 Today we have our festival edition with Martin d'Espagne and Simon Bussier. This is the festival edition of Human Humane Architecture and the festival is going to be the festival that you organized and curated together with many others and two of the others we just had in the previous show, which is Carol Mon Lee's Education Matters with Carla and Kathy. So we're going to do volume 2 and we called the show here pretty much Voice Yourself 2 and we mean 2 both ways, right? So why don't we start off with picture 1 and we can probably, as we said, we can go through the first couple of pictures pretty fast. But I want to say that we arranged how we called you in the show here and I suggested to call you the landscape architect because you just joined us a while ago. We're really happy to have you as the other colleagues and we're great to have you guys on board. And so obviously this show is not going to duplicate the previous show, it's going to complement it and whereas the previous show naturally because of the personalities has been a little building centric because they're great architects. That's true. This one is going to be a little landscape centric, Brian. I won't disagree. So thanks for that. You'll see my bias pretty quickly in my students work and in my tone about the way we talk about this place. Very good. Thank you very much. And you wanted to talk, think the sponsors, I think, and if we can have number 2. Absolutely. It's really important to thank our partners that are involved in this and I won't be able to take any credit as a co-chair. Kathy Hoshar and Kara Sieralta and Brian Straughn have really done the yeoman's job and the bulk of the work I've done really just a fraction of that. And we have to thank our School of Architecture and the Office of the Dean and the folks that are behind us paying the bills and so honestly our professional community here in Hawaii is really phenomenal. I've never felt more welcomed by a professional community than I do here. So that includes the local AIA chapter and ASLA and APA, USGBC and the Office of Sustainability at UH. Among some of the other partners there have been just really great, robust conversations around possible relationships and future problems that might emerge that we might tackle together. Because as we know there's nothing really happening that one building can solve or nothing really needs really robust sets of challenges that any one of those offices or entities within their silos can really emerge and be as heroic as they may have previously claimed to have been. So it's really an effort to bring a lot of these voices together. And last but not at all least to thank the next picture. Our wonderful and brilliant and inspirational students here, Chris and Khan and Mason and the very vivid landscapes of Hawaii contrasting their bright smiling future thinking faces. This is just a screen grab from our Instagram feed for the design festival that I would encourage everybody to check out. There's a team of social media savvy young people who are grabbing different interviews off the street and also commenting on some of the pressing challenges that our colleagues Kathy and Carla mentioned in the previous session. And they're obviously most obviously representative for many others. We just can't show them all at the same time. That's right. That's right. A bunch of dudes. Sorry. And we also have amazing female emerging colleagues, right? We also want to mention that. Yeah. Khan, you know, looks has long hair but he's not. He's a dude too, right? I have no comment. Just be gender correct, right? And the next image here is basically putting illustrating what Carla and Kathy had been talking about. This is the schedule, right? This is the program. It's just written out. And if we can get the website again brought, then you guys can go online. There it is. That's right. And basically, you know, pick the schedule and see what's all going on. Please take a look there. This, you know, first rule of PowerPoint slides is put as many words as you can on one slide, right? So we're breaking that rule. But the schedule is stacked. I'll just say that there's over 40 speakers coming from all around the world bringing their voice to the party. And that's complimented really beautifully by a really wonderful roster of local decision makers and thought leaders from a whole diverse range of backgrounds coming together around the same table in a very public venue, which is the state capital building on Earth Day, which is maybe the last Earth Day. It's a very auspicious celebration. Yeah, sorry to put it to rain on the parade. No, no, no. I appreciate the critical approach. We're excited about the party and the after party and the following up discussions. That would be the next slide that illustrates that one line. Yeah, thanks for adding this as well. And you'll be on this roster speaking about your work, your stratosphere work with your students. And we have some other colleagues that will be here as well. And I appreciate you wrapping it up. I mean, this is like usually these events. You know, there's this moment when the last speaker and then everyone runs away and it leaves a sort of void, this kind of gap. Oh, I would have left to talk and talk and chat about it. So voice yourself. This is a very important sort of phasing out, right? In a non sort of conformist style, right? This is casual, right? It's very purposeful, but it's also a party. And I think that you're right. Sometimes these events are so formal and stuffy and esoteric and it can be anti-climactic at the end. So we really wanted to host an event. And we have to thank our great colleagues at Art at Mark's Garage. And in partnership with Sustainable Coastlines and Artists for Social Justice, among others who are really engaged in just being in and of our time and doing just really beautiful, good work that's thought provoking. And so there'll be a DJ and a bar and a bit of a party vibe to kind of cap the evening. And we hope that some of the conversations that just got started in the festival during the day can hopefully bear some fruit out and some context can be made. So again, it does have an agenda to it, but ultimately we I think deserve a little moment of relaxation at the end of a long day. And I think this will be the opportunity to do that at Mark's Garage. And I wanted, since you mentioned, I'm going to be part of that after-show party performance. I want to thank Kathy who never gives up on me and my non-conventional ways and said that's the right format. And I also want to thank Bundit to be on the stage and I consider the two of them in the offices as collaborative practices from an international perspective, having the most critically creative voice. And maybe that's the way the conference is set up. The day is inspiring, but it's certainly a little bit more mainstream over the day. And then as it should be, it becomes a little bit more avant-garde, becomes a little bit more edgy at the evening. And again, I thank you guys for putting me in the edgy part, which I guess I might be long. So that's great. Let's go to the next picture, which is actually the picture we have behind us all the time, right? Because I want to use the chance here to also get a little bit more to use since Kathy and Carla have done a great job and sort of very selflessly talked about everything. But I want you to talk about yourself a little bit, not so much about your ego, which you don't have, but about what you believe in. And you just came here with just chit-chatting before the show. We're both Waikikians, right? And we both go into the water every day. So we'd love to be here at this place. But at the same time, I know we share the worries. So we're just talking, you know, water is like, oh, you go into the water. Do you also go after the rain, right? So it's always bittersweet, right? Or a sweet bitter, right? Depending on how you want to look at it. So talk about this sort of very intriguing collage here that the audience sees in the background all the time. What's behind that? I have to say, some of our students, Jay, Malise and Ruben, put together a really beautiful competition entry for the Aloy competition, or student design challenge. I think it's called Make the Aloy Awesome, I think. Talking dirty waters, right? Talking dirty waters. So, and this triptych is just, I think, a beautiful image that really encapsulates a kind of three-sided situation that we face here in Hawaii. I really appreciate this image because it speaks to the landscape in a really powerful way. I think we're, as designers, always interested in finding patterns, finding meaning. And as a landscape architect, I tend to think of those things in cultural lenses as well as ecological lenses. So we're beautifully nested between Maoka and Makai, and we are really, really lucky to be a part of this vivid and spectacular landscape. But we're not separate from the nature. It's the same in many ways. So I think that's what this image is speaking to. And the other next picture, it reminds me of that you being an East Coast boy and Harvard educated. Whoops. I think you bring this sort of very, very skilled, obviously, talent and experience and expertise to the students here in analyzing things and diagramming things. And that's refreshingly provocative to, critically speaking, a commodification of culture here, a commercialization of culture, where you force yourself and your emerging architects to peel off these sort of superficially symbolic layers and look deeper into things. 100%. There's definitely a sort of mythology of the things we believe are on the surface. But what our work, I think, what my studios are really interested in doing is peeling back the surface and looking deeper at more of the substantive patterns and searching for meaning, in particular in that last image with the circle diagrams. This is a diagram by Mellisse and Jay and Ruben again, who were just given an honorable mention for the Building Voices Design Competition. I'm happy to say. This was an early set of diagrams from some experiments they were doing. First, tracing just literally the growth patterns of a series of different plants, actually weeds, around the urban environment. Weeds tend to pop up where they're most resilient and they can teach us a lot about being resilient to chronic and episodic disturbances in the environment. The second column are yeast experiments. They're basically like unbaked dough experiments that bubble up in these really weird ways, and we can almost use that to simulate how the land takes shape and changes dramatically over time. And then the third column are a series of different images tracing water, learning how to read patterns in water. And there's some really wonderful sort of emergent forms that occur that teach us a lot about a whole series of things. I can explain that more. And the last column are the actual representations of a composite of those things. So these are some of Mellisse's models, Mellisse Nicoba, who's a really brilliant young designer. We're very fortunate to have the kinds of students we have who are just hyper switched on to the problems of the day. I think by the time they ultimately retire from their careers, it's like 2075, 2070 or something crazy. So this whole time they're figuring out how is the world changing, and then they're trying to figure out how to anticipate the change. So that while their school now involves some vocational skill building, it's really important that they can develop the skills necessary to adapt to new challenges and to shifts, cultural or environmental or ecological or whatever. And so I appreciate that opportunity to say a few things about their work. Yeah. And going to the next two pictures, you had sort of had a micro methodology here, right? And then what you learned from that, you basically, it results in a macro scenario, just like nature works, right? Sure. So whereas maybe, again, complimenting the last show where there were very sort of immediate interactions and applications of immediate solutions, problem solving, right? This here might be more a question asking and saying what if, and saying let's do it because what choice do we have and then learning by doing, right? I think absolutely. There's a set of environmental concerns that's really thick. There's a lot of layers and what I think this project, hopefully what this project represents, and I think there's some evidence that it's a successful one. It was just given an honorable mention by an international peer reviewed Jerry, which includes a lot of really wonderful people. But this project is primarily interested in the impacts in daily life. And so we have to oscillate between the large scale and the small scale so that some things make sense and are legible. And yet we also have to be kind of, let's say, alert to consequences of our good intentions and be receptive to the possibility that our ideas may fail. And that was a really vague response to your question, which is a really good one. But I would just say that there's a lot of tensions and there's opposition. There's this sort of apparent chaos and I think that it's not chaos. I think just because we can't put nature into a little neat box and understand it, I don't think that that means that it's chaotic. I think that that means that ideas of determinacy or preconceived solutions are often going to meet resistance. Static objects in the face of climate change and sea level rise, for instance, sea walls that are overcome or communities built out of sort of inflexible grids. Like we see at the result of Hurricane Sandy, we see communities sort of ravaged by waving inundation from water. We kind of think we can use that and actually use those patterns, use the FEMA predictions and make some determinations about better placement or optimum placement. And a good illustration how this sort of chaotic, creative curiosity can play out is number 10, right? Sure, I think we just zoom in maybe on that plan. If we can get number 10, yeah, there we go. Sure, here's a couple of opportunities that the students identified along. The top is along the Manoa stream corridor and their intervention is one that adopts the low E principles of passive irrigation along a sort of sequence of descending terraces. So water is not just a thing you get into a pipe and get rid of, but water is wealth and water is life. And it's sort of rather than looking at it like a problem, you look at it in terms of its abundance. And it used to be, by the way, right? Not such a crazy idea. There's just an enormous amount of knowledge embodied in the landscape here. And this is not an appropriation, rather it's a very humble and respectful re-centering, reinterpretation for a contemporary Honolulu. And the bottom image, which I think complements the top really well, is taken from the Alawai Canal where my wife and my dog and I live. And this waterways almost annually recognizes one of the most polluted. And it has a whole series of possibilities. So the students are being highly aspirational. This image shows the possibility for new beds of plants, fighter-remediatory plants or plants to clean water. And possibilities for doing some soil recharge and soil regeneration. So it'll take a while to see these kinds of things rebound or these kinds of places that have suffered for so long. It was easy to pollute it, but it's not as easy, equally easy to fix it, right? Sure. And yet I think there's a good likelihood that it's an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving the problems. And it shouldn't be necessarily just left to the Army Corps of Engineers to determine what's best moving forward. But maybe the community can see that as a place where they come together. And I ultimately think that's a really important aspect of what landscape architecture does, which is to say that despite all the growth pressure and development pressure, cities around the world are competing with each other, but also neighborhoods are competing with each other for households and for new forms of life. And with that I think there's a really acute need for big open spaces that people can come together in. And the programming can encompass ecological solutions. The programming doesn't have to just be open green lawns or beaches made out of sand that we import from somewhere else. They can be really powerful, humane, accessible, contemporary, vibrant spaces that come together through a process of collaboration and people coming together. It fits right into the theme of the show. And before we run out of time, because time goes so fast, we want to spend the rest of the show basically on a project that you're dealing with in studio right now, with your emerging colleagues, and which once again shows that whereas the other why, there's also a competition has been launched by the university, So these are very prominent topics that seem sort of catchy, right, and kind of trendy almost, although it's probably not the right word. But you choose something that's rather sort of unspectacular, right? That's an area which is usually not on anyone's radar or hardly unless the people don't live there, right? Which part is that? And that's number 11. Yeah, I would just like to give Waipahu a plug and talk about this really incredible community. This satellite image shows the just diversity of landscape patterns. You can see two shield volcanoes draining into Pearl Harbor. You can see the most turquoise water in the world just below that. You can see the agricultural fields. You can see rich jungle. You can see sort of this incredible amalgam of different cultures settling in post-plantation era. And in many ways, this is a really important place in the history of Waipahu as previously with the capital. As it name suggests, it's about water bubbling up and coming to the surface, and it's about a meeting place. It's about a gathering place, which is what you see today in the people. However, if you look at this, again, the satellite image shows really clearly this kind of interruption that the urban settlement pattern is. Imposed sort of superficially on that otherwise beautiful set of interconnected and accruing and sort of self-modifying, self-regulating landscape patterns. At the window of the airplane, we call that mapping, which is the form of diagramming. Because you don't perceive this in its potential and its sort of genetic code when you drive there first. My very first time driving west, I was like, oh my God, a multi-lane highway interstate which isn't an interstate because it doesn't connect another state. So this was also real to me. I thought this was in LA. I couldn't believe it, right? So you need to look at it in an analytical way and saying if you peel off all these layers, if you make sort of changes in individual ways, and that gets us to the number 12, we're just simply here through a very radical kind of color coding. You basically uncover, unveil a restoration of a tradition, right? Yeah, so the rail project that is aligned with the Farrington Highway that has a series of different stations along the way is really the catalyst for the project that we started earlier this year with the state and the city. And we're in cahoots with those guys because I think we're really interested in having a conversation about what these transit-oriented developments will be. And what's really striking when you're there is you can't even perceive the fact that you're in this place that has this water richness. And you can't really even see Pearl Harbor from there. You can't see your waterfront. And I think it's striking. It's striking how hot it is, and it's also striking that you're so disconnected from nature. And so any efforts to conceive of sort of urban cooling, as it were, should involve a threading through of water systems, blue and green belts. But they should also, I think, correspond with those existing cultural layers as well. So as a station emerges, it's one that's a consequence of a process of studying those layers and really understanding what the possibilities are for that, rather than sort of an imposition of an object that's like levitating. This is interesting because there is like the architect and the landscape architect that you say, hey guys, you know, rather than throwing a chunk of something down there, why do you let it emerge? Why didn't let it grow as maybe a too oversimplified way? But if we can get the pictures 13 and then 14 and 15, this is a really interesting approach. How you said it should basically emerge and grow out of the natural and cultural and multitudal landscapes. Here's just a series of different hillshade diagrams that are looking at a series of different specific analytical readings. And we can talk more about each one if it's useful. But suffice to say there are specific temperatures and specific wind speeds and specific sounds extremely loud right under the highway. And what that really enormous piece of infrastructure will do is reflect a lot of the sound. It will in many ways intensify a lot of these things. And so that's something that we're interested in trying to understand through the mapping exercises and analytical stage of the process. When you're there, as this image shows, you're really looking at a very low scale, low density automobile centric environment with now this rather imposing piece of heavy infrastructure that looks like it's sort of ominous and it's sort of reflecting almost like a different time. We're going back in time to some degree and there's like myriad benefits to mobility and that's not something that we can necessarily unpack in this short amount of time we have. But let's say that this thing is happening and what can we do about it? There will be the next picture. Again, we have this kind of steadfast optimism about it. So then there's a superimposition in some ways of these layers of data. This is looking at light so you see the underside of the bridge is going to be quite shaded. And so, you know, taking together there's multiple layers that we stack and we start to look for opportunities to create a structure that is reflecting the existing cultural and ecological patterns including all these things from water to light and sound to human access. Which the next picture shows in plan how this new rail station emerges from the specificity of the place. And as you indicated we're running out of time here on the show so I want to spend the last two minutes about chit chatting about sort of our obligation and mission as educators and what we do, right? And I want to sort of put a sort of a disclaimer at the end of the show in saying while the whole symposium doesn't basically reflect sort of the values and virtues of this program here in Think Tech Hawaii your specific work certainly does it. And if things don't we need to confront these, right? So we're like some people might look at your work and my work is being weird and we take this as a compliment because we believe that if we encourage our emerging colleagues to be these provocateurs they're going to elevate the profession, I mean they're going to run the show pretty soon, right? So I really appreciate you being that provocateur, that rebel in shaking things up and, you know, being on the search rather than saying I have a solution, right? Absolutely. Let me just say I really want to, I should give a shout out to our colleague Judith Stilgambar who's really been quarterbacking this new MLA, Master of Landscape Architecture Program which will be the first of its kind, which is really site dependent. I talked about site specificity, I want to talk about site dependency because here we can study how the land is created. We can see some of the most interesting kind of Pan-Asian, Pan-Everything fusion of cultures in urban contexts that's, you know, some of the most hyper-urban anywhere in the world. We can also see some of the most incredible conservation efforts and things on our archipelago in different sort of unique geographies. And the program that she started that some of us are going to be involved with is really a profound leap ahead for the state of Hawaii. The fact that we're here in this time I think is wonderful. We can spend more time sort of dwelling on all the different challenges, the substantial complex challenges. But I think it's also really, it's really wonderful to think of our students who will be the principals of the next generation of design firms. Absolutely. They don't exist yet. We don't know what their names will be and we don't know what kind of projects will emerge that they'll make a name for themselves through. But let's just say that there's a lot of really wildly aspirational people who are coming up through the School of Architecture program and through SOEST and through Sea Grant and through Tropical Plant Soil Science and through Sustainability and through Urban Planning and all these different offices. And I think they're wildly optimistic and they're also pretty disruptive and I think that they end up through this kind of series of provocative projects as students develop a vocabulary for themselves rather than mini-mes. So when they get to practice they can be disruptive agents for change which is as we know a key demand for design. You can't continue to do the same stuff that your parents gave you. So I take your rather than mini-mes as a closing note pretty much of your message which is great. Thank you. We didn't get to a lot of things. And particularly not that you took on this conference as the other ones. It was presented to you and you put a lot of other things on the side that you actually do which we wanted to talk about. Thank you for that. But you also take advantage of this here and let it sort of feed into your research and into your work. Thank you. Again hopefully we get the chance to talk about that another time and thank you for pulling all this and thanks for putting it all together. And again we see you guys all on Saturday at the Capitol for the various events. Go to the website again and it will be awesome. It sure will. Thanks Martin. Alright thank you very much everybody.