 This is Education Matters, and I'm your host, Cara Monley. Today we have a very special two-part program. Voice yourself part one with my guest, University of Hawaii School of Architecture faculty members, Kathy Ho-Shar and Karla Tsoyalta. Stay tuned for part two with your host, Martin Despeying, on his show Humane Architecture at Five with his special guest. Today we're going to cover an exciting idea at an action festival called Building Voices to be held on April 22nd, Earth Day at the Hawaii State Capitol. University of Hawaii School of Architecture conceived of this unique event to promote the value of design, engage designers with the community, learn from local and global perspectives, debate complex issues about Hawaiian-Hawaiian archipelago, and collect diverse ideas and collaborate on shaping an agenda for change. Oh, so welcome, Kathy and Karla. Hi, thanks for having us. Oh, we're so glad to have you and learn more about this really exciting and important event. So tell us more about Building Voices and how it all was conceived and some of the details. Well, it started out really at the School of Architecture going to the community and asking them what were the challenges facing Hawaii. So we had a kind of listening tour where we engaged our students, our faculty and the professional community and the community at large to ask them three big questions and they were what are the largest challenges facing Hawaii? What do you see that Hawaii can offer to export to the rest of the world and what were their hopes for Hawaii in the next 50 years? And from that we gathered a smattering of challenges, issues and opportunities that we then used to frame this symposium on April 22nd. So were the challenges relating to architecture building or beyond broader than that? You know, we based it as a built environment discussion but we were just asking people for their off the top of their head responses. What bothers you? What are you challenged by? So it could be something like traffic or too much air conditioning or not enough walkable communities or it could be I have children and I just don't see them being able to live in this place when they grow up. It's just the challenges that people face day to day. I think we framed them within the context of how we as designers can then engage those problems and aren't those all related to a built environment? They are and so now then what was the next step? You went ahead and you identified these challenges and then how did the festival? Right, so we had those primary goals that you listed and then worked within our network to gather designers from all disciplines and to gather the people not only within the design community but the people we work with and the people we work for to put together a number of speaker sessions, workshops, panels that would all talk about those issues and problems at the state capitol and serve large multi-format multidisciplinary discourse. Okay, so I know we have a couple of slides and this is the brochure, Building Voices Right, so where is it going to be at the state capitol on the grounds and is there a charge? It is free and open to the public so we welcome everybody to the event. We're taking over multiple levels of the capitol so Carla will talk about we have a great exhibit that's going to take place in the open-air rotunda and then we're using the senate and house conference rooms on the second floor for some of our breakout sessions and the basement auditorium and some of the classrooms there too. It's also an opportunity for people to come and visit the state capitol as one of the sort of significant pieces of architecture in Honolulu. And so it's on Earth Day, right? It is. Next week, this Saturday. It is this Saturday and it was deliberately on Earth Day to celebrate really the built environments. Discourse has to deal with how we deal with our planetary issues. Okay, so the built environments can you explain that a little bit more what that means, what that term means, the built environment? I guess the built environment is pretty much all of the spaces that we have something to do with the design of. So it could go from literally our cities, master planning, infrastructure, landscape architecture, architecture could be a building, it could be an interior space, it could be a small inhabitable space of any sort. Did I say pretty much? It could even be related to certain product design and certain services that are related to also architectural space or space in general. Right, now I know we have some slides. Will that help us to identify some of those spaces? Let's go to... What is this? Well, this slide is really just taking a look. This is a very Hawaii centric symposium and set of issues, saying that Hawaii's unique geographic environmental, ecological, social, political context makes this a very special place in which to deal with our built environment. And then our next slide. This is a picture of most of Honolulu and specifically the Waikiki Ahupua. We have a number of workshops and sessions that look specifically at climate change, sea level rise and how that's going to affect Hawaii and Honolulu at a large scale, urban scale. Right, okay, and I think we have a couple more slides of, oh that's a map of Waikiki. Right, and a large part of our discussion is also connecting Hawaii specifically as a unique place tied to this culture and that cultural lens being one way of understanding our ecology and our environment. And so this workshop is being led by WCIT, Rob Yopa and his team will engage the idea of Waikiki but within the context of a Native Hawaiian understanding. I see, and I think we have another couple more slides. Okay, what is this one? This is a magazine cover, Metropolis. Right, so you know I think a lot of the problems go back to affordability. You know when you're talking about affordable housing, cost of living, price of food, cost of gas, transportation. So we are inviting the acting director Javier Vendrell from Rural Studio which is a community design center run out of Arbor University and they do design built with their students and they focus on the very very low budget, low tech type of architectural projects that serve the community. So at the festival then, how would that be part of a display and you said a workshop? Well Javier was the chair of the jury of the competition so he's already involved and has already been participating. You're going to talk about the competition now so there was a competition as part of this festival is that right? Yes, there was a competition. We essentially called for innovative solutions for all of these issues that Kathy was talking about in a way to have some visual provocations. They're only ideas. Visual provocations, another term. It's a good word, right? It is, it's great. To go with all this discourse that we're going to be having on Saturday. But what I was trying to say is that Javier Vendrell has already been involved and he's already been looking at some of the problems and some of the projects that have been submitted to the competition and he's going to be talking a little bit about that image probably that you just saw and the projects that they're working on and also going to be introducing the winners of the competition and giving the awards. We'll talk a little bit more about that after the break. What kind of were they mostly architecture students or landscapes? What kind of applications did you receive? So we had 111 entries. Originally the registration included entries from people from 20 different countries. No kidding. And we have I believe within the awards there's somebody from Spain there's a well I'll talk a little bit about who the winners are later but I think there are a lot of different ideas that are addressing some of these issues in a hybrid way. So we asked for prototypes that would address more than one issue. So maybe you'll see something like housing that is also addressing food, food production or growing our own food or perhaps an infrastructure that is also generating energy. So you start to see these mixed prototypes that we'll talk a little bit about later. Okay. But you know in Hawaii of course affordability and homelessness is always a big issue. So were those issues addressed in the competition? There are definitely some proposals for those. How are those issues addressed in part of any of the other displays or talks? Well I guess in the talks because the talks were shaped by the problems themselves. We have an affordable housing panel. So we're bringing together the designers and the policy makers and some of the nonprofits who deal with housing. And here in Hawaii? Here in Hawaii. So who are some of those speakers? So we have Harrison Rue coming in from the City and County TOD division. We have Kevin Wilcock who just moved here from the mainland who did a lot of affordable housing up in San Francisco. We have James Koshiba from and we have Jesse Wu from Office of Public Housing and HUD. So we're bringing together not just designers but all of the people who create the fiscal and political framework. So this is a sympo... This is going to be a symposium. These speakers are going to be at a... Yeah, so there's roundtables. There's talk stories. And who can... So at the pub I know it's open. It's free. It's open to the public. And so have you... Are you expecting a lot of members of the public? Are they from schools or government? Who can attend? We hope anyone interested or caring about their environment can come, especially if they're interested in how designers are engaging some of these problems. Because I know there's just a lot of talk about the problem field but not how you would visualize a solution to that. So if anybody's interested in a lot of the visualization of that narrative we would hope they would come. Okay, and so tell me more about how the School of Architecture itself has been. I know that you coordinated this and you've been doing all the lay work and putting it together. Are you also having unique University of Hawaii School of Architecture displays and if so, what are they about? Go ahead. Well, in addition to the huge and monumental and awesome exhibit that's going to go up in the Rotunda. You need to talk about that. So we've been working on an exhibit which will display some selected entries from the competition. So you're going to be able to come and see even if you just stop by come and see some of these visual provocations that we've been talking about. Three-dimensional. There's a construct. There's a series of benches. There are eight islands. There are a series of benches that could be just talk and chat. They're inviting people to come and use them and sit and just come to the table and open up the conversation. And then there's also some vertical displays which will hold the boards and we'll be able to use at the school for pin-up space and putting other students' work in the future. And we've had a crew of over 20 students working not all of them at the same time but there's a lot of students that have been volunteering and have been working really hard for the past two weeks on this exhibit. It's been really generating great energy at the school and we're really excited to bring it. So it's only going to be up though the one day Saturday at the 22nd. It's a traveling exhibit. We're hoping to pre-launch on Thursday because the students are having an event at the School of Architecture. We're hoping to pre-launch on Thursday. What does pre-launch mean? Well, it's for the students. So it's their event. Release it bit by bit. And so they're part of it. We're only maybe going to be showing one of them and then we're bringing all aid to the State Capitol on Saturday. It's a pop-up event, so it's a pop-up exhibit but we're hoping that it can travel to other places so maybe you'll get a chance to see it later. Right, right. So do you already have scheduled other locations? We have some conversations but nothing that we can talk about yet. On this island or also on the new island? We would love to take it up to the new island. Yes. Maybe that can happen. Well, I think we're going to go to a break so let me remind everybody that this is Education Matters and we're talking about a wonderful special festival. This is part one of the program on Building Voices which is going to be at the State Capitol on Saturday. The April 22nd will be right back. Aloha. My name is Mikey Ho, which is Happy New Year and I hope it's a happy and prosperous new year for you. I'm Kelea Ikeena with the Grass Root Institute. Every week we partner with Think Tech Hawaii and produce a program called Ehana Kako. Let's work together. We bring together movers and shakers who are making a difference here in Hawaii making a better Hawaii for everyone. If you're interested in improving the economy, the government and society join us every week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. for Ehana Kako on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network until you see me then. Aloha. Hi, I'm Nicole Alexandrinos and I was born three weeks ago. Congratulations on being there for me for some of the few weeks of my life. I'm starting a new show, The Millennial Mind every Wednesday at 2 p.m. for the month of April where we'll go over some of the reasons why millennials are some of the most anxious at the moment. Welcome back to Education Matters with my guests. Kathy and Carla from the University of Hawaii they're both architects and they have been instrumental in setting up the new the special festival at the University that's going to be at the capital on Saturday part of Earth Day called Building Voices and so we just heard about some of the interesting panels interesting visual provocations that were instigated as part of a competition. So Kathy, tell us more about some of the panels and some of the speakers. Okay, so in the morning how we tried to frame the symposium day was to take a look at the large scale issues in the morning and then to get towards a finer grain in the afternoon and then to finish with a large closing plenary session where everyone rehashes and kind of gets to next steps and action items. So in the morning we have two panel sessions in addition to our keynotes one that looks at landscape and water sensitive urbanism and that is a panel moderated by one of our faculty members Judith Stilgenbauer and has a landscape architect Joel Kurokawa somebody from CITAR, the UH Andy Kaufman, Lauren Roth Wendy Megadol and Daniel Spirindelli so a collection of people looking at water management and resources from both academic and practice perspectives. We also have a panel looking at decolonization of cities so looking at urban design and how we can look at a different model for that and again there we have Konia Freitas from Hawaii Nuiakea moderating and we have panel members Ramsey Tom from PBR Annie Koh from Urban and Regional Planning and Sean Connolly who is the founder of After Oceanic and has this great website and they're there again just to talk about the issues and to sort of give their topic a platform and a megaphone because I don't think people really understand what decolonization means Exactly, what does that mean having people move to the separate I will let people go to the symposium and find out what that means But importantly I think a big part of it is to not just talk about things and to have people talk about their work and ideas but to synthesize it at the end of the day so we do have a really strong closing plenary panel where we've asked people across different industries and disciplines to come and talk about the day and to articulate how we can actually move forward Senator Donna Van Della Cruz we have the Vice President for Budget and Finance for the UH, Kelbert Young we have Karen Ume-Moto from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning Kevin Miyamura and Phillip White both practicing architects in Hawaii framing that dialogue And what time do you think the closing plenary is? That is at 4.30 and that's moderated by Cam Napier from Pacific Business News And where is that going to be? That will be in the auditorium So Carla tell us a little bit now we have wonderful announcements about the competition We do We are ready to announce the winners of the competition I think we actually have some slides here The very first prize goes to a project titled Outside House by Erin Moore a float architectural research and design She is an architect and also a professor at the University of Oregon And what you are seeing here is an image of one of the pavilions The project is actually two pavilions So her submission was this project but it included two pavilions So if you come to the state capitol on Saturday you will be able to see a little bit more of the project and some of the images and she is actually flying in and she is going to be here with us answering questions and talking about her project which is really exciting So anyway, just to talk a little bit about it this is a perfect example of creating minimum impact on the land There are two pavilions They are less than 120 square feet One is outdoors which is the one you are seeing you are looking at right now in this picture It has a deck, an outdoor kitchen and it has a hidden outdoor shower and there is also another one which is an enclosed pavilion It is kind of like a reflection It is located in a property in Maui an upcountry Maui and it is built and it is the only built submission actually to the competition I see, but it is only for climates that can allow outdoor living So it is really interesting I have a little quote from one of the jury members He said, the design is developed around the understanding that the home is not only a private interior space but all the land no matter where you live is really beautiful and that is hopefully what we are trying to promote I think that is something to think about Great, and then we have another slide for the next winner Okay, so the second prize goes to Cristina Holcomb and it is an idea for an urban market There is a series of vertical pavilions but they are all spaces for growing hydroponics It is next to the Kapalama Canal next to the community college that is located there and it is also intended to be an education center And where is Cristina from? Cristina is a student at the School of Architecture at the University of Hawaii So this is Honolulu The urban market is in Honolulu That's how exciting Is she almost ready to graduate? No, she is a very young student at the School of Architecture Very exciting The next slide is going to be the third prize which is a compost playground also a very interesting idea Growing Parks for Growing Communities and he is proposing John Colburn is the winner John Colburn who is also a University of Hawaii School of Architecture student They were very excited about this event and we had a lot of students submit and you are going to see a lot of their work displayed at the exhibit on Saturday and he has an idea for composting and not having to drive your compost but maybe have it really not having to drive your recycling really far away and using these new prototypes for composting within your own neighborhood How much space does that take? I don't really know how big it is It's a small pavilion but his basic idea is about playing compost and the pavilion to educate people about recycling and composting and resources and also creating a public space We have a couple more slides but the slides essentially are kind of telling us it's just a teaser really because I invite you all to come and see these projects at the State Capitol again on Saturday We have a couple of them who are practicing architects here within the city of Honolulu and some are also architecture students and then the next slide is citations because there are a lot of really interesting projects the jury decided that they wanted to give honorable mentions and also citations for ideas that were really good and you'll see another there's a series of architecture students there's people from other community design centers and then there's an architecture firm from Spain in this list So all of the winners, the honorable mentions and the citations will be displayed at the festival That is correct We'll be able to see the images that go with these words and these titles I wanted to say that we had a really interesting jury This competition So the competition was anonymous I was part of the organizing team but I was present at the jury but I didn't really talk a lot during the jury for confidentiality and anonymity and we had a jury of 11 people for them here met at the Charlow House Kuhao Zane director of design and marketing for Zig Zane We had Healoa Johnston director of the arts at the Honolulu Museum of Art We had Joe Ferraro which is a founding partner for our jury and we also had Andrew Tang who works for the city and county of Honolulu on projects related to transit oriented developments which there are a lot of also in the proposals and then we had a series of people abroad on Skype that judged the competition together so it was really interesting it was a collaboration from different countries we had different time zones So were the submissions all because so many of them are three dimensional are they presented orally or all in writing Everything is presented the competition asked for four boards which are tabloid run by 17 and then you have to communicate using graphics drawings and then there was a written statement that also goes with the proposal so it was what everybody interpreted from the submission So it's really interesting so now having had the competition and identifying these winners what's the next step for them what's the aspiration of this imposing the festival having identified these great potential projects out there is there an opportunity for them to actually realize their we hope that's the hope I capture the imagination of the public or the design community or the policy makers because at all levels some of these aspirational visions require some change So it's the first step in putting it out there and then encouraging and publicizing that this is an opportunity to better use our built environment by these great great pieces and the power of designers and the power of designers what we can do is design, what we can do to help solve problems and make our cities more livable I think is really important So in general though what is the next step I mean after this festival is it something that you're looking forward to doing on a regular basis I know you said you might want you do want it to be a moving event We want there to be follow through definitely we're not doing this as a one day effort that doesn't go anywhere I think our goal is to affect change or to create some momentum for either end the university and our professional communities It will be really interesting at the end of Saturday to see what people think and how we can actually move forward Are there other states that put on something similar or other schools that put on something similar I think the symposium format is pretty typical but I think this taking the symposium to the state capitol really working closely with members of the government and other people in the community and then to pair it with an international competition so that it's not just people talking in stuffy rooms but there's this great exhibit with visuals makes it something somewhat different We hope that it's something a little bit different and unique even though there are other models that are very interesting trying to get people involved We just have a few more seconds I'm just going to have you Kathy look right into camera too and just remind everybody what's happening on Saturday Okay so please everyone come to the state capitol April 22nd Saturday we have events all day from 8.30 to 5.30 We have the exhibit, we have many many speakers members of our community and we would love for you to join us Thank you and is there a website to go to? Yes there's a website, the official website is buildingvoices.org Buildingvoices.org You can always also go to the school of architecture U.H. Mendova U.H. School of Architecture Okay well on that, thank you so much Kathy Thank you for having us Congratulations to you and to the winners of the competition and we look forward to everybody stay tuned for part two with our guest host Martin Desbang Thank you so much and aloha