully. I mean, I mean, it is Cabanas, right? Yeah, everyone in Laguna says this is like a Hawaiian house. Well, basically, it's a single-wall house, meaning you can look through the cracks and see the ocean. And it can breathe through them, too. Yeah, and the basic airflow is quite constant, although you can close it. Because in the wintertime, you have storms. But my solution was the windows leak. So I just put roll curtains on a diagonal outside the windows. And they cost, what, $50? And the whole place stays dry all wintertime. And that actually gets me to the point that also the major stuff in your place is repurposed, is reclaimed, right? I mean, I didn't put it. I don't know if this is the Persian carpet. You had another picture of a show right now. Well, Persian luck came out of a dumpster on Kapa Hulu. Oh, that one. OK, awesome. That's local. That poor guy. I think he got divorced. And he just threw all these things. And these are $1,500 minimum rents. Swim in the dumpster. Yeah, and if we would all do that, our carbon footprint would shrink because we stopped making these stuff. And we can all share what we already have, right? The thrift stores are burgeoning with stuff. And they're getting more and more filled with the turnover. And even the upper class now shops there. You can see the cars. And there is another place here, which, if Ray can also zoom on to the book that we have here, which is basically a surfer magazine here, the surfer journal, and it has an article about you guys and the letters and the places and a perfect portrait sort of image of that next place here, which if we get the next picture as well, this is what we're looking at out of these windows here. So where's that? This is the basic concept of an open house. It was actually copied after a cattle, a cow barn, a dairy cow barn. And it's a 360 degree roundhouse with two stories. And the center story is actually open and draws the air up from under the surrounding eaves of the roof and continues to cause a circular airflow. And once again, perfectly portrayed by you, Eileen, which you can see on the next picture. Oh, yeah. Very good. And this is, if we can get the next picture, Ray. I mean, this is for me. I mean, this is easy breezy. This is tropical. This is exotic. This is erotic. This is where I want to be. I mean, if I look at that, I'm just like, wow. No air conditioning. No necessary. You don't need it, really. It's natural. Everybody else is pretty much air conditioned by that. And I mean, this always is so like, I mean, just did a tour with the students to some new classrooms they're building on New Asia. I call it frog house. And it's so much about technology. But this is about the absence of it. I mean, this is about us as human beings and feeling things and still allowing us to feel. And this is like more staying away from technology, right? Yeah. Well, I think that would be the highest form of technology. Yeah, yeah. It's the natural systems. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if you did look up coastline community college and check that out, because it's got open walls. Yeah, no, that's good. So after sort of having seen some of the other places, we come home. This is homecoming now. We get to the next picture. And here we are again. And tell us a little bit about your approach when you do this fabulous. Well, first of all, I would not be able to set my easel in front of or in the middle of Kapahulu to actually paint this. So while he's driving, I've got my iPhone out here. And I'm snapping a bunch of shots and whatever, because there's a whole bunch of repetitive shots. But whatever looks best is what I pick or what looks most dramatic. And I know it makes a good painting. That's the bicycle shop in Kapahulu. Yeah, yeah, that's where the corner of Zippy's and where you're filming. They just demolished the interior next door. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, so it's our hood. And it's we just we forgot it. I forgot it. But so the big key kind of bicycle renting thing has a new card out that has sort of color code of the different neighborhoods. And you know, there is like the city that's purely for vacationing, which is called Waikiki. And there is a city that's purely for dwelling on a luxurious that's called Kakaaka, although people are defending that. So we're mixed use. We don't believe that, at least not to the terms we understand mixed use. Exactly. And then there is the city of working exclusively. This is where we're broadcasting from. And ours is color code of green thanks to the people. And ours is actually the only inclusive neighborhood that does everything at the same time, right? And so if we walk to the next picture, this is how we got to know each other because I was parking my car in these side streets here. And at a certain point, I'm going through this street, which I can't that easily because it's gated off, which we'll get to what the quality of that is. And all of a sudden, there is like the absence of architecture. And I think if you achieve that, as you said with your El Salvador house, where it's not about the architecture, it's about the nature. And architecture is just facilitating us appreciating and indulging in it. So I didn't see a house, but I saw someone sitting there. There was a dweller. And so next picture is when I finally sort of chatted you up. I took this panoramic with a plano function. And this is the whole scenario. This is basically you. I mean, Aline, you hadn't been coming around the corner yet. It was just us basically opening up the discussion. I think I mentioned the patient seems to be part of this jungleism, you call it. Because I planted those two trees because the neighbor cut his trees down before we bought the property. And here it was very exposed and especially hot because afternoon sun there is a killer. So I knew we had to have some shade. So once I got a viable seedling from Kauai, this is the avocado, the nearest to the camera. And then I got a seed from my neighbor's peery tree. Which we can show the next picture. They were both sprouting. So since they were sprouting, I stuck them in the ground. And then you have to be patient. But this is only 10, 15 years total later. So if you've got 15 years, go for it. Put in a tree. I always say if you're going to retire, plant a tree. Because it'll keep you busy also. They have leaves every day. You have to rake the leaves in you. And you also prune your trees and do that. And you and me, not sort of not knowledgeable enough, you told me about the different species. And then this is the best one and carries many years. And then you're doing this here again. So it's like evolving around nature. I mean, this is your, you were talking about, I always used to say decorative green, but you had ornamentalist the term, right? Usually we don't do that. We grow stuff that we can't eat. And if you think about it, why do we do that? And you had an interesting kind of political conspiracy theory behind it. Well, it happened earlier when the town, the people who could afford to move to town, they didn't want to have flies, which, you know, they didn't want to bring the farm with them. So they basically plant ornamentals. They don't plant fruit trees. They don't plant food. So let's go four to one picture. This phrase is to the avocado tree, which we had the sort of shared serendipity experience because me only a week before when I was on my way to lunch at school up at UH and was checking on my car if it's still there, I was thinking what I'm gonna eat for lunch and I wasn't sure. And then I must have visualized this here as being my lunch because it dropped right in front of my feet. And I just went home, got salt and a spoon and this was my most delicious lunch. And so you have a similar story about how your tree came about, your avocado tree. Well, that was, my niece was watering avocados in Kauai over there in Kilauea. And my daughter went to visit her and she came back with a big avocado and she happened to leave it in my house. I was in California and I came back. I thought it was a rotten avocado. I was gonna throw it away. Had it in half. It was perfect butter avocado. Just like mine was. But the seeds, I didn't notice your seeds sprouting but my seed already had two trunk branches and a bunch of roots. So that one, I had to stick that in there. And that's how we got our avocado. And we're coming in and running into Jay as he's all master provocateur. He was saying, oh, you're gonna talk about human humane architecture. Are you also gonna talk about the ones for the ones who can't afford it at all? And this is our next picture here, which Arlene, why don't you tell us who that is? Oh, this guy's name, am I allowed to name names? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay, Dan. We'd love to say anything here. Dan Devine, he's homeless, but John originally met him, which is right down the street. Oh, that's not a big deal. He just, he wanders that area and we can't say where he lives because I think he's not supposed to be there. But at times, so he comes around here but he was a very big name of sports photographer. He worked for Sports Illustrated. He was a stringer for a lot of different magazines, America's Cup Race in New Zealand and stuff. But after all those years, ended up pretty much off, I think, off the road. And I don't wanna get into political things that I don't know about. I think it's too bad, he got into trouble with police once, then he ends up on social services, then they get to withhold his social security. Where does that money go? That's what I'm like. We should talk about these things. I don't know. I mean, you need to put the lawyers to find out. Yeah, well, Jay, again. Oh, yeah. And he wants to talk about it. He gets, he's about $2,000 a month, but he gets $200 a week. Wow. So where that money has gone for some years now, I think maybe $20,000, $30,000 sitting in an account. Where in the hell does, who has that? And I think the reason why you engage in these discussions and thoughts is because of your living style, your dwelling style, because you're out there on the street, on your street, and you engage with these people. And we talk about money and as a means to buy something, for example, food. How about we would actually, there's this term, the low-hanging fruit, right? Well, why do we take this literal and we mandate, I mean, at this point, I'm already gonna say, if I would have to something to say here and would be on some kind of planning boards or some kind of political power, I would say I mandate what you guys did, plant a mango tree and a avocado tree, and you also had banana that you wanted to give me one, and I look forward to that on the way back. Why don't we do that? And then the people who are in needs can basically feed themselves, plus the ones who visit us, can all of a sudden see that fruit that they only know from the grocery store and real and they can pick it or at least look at that. I mean, how cool would that be? Yeah, if you can share it, the biggest argument, or it's not an argument, the biggest critique is just that density is what makes things possible or impossible. And once you reach a certain density, you can't have enough people to share enough things, you can't get enough shares. There aren't enough shares for everything. So how do you orchestrate that? I mean, I've already run into that for some years now about surfing. How do you share those ways? Real problems going on with sharing those ways. Yeah, yeah. Well, in architecture, there's a new trend, so to speak, that's called urban ecology. And you ask, can we do what you guys do on a multi-level with your most activist journalist, Kurt Sandburne, called Stacklinize? And yes, you can. You can bring in soil and you can bring in perlite and you can grow stuff of significance and basically make your whole building like a stacked greenhouse and live in the jungle on sort of a stratospheric kind of way, right? But let's pour a little bit of that water into this kind of delicious wine we're drinking here. We're not, but we should, but sort of spiritually and go to the next picture because what happens just around the corner, is it the opposite? Well, yeah, the single wall is gone and you're the one who pointed out that they've adopted the California Code for Building and this is all hermetically sealed stuff because you put in air conditioning and you neutralize the surrounding atmosphere and put your own, you're in control. So basically it's a control system. Everybody wants control and more and more what everybody's life, children used to grow up and have zones where they were not in a controlled zone. I mean, when I was a kid and beach communities are supposed to offer that still, there's 180 degrees that's not private property. That's why you find a lot of homeless guys down at the beach, a lot of the little bandits are down at the beach and everybody can be there all in the same zone. You go ahead and walk along what you keep. And so it is. It's the biggest mix you've ever seen in your life. And so it is and when I just picked you up you had a bunch of friends out there with kids and they were just roaming around and having fun. That's the benefit of having a gate across. There's no automobile traffic. That was the secret they, three, many years ago, four, many years ago. He says, how can we solve this cut through traffic every afternoon, every morning? So we'll put up a few gates. Those are private lanes. Those aren't streets, you know. Most of those are extended driveways where they put the Ohana house behind the other house and run their driveways together. Those things you could block them again just like we have. And then everybody would be very. And this is actually at that corner of your street. And then unfortunately we have one more and it gets worse, which is the next picture because this is at the other side of the block. No, this guy took that single family thing to the extreme. There's 13 bathrooms in there. And there's I think eight units on each side upstairs and eight on each side downstairs. This is strictly for Airbnb. But he just picked the location that he thought was viable, bought the lot. And I don't make it a discriminatory thing, discriminatory, but it's strictly bottom line building. If that's what building's about. Yeah, hopefully not, hopefully not. Because this is about the presence of a building that we don't want. Everything you said so perfectly, you should teach at my school. This is hermetic, this is invasive. If we get close, I didn't want to because I found it even too disgusting. I didn't want to waste a digital picture even. This is vinyl siding that has the imprint of wood. I mean, this is the epitome of anything. And the other one at least, you were even talking to the people and saying save these few trees, which we saw. There is nothing left. And this was a pretty idyllic sort of one story ranch home. But you gotta realize that the simple basic argument which you will get every time is all these things are academic. It's all money. It's all about the dollar. What are you gonna do? You're not gonna get away from the dollar. That's what everybody's focused on because it's the only linear thing to measure your values. And everybody's gonna get the best dollar. All right, let's pick or spur it up again with an X picture which I took from the old house that's still there on the other side of that street. And this is a detail that I think fits perfectly with last week's show, which was about pretty much the architecture versus architecture. And this is just the texture of plans and similar texture of wood slats, that shade and give privacy to that. You can interview that guy. He used to have a big gallery here in town. Abacus. Okay, Abacus, yeah, anyway. So this is an inspiration for a project we did some years ago here, which is the next picture, which is sort of rethinking. Actually, this was for DHHL to how rethink how the locals live and not having to buy these sort of rip-off track homes. They're basically sort of American stick frame hermetic and AC, and we just came up with sort of this kit of part for pavilions around outdoor spaces. And the next picture is showing sort of in this sort of green diagram that on the top is what you conventionally you do plot this big McMension on a lot and then you end up with these leftover spaces whereas the very bottom one is basically this concept. So that even then next picture in the places and spaces between the homes, you create this communicational shaded, vegetated spaces and places. And next picture on the street, it's exactly what you guys are doing. You hang out in your house and not being not inside of the house. You're in the carport, you're in the lanai, you're out on the streets, and this is pretty much a lot of the same lines. Anybody who has the curiosity is gonna stick their head in and say, what's going on? Exactly, exactly. That's what breaks the eyes. It really breaks the eyes. It is anybody who's willing to just push the envelope a little bit and everybody's there. I mean, there's a place in Irvine where she grew up and they made this perfect park with lights and toys, you know, jungle gems and everything else. And I used to drive there commuting from teaching. And it was like after dinner, all the lights are on in this perfectly groomed park for children, there's not a soul in there. Right next to it is all the rubble, the rub, but it's a triangle of trash. The gritty. And it was filled with kids. Exactly, that's what you want. I mean, it gets you excited, you can explore. It's nobody's property. Exactly. But all that other stuff was just a manicured idea. It was off somebody, unfortunately, a drawing board. It was off a drawing board. Yeah, yeah, of course. Somebody sold it to the master plan and get to the next picture. I mean, this is everything you perfectly, described also applies to you guys. I mean, this is basically the gritty. This is the real life. This is reclaimed, this is free purpose, but this is also purposely vegetated. I mean, this is the whole deal. And we want to conclude with a final piece of artwork by Eileen that I basically captioned here and calling it Making America Talk Again. Because he's taking in what that piece of art is. Oh, OK, well, just having fun, painting t-shirts, speeding up the process of drawing it. And I don't know, you can talk. She draws at the drop of a hat. Meaning behind it, whatever the meaning is. But I think, yeah, the spirit of fun is the primary issue. And whoever can maintain that, you know, is going to get everybody on board. Everybody's into it. So you don't want to get to the point. And I say, if we all sit behind our hermetic sealed walls and we watch at the TV, is it Fox or CNN, whatever, we get to where we are right now in society. But if we're out on the streets and we talk to each other and we sort of respectfully provoke each other and get discussions going, which you do with your great artwork, I think this is the way and this is the future for our culture and the country. And with that, we're at the end of the show. And I thank you so much for having been guests. This is more than fun, we're really talk. Well, this is great fun. We should do another one, because there's so much more. You just brought letters with drawings of yours and Jay said, this is another show. I didn't know you had that kind of range here. We have. All right. And until then, you guys stay happy and healthy. And please consider to make some more exotic enclaves as Eileen and John do. So see you next week. Bye-bye.