 We feel privileged to have you back to this show. I think the Kawaii Human Humane Architecture happening to be our 297th show, and you are the accumulated viewer, which you're seeing down there. And we are back in the fellow windy city of Chicago, Illinois, and us is the Soto Brown, back in his Asupov design home at Diamond Head in Honolulu, Hawaii. You, the Soto, our Bishop Museum Historian and Archivist, Ty. Hello. Good day to you. Thank you, and me, Martin, the Spang, back at the opposite end of the world, near Munich, Germany. And we meet, as I said, somewhere in the middle, almost a stopover in Chicago that we're on to find out why we borrow so much architecture from there. And Chicago is certainly one of the heyday places of architecture, the cradles of, you know, urban architecture in the United States. But that was then and now is now, and we're recently getting lots of high rises from architects from that city. So we thought we sent you back, which we did about a year ago, a little more than a year ago. And if we get the first slide up, we're also going, you know, our minds go back and forth to other places here, cross-references. That's what we want you, the audience, to do as well. One thing leads to another. And this is getting us two capitals, and actually we're missing on the Illinois capitol here, but we have a couple of other capitals. Which are they, the Soto? Well, first we're looking at a large photograph of the dome, the new dome, or the new-ish dome, atop the German legislative and government building, the main building in Berlin, which is called the Reichstag. And that goes back to the late 1800s, and it's been through some major changes. It was badly damaged, twice, been renovated. And when, with the reunification of East Germany and West Germany after the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s, they did this new dome, atop the building, which was to make things, to show that it was a new beginning when the capitol moved back from its temporary location during the splitting of the two Germanys in the city of Bohn. And so this is this famous dome, which I have not personally seen. It's a glass dome, and it's got this mirrored interior section to it. And you're able to, you do have to pay admission, as you explained to me, but you're able to look down on the legislative processes going on below. But we think that the Hawaii State Capitol, which was built in 1969, is better because you can, as a member of the public, simply go up and look in the windows if you want to, or go inside to the galleries to see the legislative processes going on. And so it's much more open to the real people. And we think that's admirable because the people are the ones who the government is running for, and the people are the ones who pay for the government. So the more openness and the more the architecture reflects that openness, the better the process is for everybody involved. Exactly. And the picture at the bottom right is looking into one of the chambers of our state capitol in Honolulu, Hawaii. And we do this because we're charged to write an architectural tour guide about Honolulu for DOM publishers. And so we better get going. And this is what I took when I was just happy to be there. And for this show here ongoing, we use their guide, their Chicago guide, which was freshly out a year ago. And so at the top right is what you mentioned, the BUN one, and this is our friend, Metnoblatt's firm, Banish Architect, and in fact, the founder of the firm, Mr. Banish, built that in the 80s. And again, in both projects that you see that top right and bottom right, you can press your nose at the glass and pretty easily, you know, see what's going down there, what the ones that you elected are doing, hopefully what you wanted them to do. The one that we owe the picture to Semi, who took this for us, the picture off to the left at the Reichstag. And it was what Met praised this for good reason, the culture of architectural competitions, which we need more in America, which are not that common. It's more kind of invited competitions, if at all, or direct commissions, but Banish, are rightly so pride itself of always telling them themselves in anonymous competitions, so they're not selected for their name, but for their best idea. And so was the Reichstag, you know, remodeling was a competition that Baron Foster, Lord Foster, the previously Lord, now Baron, won. And he did the best he can, again, to sort of, I guess, the, I don't know how you want to call it, the Nazi fight, because just before the show, you shared with me the horrid thing of DeSantis. You want to just quickly mention that? Well, just something that's in the news today, this morning, right before we did the show, was that Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who is in the running for president of the United States, even though the election is quite a long way from now, one of his staffers created a video and put it online, which ended with a symbol of, that was used, an ancient Germanic symbol that was reused by the Nazis during the 1930s and 40s, which is called Sun and Rod. Is that correct, Sun and Rod? In any case, it's, and he used a symbol of, he used this, reused this symbol in a setting that was reminiscent of a Nazi rally and put Ron DeSantis right in the center of it. And so the Nazi symbols, even though they have been suppressed since the 1940s and are known for their evil associations, still show up to the amazement of me and millions of other people. Scary, scary. And of course, you know, the Reichstag played a role in Nazi era. And so it was a touchy subject and fostered, you know, tried the best to denazify it, to democratize it again and replace the stone dome by this glass dome here. And while it's quite spectacular and thanks, Semi, to having taken the equally spectacular picture here, we see him down there in the choke boat at the center in the middle with Jay, our founding uncle of Tink Pek, Hawaii at the annual Christmas celebration and Governor Waihi. And so thanks, Semi, for giving this to us when, you know, school, by the way, still, I mean, I was taught all over and all over that, you know, the Holocaust existed. So no one will deny it. So I know it. And Joey, my oldest son, who you know well, you know, had a Holocaust survivor come into high school, break out in tears. So he knows firsthand. But of course, the coming generations, you know, need to be reminded in different ways, right? And so we have to, you know, keep doing that. And as far as the point, the other point about, you know, watching your representatives here, it's not quite as direct as in the other cases of Bonn and Honolulu, because as you see at the bottom, the chamber where the representatives work is actually below under that second layer of glass on that sort of elevated ground floor, which is actually the roof of the building, but, you know, the ground of the dome. And you see there is a guardrail with illustrations on there and that keeps people away. So they're more separated and more disconnected than in the other cases, which is a little bit of disappointing. Again, it is what it is, but... Yeah, but it also is a different world in that we need more security now. And when the Hawaii State Capitol opened in 1969, it was not as likely that there would be needs for security. And that is something that is far more prevalent now, that is very, and that's very important in architecture as well. And one of the things that we are very familiar with now is that government buildings are surrounded by bollards or very deeply implanted protections so that you can't drive a vehicle up into them to blow it up. And you have to go through metal detectors and so forth. So it's a different world than it was when our state capital was built. Yeah, sadly so, but that's true, sad but true. Next slide, we hold another illustration of things we already talked about last time, but again, I was digging out pictures that I took in 2008 when I was there with our host, Dan Kubrick, who you see his pickup truck in the center picture. This is the Crow Island School that we mentioned. That was the beginning of the firm Perkins, they were still called Wheeler and Will, now they're just called Perkins and Will, together with the Sarenons, Father Alial and the Sun Arrow. And it was a collaboration that they did. And that actually made Perkins and Will become an expert in school design. And we read that they after this built the large amount of 500 schools because this was so successful. It was an inspiration for us for our decarbonized preschool that we see at the show quote at the top center. And we only knew it from literature. And then when that was completed in 2008, I had the chance to see it. And in particular, the kind of broken up courtyard-y sort of syntax of classrooms and outdoor spaces. The other inspiration was at the top right. This is the preview of our soon to be continued auto architecture show. And this is the Solar Hemi cycle by Frank Lloyd Wright, officially called the Jacobs House too, because of its passive solar performance and sudden exposure. So both projects were very informative for us. And it's amazing that from 1940, also reminded me a little bit of talking Ossipoff house that you are in. You also shared with us a couple of shows ago, the preschool or I guess the kindergarten, right? Or was it elementary school that you went to at Punahou, which was also by Ossipoff, but is not existing anymore, unfortunately. This one here still exists. And you can read in the articles is just as fresh as it was back then. I try to find out what, it's a very sort of low profile, one story building, but the entrance is marked by the slab. And there's some articles who basically say it's just a markation for the entrance and others basically say it's a chimney, maybe it's both. And if it is, it's obviously, a signal or a symbol for the fossil, while again, the work of these days should be a symbol of the post fossil. And I thought you particularly amongst other things, I'm sure the soda reminding you of your childhood in your Ossipoff, but I also thought the ones at the top left, these ceramics you might like, right? Am I right? Yes, absolutely. And what interests me is I'm seeing these touches that look very much like they're from the Doko Momo mid-century, 20th century period, the use of the stone, the use of the ceramic tiles, and also that central sort of pylon that is, you just said, is either some kind of an architectural statement of a marking device or it's a chimney. But regardless, it is very typical of that post-war, post-World War II architecture, a lot of commercial buildings, even in Honolulu, used that same type of element to make their buildings stand out, particularly for commercial buildings, you wanted people to be able to see you when they were driving by or looking for your building. And that's one way to make your building distinctive. Absolutely. Okay, so now we put pictures to the words of the Crow Island School, you know how that looks like. And it has to do with Chicago again, because it's up the lake, Lake Michigan, in this town called Winicka in Illinois. So it's up the coast of the lake. So drive up there and enjoy it. And it's not in the book because again, the book is just Chicago, but we're kind of broadening the horizon here. Next slide is also a preview of how we closed, but I put in show quotes at the top to illustrate the points that you made, the solar rightly so, because we're looking at a double facade here, where we have basically an inner thermal threshold, it's triple pane glaze, likely. Then we have a cavity space and then we have an outer glass cavity. But we have at least, I mean, first illustrate your criticism again of similar situations in HoloLunu with a choke bolt at the top. Yeah, we're talking about the gold bond building or the gold bond building as it now looks after it was remodeled. It was originally a plain 1960s box pretty much with a facade that was the same on all four sides, which in one sense is not that good because it's not taking any climatic variations into account from the direction of the sun or the direction of the prevailing wind. But what they did to jazz it up and make it look more 21st century was to create an exterior sort of glass facade over a section of the existing facade. And all that does particularly because the afternoon sun hits it is create a pocket of air that's going to get a lot more heated up. And here in HoloLulu, we don't need to be creating pockets of warm air to help insulate or keep people inside warm. Our problem is that we're often too warm inside. So in a cold climate, there can be a use for such an architectural element. But here in the Hawaiian islands, unless particularly if it's facing the sun, it is not only not of any use, it's actually detrimental because you have to be using more energy to cool your building because you've created a pocket of hot air within your structure, which you don't need. Absolutely. And that way, ironically, they wanted to make it look 21st century and they made it a form like early 20th century puzzle where now you need to AC that more to be able to be livable inside. And they should have done what this building down there which is by Perkins and Will and it's a biomedical research center. They put the shading louvers, the jellices that are retractable behind and the reason or the way to sell this to your client because it's gonna cost you twice as much because it's a double facade, so it doubles the cost. But it also minimizes the cost of maintenance for the very filigree and delicate louvers who might be damaged by the wind and they can if they're protected by the outer shell of glass. And that's how it's basically sold. And it's facing, the lake is, you see on that center picture on the right, you see this historic building in the center, this is facing the lake, the lake is east. So we know that this building in that picture on the left is facing south. And if it's facing south and the louvers are down as you see in the detail to the left of that, it's good because it keeps the thermal threshold where the sun could get through and be converted into heat, keeps that sun out. While in the winter you move the louvers up and you get past the solar gain. And there's also vents in there that you see they're open, they have to ventilate it over the summer. So they actually, if you would wanna do something like that, which we still say is a little bit like, okay, you wear a hat with a wind turbine on and thin film PV layer to run the fan that drags the heat out of your too much clothing. So it's a little around the corner so you could do it easier and just be cold, easy breezy. So we're not saying you should, but if you would wanna do it, then that would be the way to as to learn something. So here comes the shock that I warned you in the audience for because until a little, not that long ago, there was something else on that side. And that we see on the next slide. And that's very shocking to you because you as a preservationist, you love to keep old stuff, especially good old stuff. So this here, we talked about, you probably can figure who the architect is because that was sort of his signature style to go up against his mentor and master, Mies van der Rohe, who was the rectangular boxy guy. And there was Bertrand Goldberg who reveled against his master and said, no, architecture needs to be organic. And which are the most iconic twin towers of his that we already covered in a lot of times? These are the corn cobs, right? Yeah, they're the corn cobs in there. That's the Marina City development that's very famous in Chicago, which was created in the late 1950s, early 1960s. And they're very distinctive cylindrical buildings with rounded lanais on them. So they really do stand out. And as you've pointed out, and still are a desirable place to live. So they've maintained a good reputation and desirability even for many decades after their construction. Yeah, and so had this building here because there aren't that many of Bertrand Goldberg and he's certainly an institution in architecture in Chicago. I saw the building the last time, the picture on the right in the middle as I labeled it here, 2010. I was there with my Perry students and I took a picture of it, that picture, not having any idea that next time took me 10 years to come back, shame on me, but it wasn't there anymore. It was replaced by the building that we just saw that in fact they wanna even add onto it. And it would then look like in that little picture at the center of the top as a rendering. And interesting is we have Ginny Gang in Chicago, right? With her Huula Tower. And she was, and this is Michael, if you can get the bottom right. This is someone that Jay likes a lot who is Mr. Kimmelman. And Mr. Kimmelman is an architectural critic as we, I guess, take on the role to be that here in Honolulu. And he was very critical about the plans to demolish that and he reached out to Studio Gang, Ginny Gang and her firm. And they made a proposal, and that was, I labeled, I looked it up, that was in 2012. So when I took the picture and saw it, it was very timely to soon to be scrutinized. And they basically made this proposal to basically keep the building while still satisfying the needs of expanding and they put this tower that looks very sort of scandalous and almost visionarily impossible. But they say they consulted engineers and they said there is enough structural integrity there that you could do that and let's believe that. But obviously, the clients didn't wanna listen. This is an institutional client. We know this very well from our age when we had told them a couple of times not to tear things down as just a cross-architecture hall, which we will get to also either in this show or the other one with Met. And they basically knocked it down and built absolutely new one. This is rather sort of bad these days because everywhere people getting increasingly aware of that we have to keep things in the life cycle. Whenever we can, we need to keep things. And only if we cannot, and I'm sure they had arguments, but again, Kimmelman and Studio Gang basically said, okay, we understand you need more spaces. You need more program. Here you are. So is that shocking enough for you, disorder? Yeah, it's very unpleasant. And when you say we need to keep things, there are two reasons for that. The first being, from architectural standpoints, there are buildings which are never going to be replicated, that are never going to be designed that way or built that way again. And buildings like that need to be preserved simply because we need to keep our history and things that you'll never replicate. But secondly, every time you tear something down and build something new, you're using a lot more resources. You're using a lot more energy. If you can not do the whole demolition and rebuilding process, but make use of things which have already been through the construction process, you're benefiting way more than starting from scratch and you're saving money too in many cases. Yeah, and why we threw in the show quote at the top right, which is the Royal Hawaiian Center, that's why we do this on air every week for many, many years to raise, as Jay calls it, raise public awareness and to inform and educate clients, slash owners of buildings because sometimes they don't even know what gyms they have. Right? Absolutely. And so, I mean, the Hawaiian Center is still there, but it's very, very altered. It's very cheesecake and Tiffany's to a degree that you don't recognize, but it's luckily still there. And as we did the show about the Hermes store that some people from the other side of the world, some French people saw that potential and basically retrofitted it back to its original tropical brutalist nature and added louvers and added vegetation, did a really good job. For that reason, it's gonna be in our book. And so we would encourage clients to do that more. And certainly again, Kimmelmans and Jeanie's proposal had validity and certainly again, that's why the Royal Hawaiian Center is brutalism. This is certainly brutalism. And you can, the point is one of the excuses is, oh, it's not up to energy code. Well, you can bring it up to energy code. You can use vacuum insulation, panels that you put on the inside of concrete. In fact, even in new buildings by Zaha, for example, in Wolfsburg, which is the headquarters of your favorite BWs, she built a science center, the Fano, which is a new building that they basically used insulation on the inside to show off the baton bruit on the outside, which is what's the other. So let there not be excuses. This is what we basically say. Let's work with what one has. And they call this gray energy. By the way, the gray energy is the energy used in the whole life cycle, in the circular economy and ecology of a building. And it's kind of absurd when you have discussions with developers who say, oh no, to keep it would be too expensive. How can this be? It's often an excuse and a lame excuse. Let's just go for the last remaining minute to the next slide, because if you build new, you get things like this here, which again, we would say, hey, where is the double facade? There is only a single facade and how is that gonna perform in both winter and summer? And here they basically, I did the boat tour, I said at the beginning of the show sequence, right? And the very knowledgeable guy basically had the intel here that he said, oh, this building prided itself to have something super cool that reminds us in Honolulu, they call this ocean or seawater air conditioning, that's how they call it. Here they said it's river air conditioning. So they use the walk, the temperature of the river to run it through the thermal mass of the building and then loop it. Well, in the river, it basically caused the fish to die and algae to grow because you were warming up. Hans Crock, the great partner of Alfred Yee that we did a show about who is fostering OTEC told me that in the ocean, it's not the case because the mass of the ocean is so huge that if you inject it back into the zone where the water already has that temperature, you can actually do that. I was skeptical about that, but when Hans told me it works, I believe him. But here it didn't work out. They actually have to stop that. And since the whole thermal conditioning of the building is based on that, they're pretty screwed, right? So here we go, right? You tear down a building like the one by Goldberg and then you build something like this here that doesn't really work that well. Oh, well, I guess. So that's a kind of a sad and bad closing note, but it is because we're at the end of the show. So more to come and discuss next time. You, however, will be on air for the next three weeks with some interesting Doko Momo shows that I, and I'm sure you too, look forward to. And until then, stay happy and healthy. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.