 Okay, we're back. We're live. It's a given Monday morning at 9 a.m. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is ThinkTech. And more specifically, this is Community Matters. And we're talking again about architecture. Because Kevin Newt is here, and he gave us a show a couple of weeks ago. And we're talking about animation in architecture. So Kevin, welcome back to the show. It's so nice to see you yet again. Good morning, Jay. Thanks for having me back. So can you give us a handle on exactly what this is? Can you make sure everybody understands the logic of it? Right. Again, thanks, Jay, for giving me this second opportunity. If we could bring up the first image, I'll get straight in. So our ancestors 10,000 years ago would have evolved, grown up. Our physiology would have evolved in this kind of environment. Basically, mostly outdoors follow change. Next image. And then there's been research over the last decade or two indicating that contact with nature and natural change in particular lower stress and improves attention. Next image. Unfortunately, most people in the developed world now spend over 90% of their lives in environments not unlike this, where nature and change are completely absent. Next image. Many of us work or live or both in environments where it appears that nature is entirely absent. Next image. However, in most cases, the vast majority, the largest wilderness on the planet is only the thickness of a piece of glass away from us. And it's a particular piece of nature that is characterized by constant change. Next. There's one fly in the ointment here. The buildings are, we all learn in architecture school 101, meant to protect us from the weather. So how could you bring the movements of the weather indoors without actually compromising shelter? And that's been the question that I've been looking at over the last few years. Next image. So I've identified with some help three very simple strategies for bringing natural change movement into buildings without actually compromising shelter. Enclosing weather animated change, basically courtyards. Projecting weather animated change onto interior surface, that's the middle image here. And then back projection onto a translucent surface. Now all three of these images are happened to be leaf movement, but they could be sun, they could be rain. Next image. So that took care of, and there's evidence to show that it does reduce stress and improve attention, which is important when you're in buildings for eight, nine hours a day and you're not free to just go take a walk. So in essence, if you are free to go take a walk in nature, if there is nature around, it's not a problem, but most of us, most of the working population have to be at their workplace. So trying to bring nature to them rather than insist on them going to nature because it's not practical during a weekday very often. If we could go back to that image, sorry Eric. The other component of this is that green buildings, a large part of green building is passive environmental control where instead of HVAC you're using natural ventilation, instead of electrical lighting you're using daylighting, shading, passive solar, rainwater harvesting. These are really, really important, very effective, sustainable practices, but they're grossly underused compared to what they could be. One of the reasons for that is that the general public are really not aware of them even when they are being used because they are so passive. So it turns out, if we could go to the next image, that the movements of the sun, the wind and the rain, the sun, wind and rain are the usual three suspects in passive environmental control for buildings, but they're also primary in natural animation of indoor spaces. So I've been looking at how to combine the two. In other words, to make passive environmental controls like daylighting, shading, solar heating, etc., visible so that not only will building occupants be stimulated and calmed by those effects, but also made aware of these increasingly important passive environmental controls. And the final slide, please. So here are an array of some examples where the movement or a passive environmental control strategy is being made visible to building occupants. So the hope is that that will start a conversation along the lines of, well, what is that effect? And then the explanation will be, well, that is in order to save us money, we will also save the planet by using less electrical power and therefore less environmental damage. So there is both a poetic, a physiological, and an environmental component to this, Jay. And that's kind of the background to what I was showing you a couple of weeks ago. And I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that. I'll give you a scenario. There you are in downtown. You're in a big conference room. There's a developer next to him, a banker. And they say, Kevin, pitch me. I'm going to develop this big project. It's going to be 500 residential units. How does this play into my project? What a great scenario. Do you actually know any of those people that you could introduce? You may not want to meet them. Right. Well, at the heart of even the toughest banker, there's a human being and a child, actually, inside of all of us. I've said it recently to my own students that many of these environmental experiences with nature, we've already had before the age of five. So it really, they're core kinds of experiences that resonate across cultures. I could show this to somebody from Japan or from Germany or anywhere else, and they would recognize. So it's kind of universal. But back to your scenario, Jay, these are things that will help improve reduced stress. Well, stress is a killer. You know, chronic stress. You're in an environment long enough, working or living, where you're constantly stressed. It has long-term detrimental effects on your physical health, as well as your mood, of course. And so the idea that you could live in an environment 30 stories off the ground and yet still be connected with nature, be calmed by nature or not, what happens when you can't go for those long hikes? Well, actually, if we live long enough, all of us will become a member of that group of people we commonly call the disabled, where we can't walk a long way. So what happens then? Well, if you could stay in an apartment and still feel that you are in contact with nature and natural change, even on the 33rd floor, then I believe that that would be an important factor in somebody purchasing and saying, hey, you know, it's going to cost me, I don't know, a couple thousand dollars more, but this environment is entirely different from the one next door, where those spaces are static and there's no nature in them. So I think it's, you know, what is contact with nature worth? I think I can't put a dollar value on it, but what is an extra higher quality standard of living going to be worth to somebody? That would be kind of the approach I might take, Jay. Great question, though. On the 33rd floor, I can't go for a long walk. So we cannot include that, not unless we have a treadmill or something built into the system. But what about all the other things? Can you drill down for a moment and tell us what this apartment on the 33rd floor is going to look like with the animation? Well, on the 33rd floor, we're not going to have any growing trees unless you've got a low nigh. You could definitely, you know, use the wind effects on the lanai. There's a video that I'm anxious to show you in a moment that actually shows some of these animations. We showed it a little bit a couple of weeks ago, but it was a much too low resolution to really show on TV. So this one hopefully will look a little better. But back to the 33rd floor then, up there, you're not going to be away above the tree tops, of course. But you can, and we've done it in simulation at least, you can have artificial plants in the sense of something that moves close to the movement of leaves. You can also use screens so that, and I'll show you an example of that in a moment, the air movement immediately outside your windows on the 33rd floor then could actually tell you, or the screens, could actually tell you about the speed of that air movement, which is hard to tell if you've got hermetically sealed windows, which they very often are for safety reasons. The rain, likewise, a small amount of water on a surface can reveal not only wind movement, but also the slightest amount of rain. So at a push you can do this actually directly, retrofit onto windows. Better if you've got a slight small an eye, but both would be possible. On an office building, for example, they often don't have it on an eye, so it would be necessary to retrofit onto the actual window. Let's take a short break, Kevin. Sure. This is ThinkTek Hawaii Community Matters with Kevin Newt who'll be right back. Okay, we're back. We're live with Kevin Newt of the UH School of Architecture in Manoa. And we're talking about animation in your living quarters on the 33rd floor of Big Condo and trying to examine how that's done. And Kevin, you mentioned you had a video that might help us understand what this all means. I hope so, yeah. If we could run that, then I can talk over it and you can ask me about it. So this is a book that came out a couple of years ago. Here are those animated versions of what I showed you earlier. These all happen to be leaf movement, but you get direct enclosure of the actual foliage, you get projection, and you get back projection. So if you can imagine anything growing or even an artificial plant on an eye, here's some more examples. These are all being projected directly onto interior surface or back projected onto interior translucent surfaces. So even on the 33rd floor, if you've got a small surface of water, for example, you can bring wind generated movement. These are examples into your living quarters. These are all simply the wind affecting surfaces of water. The one on the right is back projected onto a translucent piece of glass. So you can get a large variety of natural animation that appears to be actually in the space with you. This is somewhat more exotic where we've got water on a glass roof. It's something that not all of us are going to be able to do, but these are caustics that are being, these patterns are known as caustics being projected. And then finally rain form, any sloping glazed surface, or certainly in the middle there, a horizontal one, will indicate rain. And these are examples where rain is falling onto a small surface of water outside, but it's being projected by artificial light into or onto interior surfaces. So here's the last part where I was looking at the overlap of those natural indoor animations with sustainable practices. I hope this is going to advance one second. I might need to, oh here we go, alright. So here's that same argument then that green buildings really don't tell us anything about why they got their gold stars. And I'm arguing that buildings should be able to talk for themselves and show building occupants just what they're doing to earn those sustainable credentials. I wonder if this is going to... Okay, that could be the end of it. Yeah, we're back. Alright, so that's really the theory. And there's an experimental component behind this, J, where we've sat people in basement rooms and mimicked or simulated wind movement and sun movement, and we've done the heart rate experiments and attentional experiments. And there are significant improvements in both lowered heart rate and improved attention when people are in those naturally animated environments compared to an almost static indoor environment. So we're kind of hopeful that this is going to pick up. Well, I just have a reaction. I recently saw, again, where some footage of this really expensive condo penthouse, I think it must have been the Howard Hughes building there in Kakaako. The one that went for about $100 million, it's a two-story penthouse. And the ceiling of it was all glass, and it was atop the building. And it had these shutters that came down and closed the glass if you wanted. But most of the time it was open, and the view was absolutely spectacular. And you could see and feel the elements, you could see the rain, you could see the wind. All that stuff was visible to pretty much the whole main body on that floor, the top floor of the building. I said to myself, this is really the kind of thing you're talking about. And if the wind was blowing the rain, you could see the droplets moving around on glass. So it sounds to me like one big thing here would be glass. And I agree with you, absolutely. You can't have every condo not going to have glass on the ceiling. But at least it might have as much glass as possible given the structural considerations. Right. And in this environment, and here in Hawaii, of course, there are situations where you can actually go without the glass. You can open up as long as there's an insect screen or something. So we're very fortunate that you can't do that in large parts of the world. But to be able to actually open up and feel that breeze, not to see it, you're absolutely right. It's when we need some kind of barrier, some kind of enclosure to keep the worst or the less comfortable parts of the weather out. But we don't want, and this would sum up what I think has happened over the last 50 years, to throw out the baby with the bathwater that in the process of protecting us from the weather, then architects, builders, engineers have disconnected us from something that is actually very important for our long-term health. And I'm trying to recalibrate the envelope of buildings so that they still protect us. I don't enjoy it being soaking wet or being blown away and having all my papers blown away any more than the next person. But I miss that simulation and that contact with wild nature. And I can have a dog. I can bring plants into my apartment. I can bring fishes into my apartment, et cetera, which I think is, I regard as a form of self-medication where buildings are not doing what we need them to do so people will kind of take up the slack themselves. The issue I have with those things, which are great, is, well, can't buildings do more? But also, domesticated nature is of a different quality. When we are responsible for feeding the dog, watering the plant, et cetera, feeding the fishes, it's not the same. It's within our control. And if we stop doing those things, that thing will die. Whereas the forest, the ocean, the sky, they really are beyond our control. And we seem to need that contact with something that's much bigger than us, that finally something that we don't have control over. And that seems to be an important part of what we are as human beings, that sense of being part of something much bigger. And the weather is, as I said, the largest natural wilderness that we still have on this planet. And if you go to Mars, for example, I guess they have a form of weather, but because they don't have an atmosphere, you know. It's no fun at all. Well, not that I'm talking from first hand experience, but if you think about it, the atmosphere, the expressions of which we call the weather, then the local expressions of which we call the weather, it appears to be unique to our planet. So the idea of using the weather to draw attention to environmental change, climate change, I think is pretty direct, you know, that if we're not careful, we'll lose that atmosphere. And once that's gone, you know, that is really the key to all life on this earth pretty much, certainly ours. So, you know, it may seem like it's sort of idiosyncratic and peripheral, but I think the weather is something that is profoundly knitted together with a human soul. You know, you can have a conversation with anybody anywhere in the world about what the weather is doing. You know, it seems to be a universal part of human being. Well, you know, Hawaii would be a good place to do that. I'm wondering, though, if there's a model somewhere, some other country, some other city, where people are already doing this that we can study and maybe bring elements back and use those elements in our design here? Well, I don't know that it's being done in quite the way that I'm proposing, especially with the overlap with sustainability, but I first noticed this in Japan. I was in Japan for other reasons and writing a book about another topic related to Japan, but always, as I explained last time, always with a view to, well, what can I bring from that that would be valuable beyond Japan, because if you're not Japanese, it's not going to be very helpful. But this was one of those elements, Jay, that I lived there for quite a while and I noticed that even in kindergarten, pre-kindergarten education, children there are sensitized to nature. It's kind of a stereotype of the Japanese, but it's very true. They have multiple words for all sorts of natural phenomena that we don't even have a single word for. And that sensitivity to natural phenomena that we would take for granted, I think we've all seen these natural phenomena, but when they are framed by architecture and captured by indoor spaces, they become very special. In other words, stuff that we would see outdoors in nature and not give a second thought to, suddenly when it's in an apartment or apparently in an apartment, it becomes really special. And I think that's something that architecture has to offer. It can't compete with nature, nor should it, but it can compare or frame nature and say, well, this is what human beings can do and here's what nature can do and isn't it amazing because we're clearly part of that nature. And in that way provide a better quality of life. Right. Well, so back to the scenario, here we are with the developer and the banker. They haven't left yet, right? And by the way, after a while, the engineer comes in. But here you are, the architect. Okay. And the developer says to you, that's very nice, but I'm into value engineering, which means I want to make it cheap and I want to sell it at the cheapest price for the largest market and so forth. So I need from you, actually, Kevin, I need a menu, a matrix of 10 things that you might suggest for these units. Right. So my question is, what would those 10 things be? Would they be the same for every unit? Would they be the same for every building? I doubt it, given the creative aspects of this. And then he says, this is a hard question. Then he says, well, that's a great thing. Why don't we sell the matrix? Why don't we say to these guys, if they want A, B, C, and D, they can buy that. It's a package. If they want E, F, and G, they can buy that separately. That's a package. Can I hire you as my commercial manager, Jenny? Anytime. Yeah. Well, the value engineering thing, I absolutely recognize. And something that I'll say to my students a lot is, if you've got, and this is a terribly badly kept secret, but if an architect has some poetic idea that they really want to introduce to a project, it's going to get value engineered out in the first meeting with the being counter, of course. And so it has to be interconnected, inextricable from other very practical things. So in this case, when the accountant says, well, that's very nice, very poetic, et cetera, but my client doesn't care whether they live long or they just want the cheapest apartment. To be able to say, well, this will introduce natural daylight into the apartment or the office, whatever it is, and reduce your utility bill by this percentage at the end of the month. The running costs of this unit will be significant less. I would then turn around to the client and say, but if you want to pay more for your utility bill, by all means fire me or you could fire your accountant. Why don't you choose? But you have to, obviously, there are several bottom lines here, environmental and physiological, psychological, but also financial. I recognize that. And that's why I've been investigating the overlap, the intersection between these passive environmental controls, the core of which is sunlight, wind and rain, just as it is with natural indoor animation. So to be able to kind of kill both birds, I wish there was a better metaphor, with one stone. I should think of one, to feed both birds with one cookie, whatever. The, is essentially what I'm proposing is to say that this will improve your life, might even make you live longer, certainly a higher quality of life. But also, at the other end of things, in a purely pragmatic way, reduce your utility bill, and by the way, help to save the planet. All of that from one thing. Again, I'll turn around to the client and say, but if you don't want any of that, you just want a cheap building, I'm not your guy, keep your accountant, I'm not your guy. But I would like to think that, you know, huge advantages on the human side, the environmental side and the financial side would probably appeal to the guys, you know, well, logic I suppose. Well, how about, you know, how about the banker now? The banker wants to be sure that these will sell and get financed and be secured and all that, you know, and he'll get his money back. But more than that, the banker wants to be sure that they'll resale because that, you know, that maintains the value. And so the last question I put to you in a minute left is how would this affect the resale price of the unit to include these kinds of special amenities? I would imagine that this, because the costs are relatively small, if you're retrofitting especially, and that's something that we've looked at. I wish I'd brought the video, but we retrofitted a light shelf. Now, a light shelf for those who don't know, I should have brought an illustration. It's something that takes light from inside a window and bounces it, reflects it back into a deep space because usually you get far too much light just inside a window and it drops off to near darkness at the back of a unit. So those are usually solid reflective white surfaces. What we did was to make that surface of water just outside the window so that you're actually getting animated light coming into the back of the unit. So in terms of resale, I don't imagine that the resale value or appeal would be significantly different from the initial, you know, do you want to purchase this or not. But a lot of these things are not permanent, you know, if you could add on or remove pieces of these, I like to call them prosthetics, architectural prosthetics, you know, that you can put onto a building as you wish. So if somebody said, well, I don't want that, you know, it'll be troublesome to maintain or whatever, you simply, you know, you get a guy to come in on a Saturday morning and they unscrew it and take it away, you know. That's what I was really getting at. Good. All right, I finally got there. Well, thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Jim. Kevin Newt of the UH School of Architecture. We want to talk to you about all manner of other things going forward. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, Jay, for having me back. Aloha. Bye-bye. Aloha.