 Well, to have you back to this or a show, Human Humane Architecture on this Think Tech Hawaii. This is the 274th show, and Eric, the accumulated viewership is as of this moment. Currently Humane Architecture's got 14,751 views. All right, and it's, of course, not about quantity, but quality. And that being said, we're back on volume 11 with you, Matt, and welcome back. Thank you, good to be here. At your Boston base, giving us the banish booze that we desperately need, we think. And via drei Glatzköpfe von der Tankstelle, which means the three bald guys from the gas station, it's only two of us, me, Martin, this bang from the bathroom of its Waikiki Grand, but we're gonna have the third one, the Soto Brown in his Bishop Museum, once he's out of the traffic on H1, which he said will be in supposedly five minutes. So let's get started and talk about him while he's not here, Matt. First slide up, Eric, fast. Thank you. Now, in all seriousness, we go back to show quoting at the top, because we were arguing with the Soto last time after the show because shame on me, I'm always having pinned the picture on Zoom where, what the audience sees. So I did not see that he was joining us secretly and quietly, and so I never was aware of that, so he never joined, but this time this will not happen again. And then he said, he watched the show and he said it went shockingly well without him and Matt, we respectfully disagree with that, right? I, there was, went shockingly bad, badly without him, I would say. Exactly. We can say all this because he isn't here either again. And we also need him because at the top right, we're zooming in because he has been on this island, which we say we can learn a lot from your practices for the longest and then you second longest and me the shortest, but he has also experienced in that temper in the cold and that's why you see him there as bundled up then on that white stuff in his youth. Exactly. There's cute little DeSoto. And then Eric, if you can go to the very left because he keeps saying, okay, I will never go back to this cold. I can't handle it. So at the very top left is what he was happy to return to. There he is even cuter. And he wears these hats that we talked about on the right that DeSoto's former Bishop is him colleague Jim who runs this, I said antique, which is probably not what he likes to hear. We should call it vintage store of things in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, which architecturally is not unsimilar to what brings us back to your project, which is the Harvard School of Engineering because these buildings down there look very much similar to the Royal Hawaiian. They're a stereotomic and they have a few punched openings into it, which we said in the case of the Royal Hawaiian and some sort of interesting way works here as well. Because usually when they import architecture from elsewhere it doesn't work that well equally, especially not when it's all glass buildings that in Boston at this time probably helps with passive solar but that thing doesn't exist here. So anyway, so tell us about the context, the situation for the project that we see down there, Matt. Well, I think that we sort of introduced the idea of the competition that through which the original project was awarded ultimately to us, but there was some, there was a lot of, let's almost call it baggage or context that came with the idea of building such an important sort of new structure on Harvard's campus, which really at the time there had been a couple of years since Harvard had developed major new parts of their campus and they were expanding the campus to the other side of the Charles River to the southern banks of the Charles River. The business school was there already of course, but this was a lot of land that they were considering expanding the campus onto. And there was always the question, that we were at being asked to answer, well, what is Harvard architecturally from the perspective of landscapes and physically? And so we were, this is just an image of the classic, the sort of the central Harvard yard around which all the freshmen eat and sleep during their first year at Harvard. And that's kind of the quintessential Harvard experience. And a big preoccupation of those early days of the design efforts were, what will be the, how will Harvard be defined on its 21st century campus? Yeah. And again, these trees look naked and there are because this is deciduous and this is temperate climate. So that's starting to get winter or starting to be spring or one or the other. So that's the situation we're basically facing here, the context. And let's jump into the project with the next slide, which once again shows a compilation of sort of multi-duty ways you guys work and sort of multi-media ways. And yeah, I explain what's behind what we see. Yeah. So this is the original competition winning entry for the project, which was basically, it was a almost square site, as you can see, although a couple of the sides bend a little bit. It was a sort of funny shape. And the idea for the project originally was to build sort of build a basement, exactly that shape going down into the ground that was contiguous across the whole site. And then above grade to build a series of buildings, in this case four buildings, each of them with mostly life sciences research programmed into it that would be obviously connected through the basements everywhere and then connected above grade by a series of multi-story pedestrian sort of open-air pedestrian walkways that would allow people to move back and forth. And the point where those pedestrian walkways met the buildings were these winter garden spaces that really were in our mind, if you see that sketch in the upper left, kind of the idea of this courtyard that the buildings form sort of turning vertically and going up inside the buildings. So this was in a sense at a very, it's at a somewhat smaller scale, our response to the Harvard Yard, which is still to create a kind of an outdoor public space, something that everyone could participate in, but then use that to inform the architecture, perhaps more than it is actually at the old Harvard Yard campus, but still very much in that kind of spatial and community spirit. Yeah. And let's look at these interstitial spaces, a little closer in the next slide, because this view of the, as you just said, the competition model is a little better here. It's interesting for me to look at the buildings themselves, they look very sort of rationalist, mine at von Gerkan just passed away, right? And so it almost looks Gerkan-y in some ways here, or Ungas-like, and then on the inside it really breaks open and free, right? Is that- So interesting, it's a lot more interesting to think about this as a sort of a way, a station stop in the process of getting to the final design that we'll eventually get to here, because also bundled up with this concern about what should the new Harvard be and how is the new Harvard Yard gonna emerge in Alston was a really sort of inbuilt conservatism about what the outward looking side of the buildings should really be. And at that time, this is directly across the street from the business school, which is a very conservative environment. There was kind of a thought that, from the outside to the street-facing parts of these buildings, it should be more of a sort of a stone facade with a kind of a gridded appearance and still these were larger than average windows and this was a very high-performing facade. And we actually sort of subverted a little bit because we made all the stone panels have operable parts, the stone parts were the parts that moved to naturally ventilate the spaces. But then if we said that was the approach to the outside, on the inside, we could sort of go a little bit more crazy and define a whole different environment. So we always sort of joke that, at one point the gridded facade sort of turns towards the inside and it just gets kind of swallowed up. Almost like, if you remember that, the scene from the first Aliens movie when it kind of grabs onto somebody's, the guy's face and there's like an umbilical coming off of it. That was almost the image we had of this thing. And that's kind of how it looked actually in principle. Reminds me a lot of the founding father Gunther's case of the Parisa Platz in Berlin, where by Stimman, the head of the building department, zoning department, basically a sign prescribed the old style free war for the whole city. And then it was basically two guys who didn't behave and one was Gunther and the other one was, this reminds me of was Gary, who was behaving on the outside and then freaking out on the inside with his big fish. And Gunther basically said, I'm not even doing it on the outside and fought it through with the museum there, right? So this is, it's a really interesting kind of a thing of talking psychology and architecture and smuggling in things and smuggling things through. And yeah, so that's great. I'm glad you point this out. And there is the Soto, welcome. Good morning or a good day or whatever the heck it is. I'm finally here, but I hardly know where I am. It's okay, we're gonna slide you in smoothly. All right. And I'm gonna do it this way because I was same as you and we bad guys, we shouldn't even be in cars on freeways here, but I came back from the poly and both of us don't get it wrong because you just sort of, I'm not repeating, you're flipping over from way back, which made you hit the title page of the start that ties it when you were young in your beetle. So we're driving safe. Yes, but I had the chance because usually I'm into Stanley Chang's newsletter right before the show, but I got something even more exciting from you, Matt. Explain me what that is, what you sent me, which I then eagerly watched right away. Yeah, this is an interesting program called fellow VIP, which is a kind of bicycle or a tandem bicycle interview conducted on the streets of various cities in Germany. And this happened to be an episode of my partner, Stefan, with the host there bicycling around Stuttgart. So Eric, we give this to Jay as it's just suggestion because isn't it kind of hypocritical? We're supposedly the easy breezy show and we're doing it in a frigid museum and then with a fan operating interior bathroom here. So I think we should. And again, where I have my old bicycle repaired at the McCully bike shop. The one guy there, basically we started talking. He said, oh, Jay and I go back decades and we were the bicycling pioneers on this island. So it should be an easy pitch to you, Jay, right? So let's Jay, I can't imagine trying a bicycle. No, no, it is not the Jay of 2022. Yeah, no, he was. And so it's true. Can you imagine how great your show would be if you were bicycling through, you know, Kakaako and talking about this stuff? So this is a great idea. And then, you know, this is a tandem, but not behind each other, but next pair beside each other, the two people. We should throw in some screenshots from that for the next show and let me give the audience more of an image for you. I can't picture it either. I'll send you the link. Okay, okay. I was about to send it to you, but usually we're fine giving you the German learning sentence and this would be a whole show in German. So I'll give it to that. Yeah, no. But you will still enjoy it. I can at least look at it, even if I won't know what they're talking about. Yeah, no, it was really great, great edutainment and for everyone either, you know, already skilled in the German language or interested in you as you the soda and everyone else, you should definitely watch it. So it's, yeah, many of the things you're now talking about sort of resonates with me and you said, well, of course you heard parts of the stories, you know, over and over again, but having them all together, compiled in one piece is really compelling. So again, we're at the soda, we're now at the competition. We talked about how important architectural competitions are for getting the best project out of it last time. And so this is, as Matt just said, this is the competition model that we find out was sort of very sneaky in terms of trying to have, not to shock the audience with the banish boost too much to begin with and do this later. So this is really cool, you know, to have a competition model that's sort of, yeah, sort of- Are you saying that there was subterfuge? Are you saying they're covering things up, which they sprang on people afterwards? Or there are hidden things in the model that are not obvious to take a building off and then you discover something underneath it? No, it's more about what happens on the interior. That's what I meant. That's what I meant. Yeah, it looks innocent on the outside, but at the inside, it's, yeah, okay. You know, Stefan was saying something really interesting. This reminds me of when he was asked by the showmaster. He said, you know, between the competitions or the design and the building is finally completed. It takes years. They sit like five to seven years. So usually by the time, I mean, even if Arctic days try to be, really hit the spot with zeitgeist, they always miss it by then because of that reason, because seven years later, it's already outdated. So it's better to do something that it doesn't even try to be absolutely, you know, a victim of its time, but in best case being timeless, which is hard to, and you shouldn't, you know, be stressing yourself out to do that either, but you should just do that. What he says, what you think needs to be done and they will be right. And it won't be look old and outdated. By the way, I just saw us having to write the book about Honolulu, The Faden City Guide, the one that was, and it's out of print now, they were saying this about the convention center. And I share that with Phillip and he was a little annoyed about his colleagues about such an assessment. But that's what they said. You remember they said the convention center was already outdated by the time it was built. And we said, we would take a different take on it. And we would say, well, it really is very ambitious as far as the tectonics and the detailing, butt-joint glass and stuff, but it's just wrong in the tropics. That's the way we said we would say it, right? Because again, it is entirely enclosed, except whether they did, I do, I do have to say, they did build the roof to be an area where people could assemble. But as soon as that was publicized, everybody in the condos around the building said, oh, no, no, no, you can't have loud, you can't have loud events on the roof, which will bother all of us. So that shut down the possibility of having outdoor events at that particular venue. So it's not entirely the fault of the architects. It's just the things turned out. Yeah, and speaking of which, surrounding and looking at it from around and above, that gets us to the next slide, because that shows us the condition of the project. As you found it, or as you start to be, yeah, I mean, the existing, the status quo, so to speak, how you found it, right? And another challenge, one of the many challenges it was presenting, right? Right, so that project we were just looking at went on for a couple of years until about 2008, at which point the world, whatever they called it at the time, the world financial collapse, sort of brought the project to a close or to a pause point and Harvard restructured our contract and asked us to basically cap the site. So that basement, that five acre deep, a five acre wide, 60 foot deep basement, we needed to put a whole roof over it and protect all the openings and kind of basically protect the assets. So that's what you're seeing here. This is probably the least inspirational Danish project that's ever been inflicted on the world, but that was actually the final state of the project from about 2010 until 2013. Oh boy. Well, let's skip the next slide up and illustrate that going along with that challenge. So right, once the project did restart and Harvard had identified new occupants for the building, those new occupants developed a building program with us that looked nothing like the original one, even to the point that the column grid that was assumed to be usable for the below grade portions of the building and the above grade portions of the former design needed to be completely rethought. So what this sketch was basically intimating was you had a series of columns in an above grade building that wanted to be in one set of dimensions and a series of built columns below grade that were on a completely different pattern, let's say. And we had to figure out how to bring those two things together right at the ground plane, which was quite an engineering feat. You know, as again, as a lay person, I think this points out that the path between the theoretical and the planned to the real thing can have these huge diversions that you can't anticipate and what you plan for is not necessarily what the building's gonna look like. Right, right, or what it will do in the future, I think it raises lots of questions about the notion of kind of open-minded planning and how much a building can allow itself to evolve with new uses and new purposes. And speaking of planning gets us to the next slide because here's the plan, but why would this be of interest for us? Yudhisoto and I, we actually looked at our university, the University of Hawaii, Manoa, quite in detail and dedicated multiple shows to that. So when we're saying we're needing your mat, your booths so badly, it's not just us in Hawaii, but this might make us thinking we might also need that on campus because there's some recent developments that make our non-existing hair stand up. And I really love, there were the five questions at the end of the VIP Velo with Stefan. And one of them was like, okay, a building renovated or built new and he immediately said, rebuild whatever it takes. And that's what they, we, because I work for this institution, the University of Hawaii and Manoa, do totally wrong. They're tearing down, in fact, not some buildings that you might be sick of, but actually some modern master marvels and replace it with things without any competitions. And in a way that we don't think this is per year my favorite of your shows. One of your talks, the tradition of innovation and the evolution of the tradition of innovation. So just keep this in mind when we go through this here, the audience, this might be very educational for us up on the educational hill in Manoa. So the plan, explain us more, the color. Yeah, so what you're looking at here is actually a plan of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which was the ultimate occupant of our project in Austin. This is where they occupied space in Cambridge up until basically 2021 when they moved over into the new building. And so you can see that just in terms of the sort of the extent of the spaces they occupied and the, and I can just tell you that everything in orange here, the quality of the space in most of those buildings was very, very poor. They weren't necessarily in many cases designed to research buildings that was, there was very, it was very suboptimal space. There wasn't enough of it. And what we were essentially trying to illustrate here is you can see the red dashed outline of the new site in Austin, how much more compact they would be able to be accommodated in a new building configuration that brought everything more together. So that's really what this was about, was the organization of seeds in Cambridge along Oxford Street. Yeah, and speaking of organization, gets us to the next chart with just labeled program diagram. And on behalf of you guys, and he was actually speaking on behalf of you because he was saying, well, the most work in educational design we're having in the United States with our Boston firm, which you're heading. And he also mentioned these as the first typologies when he was asked about, you know, what he's all doing, what you guys are all doing. And he explained, he says, because it's so exciting because you're working with creative minds and people who never mind what we just said about you age, but potentially there too, I don't give up the hope on my employer so easily, is to work with all these eager people who wanna work for a better future, so work with them. But that being said, that also then comes with quite a complicated way because they're all meaning well, but there's many who have a saying and want something sort of synthesized that might be quite the challenge, right? Which this diagram that you know will tell us more about just gives us a clue, right? Right, yeah. I mean, this is basically, I mean to sort of sum this up, this is a graphic representation of the room program for the building. And it basically breaks down into three components about a third each. The first being obviously research facilities, so wet and dry research laboratories for things as diverse as bioengineering, robotics, soft materials research, mechanics and computer science. And then the second third of the program is teaching facilities. So all of the teaching efforts of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences moved to Austin. And so we have a whole complement of classrooms, teaching laboratory spaces and things of that nature, seminar rooms and group study spaces and so on and so forth. And then the final third is really amenity spaces that are constituted by the science library, the cafeteria that serves the whole building, conferencing spaces and things of that nature. So altogether it's a very diverse program, but one that, as you said, a program that's diverse that really gives us a chance in a way to step out of our own daily existence as architects and kind of live vicariously to our clients, right? Like how we get the chance in our work to be researchers or pseudo researchers for a couple of years or to be lawyers or to be doctors or whatever because we have to know so much about what they do that we really have to almost get in their shoes for a little bit to understand a bit. I'm gonna write, well, great closing note because it has to be, because we're at the end of another exciting 28 minutes and we see you again, but not before the new year because this is the concluding show in the year. And so we will see each other back, the three of us and you, the audience will see each other back. Well, you will see it on the fifth and we will be together on the fourth. And until then you can go back to the World Cup which we see behind you, Matt. Yeah. And we also let you go into some happy holidays. Let them be peaceful in the world, first and foremost and pleasant along with that. So happy holidays for all you guys. Thanks for your loyalty having watched us and we look forward to see you again in the fresh new year. Yes, likewise. Take care gentlemen. All the way everyone. Bye-bye. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.