 This is the Q&A session to last week's show about our proletarian people, Tower Primitiva Tower. And we're gonna have the creators of Primitiva 3 here, as well as the reviewers. We're blessed and honored to have the most creative minds on the islands and who have contributed to the islands here with us. I wanna now have the team. This is an excellent chance for you team members to bounce questions off the panelists because that's that unique moment here that you have. So in regards of some of the comments you got, please reflect that back. George, you're nodding in the right direction. Maybe you wanna go ahead and direct the question to one of the reviewers. I wanted to just comment to Jay that I wasn't waving because to stop I was waving because he was hitting something that's very close to the deer to my heart as being vegan. So that's what he was mentioning. And also a few things he mentioned. We've been talking about Martin this whole semester about Woodstock and Janice Chaplin. And I talked about Stony Wood when she was two feet away from me. So I'm from the New York area. So I mentioned my brother having almost died at Woodstock when he was sleeping. And then the whole thing that we talked about many times about young people making love without being oblivious to the people around them, you know, there at Woodstock. And that was the way things were back then. When I, 1968, you know, I was in Europe but my brother was at Woodstock. I was at Sorbonne that summer. And that summer, Sorbonne was taken over by some young people. So I had to go to school at Lise Louie Legrand which was across the street. So those were really different times. There was freedom and rebellion. And I remember all that, you know? So it's a different era when we were free. You know, it was a breaking away from the 50s when I grew up on Long Island in a very state, you know, state kind of existence. And then the 60s was just wild times, freedom. And then when Reagan came in, he sort of went back to conservatism in so many ways. So I mean, he was hitting a lot of the points that were close to my armor. So I wasn't trying to get, I wasn't trying to tell you that you were hitting, right? And you know, Martin, we've talked about this many times about the freedom and, you know, and basically how we're socialized, capitalism, what was his name? My professor, Reg Kwak used to talk about how soap, you know, the planning department, that the suds are only for commercial purposes. It's the rubbing that cleans you, not the foam, you know? So it's just, we are totally socialized to believe things. Like when Martin had mentioned about washing in the ocean, how healthy washing in the ocean is, and it gets back to the whole nature. So I'll leave it at that, but, so I just wanted to make Jay think I was telling him to stop, so. Thank you, George. Well, George, my brother was at Woodstock. He had a VW wagon and he said it was all muddy. So it wasn't as idealistic as it was. But the more important thing I want to make sure all the students here is that they're experimenting how we're gonna adapt to a climate change world. And so providing a new way to try out different lifestyle, different architecture is really the key idea I think that's underlying this, is whether you adapt to this particular lifestyle, is that you're creating more opportunities and see how it fits in the new environments. And we're gonna have different environments in the future whether Hawaii is hotter, colder, and so forth. So this is really, like I said, planting different seeds in different locations and see how it works and learning as a culture, how do we adapt? And so I think that's the really, really important thing whether we stylistically, culturally, and how we think about things is that learning, beginning to adapt. Martin, may I add something to this? You know, we are in a time when climate change is not in the future and adaptation to climate change is not in the future. It's right now. And so all these ideas, these creative points, these solutions that your team has come up with, we should take them seriously and we should pick the ones that will work and start insinuating them into the daily development of the city and the state. It doesn't have to be all these things all of the same time. As I was saying, there might be obstacles to that, but some of them would actually work. Some of them are now. And so, you know, a really workable project that some client would, you know, take off with it could be built right now and it couldn't incorporate some of the ideas we've heard today. I don't know about the engineering. I think that, I don't know if architecture always includes engineering, but query whether that thing will stand up, query whether the wind will blow it away or not, you know, all those engineering questions and whether, you know, you could have a workable social arrangement by sitting on the pot. You know, in some places in the world, that's what they do, but there are social issues around that here. In any event, there are a lot of ideas there that could be incorporated right now. And this is not something 10 years away or 20, it's something right now. No, thank you, Jane. Echoing that this is a tradition, this is an evolution of primitivas that, you know, Socrates has been part of, as he said, from ever since. So we all remember primitiva one, it was still rather behaved and rather sort of insecure. And I had gotten to know, you know, Bob Oda from Kamehameha School, who is now retired or semi-retired, they brought him back because he didn't had anyone to, you know, to basically speak for our kakaako as well as he did. And so we've been bugging him and bothering him and saying, isn't this what you guys would need, right? And he kept saying, well, yeah, you know, well, and then he got tired, you know, and he basically said, and then when we finally went there to show him our final presentation, he said, oh, I've seen this before, you know. Yeah, you guys are a little weird and you're young and I was like that and all of that and more, he kind of said, right? But we said, please listen to us one last time. And he did. And he kind of interrupted us and himself every now and then he said, well, just like what you were saying, well, this aspect is actually could really be, you know, seen as favorable from these people and this other aspect from that and at the end of the whole hour having to listen, he basically turned around 180 degrees from basically saying no to begin with. After that, he basically said something very similar. He worded it a little differently, but the message was the same as UJ said. He said, okay, I have no doubt that this will be the future. The question I have to ask myself and my peers is, are we ready for the future yet? And we're obviously sending this message back to Bob and everyone else. Yes, you should be ready here and now, right? And that's why we brought in the team, not speaking on behalf of Larry Medlin, who was at the young age of 80, moving in Arizona out of his house into a new one. That's the way you can't be with us, but he was with us. And he is, he's been sitting in this little Berlin Bauhausian box that we showed at the beginning of the presentation. And Friado had been traveling for the United States and giving lectures and extended this invitation for young people to stop by and he took him up on that offer. And the rest is history. They've been sitting in this little box when a government person was walking by and was so intrigued by the little soap bubble, little things, just like we've been doing that they invited them for the most important project that you can think of, of a young upcoming architect, which was the pavilion of the country of Germany on the World Fair in 67. And they made this, they made this happen. And so from a structural engineering point of view, Larry confirms us from this background, this works. This works. And we made sure we don't develop the weird one, the weird version. We developed the one that's actually the most feasible. And one other note, going back to you, Thomas, one thing of the many things you taught me was the differentiation between invasive and exotic and coming from your plant world, you explain, we all know what invasive is. It's something from somewhere else. It takes over, it suppresses the local stuff. Exotic doesn't do that. Exotic comes from somewhere else too, but it complements the environment. For example, the palm tree is exotic to some degree because no other species grows in sand as they do, right? And in many ways, primitivas are organisms, natural organisms, and they basically thrive and then they develop obviously differently at different subclimates and sublocations. So totally right, Jay, I've been thinking about an even primitiva one was thinking out there, Oahu West, right, with my employer, UH, and that you all pay for it with your two highest tuition and fees, thank you guys for that, right? They got to do something out there. And there's also a large population of local people. We got DHHL. So why don't you make a collaborative project of UH West and DHL and rather than sprawling it and basically making it couple-age and ruin the land to consolidate on that small footprint. And around it, you keep the country, country, these things, right, Thomas? Martin, I also wanna make sure your student, what I got out of it was a part of why would I want to live on the top part of your building? And so that's the part I think you wanna emphasize narratively, the aspirational part. If you wanna live, why do you wanna go all the way to the top because you want to see the top of the world? You want to feel like you're conquering the world. So part of the aspiration of the sociology and the cultural aspect, you live there because part of you spending all the time sprawling all the way up is that you wanna spend time up there. So you have to talk about part of the inspirational part of those people wanna live there. Why do you wanna be on the top? Because they're always wondering why would you spend all the time walk every day going back up? It's because sitting on top from that view and what you see below you that you were part of something of a large holistic thing, that's the reward. So you have to talk about reward of sitting where you are on top and whatever. You have to explain the sociology within that structure because that will make it warm, realistically into the human component that you have to explain too. So I think that will be really important to make it somewhat successful and also allow us to think about how do we adapt? Thank you, Thomas Bundes. If you're still there, you have a, I wanna lobby you and Kalin's exhibition that you guys have going up about the legendary Alfred Yee because Jay was talking about the engineering part. You wanna maybe chip in a little bit of El's thoughts. And he by the way has been a consultant of Primitivo one. I had the chance to meet him once shortly before he passed away. And it was an unforgettable moment when he was basically looking at the structure and he said, this is a no brainer, we figure this out. But I wanna talk about that this building is alive and it lives and it's an organism. And it was referring to what Hugh George were recalling Quinn Emma Gardens, which he initiated like that initially before it fell back on the open market. And now it's obviously gentrified as everything else. But El said, we had a millionaire living there as the trash guy, the trash operating guy. Both of them were basically had equal rights and that's kind of important. So maybe Bunda, do you wanna chip in from an El point of view? I think he would like to just help you solve the problems. It does consolidate some idea that he had in particular something that involved water, his collaboration with Hans Kroek and also his barges that after he passed away, nobody is dealing with water at all in terms of like engineering and structural design. And with the high rise, he always pushed the limit. He can come up with way that can channel all those water and also be cast everything and can be erected in no time. Kers and Poets, Alamona building, he did that in nine months, total construction. But these, if it's an invasive species, we have to do it fast. And I think he would help you to come up with a system that can populate it throughout, not only in the urban context, but the area that needed it. For example, like Jay was mentioning about the cars. So we can really parasite it in a parking garage that doesn't get used, things like that, but we can cantilever it out and populate all this idea throughout the city. And instead of going out into Aver Beach and just build more there, we still keep the country country, but keep the urban urban and bring the country in the urban. So that's how I see it. I wanna bring in one last person that can't be physically with us, but speaking on behalf of him. And this gets us to not just the discipline of architecture, but the professional architecture that this one would basically be a very provocative finger. And you can imagine which finger, maybe in the face of the profession, right? Who's not doing anything anywhere close to what we're in. Maybe they would see it as a competition, as a threat. But again, there's always exceptions to rules. And I'm thinking about a gentleman who used to be the AIA chapter on the little president so many years ago. And you were sitting down with him Jay and did a show. And there was in 2014, I think, and his name is Scott Wilson. So would you mind recalling that show and speaking on behalf of Scott Jay? The time our connection was all about Kaka'aka. It was all about building a new city. It was all about designing a place that would reflect the true heart of Oahu and Hawaii. They're complicated. It's the material that was in the presentation in Georgia's presentation about trying to be faithful to the Hawaiian ethic and the Hawaiian view of nature and living together. And it was all about Kaka'aka. There were several shows at the time, all about that. And I must say that whatever the dream we talked about was, Kaka'aka as you indicated in your opening, Kaka'aka has not been faithful to that. And there's an awful lot of stuff in Kaka'aka that could be swept out to sea. There would be no loss there. But let me say that a big part of that, Martin, was finding the social structure that accurately reflects life in Hawaii. Life back in the day of the native Hawaiian community. And for that matter, in current day. And I would add one more point. And that is that whatever design your team comes up with, whatever innovative ideas, they come up with about the physical structure, and all the creative new things that you've been talking about. The most difficult and the most nutritious of all of them is designing a structure that will accurately reflect the values that you wanna allow for the city as it develops and that will make for a better society. Your term, Thomas, about the sociology. Our buildings, our structures, our public places should all feed into our society and make a quality of life the best it can be. And so you have a lot of ideas in this project that reflect that. But I think that that is the most important part of it. I wanna echo what you just said because I think this project also forces an engagement. If everyone lives there, what is the ecology? So when they put in the plants, they're gonna find certain plants won't work. They're gonna find out, they're gonna need micro irrigation systems that is not just a simple water system. So they're gonna learn about what ecological systems works. And so all the inhabitants will learn about nature, learn about the plants, what plants work in what area, where it's dry, where it's windy and so forth. So that's part of the genius of your project is forces the engagement to learn what ecology is about and ecology in different locations. And as the world will change with climate change, then built into your environment adaptation. Adaptation of the human spirit, adaptation about human behavior, and as well as the structure around it. So it's a brilliant system because it forces people who live in it to learn about ecology. Plants aren't the same uniformly. They interact. There are nicks and different breeds and different varieties work together and you're gonna find out what works and what won't work together in different environments. If you're gonna put it up in the Iwahiwa or Popakea, you're gonna need different types of plants, different types of insects, different microbeer, different types of what they call soil biomairs, like in your gut, and you're gonna have to figure it out. But that forces the people who live there to be engaged in that life. And so that's the brains of it. As you built this, it forces the sociology of change adaptation to learn about ecology and the largest structure of ecology. Your building is gonna be one giant ecology and it's gonna have different networks of things that work and won't work with insects, mites, fungus, and you're gonna have to learn about that and that's the brains of this project. Thanks, Thomas. Yeah, what you both brought up, Jay and Thomas, reminds me of that, you know, me not a native English speaker observing it that some ways it's discriminating. So like there's value engineering and there's social engineering and there are bad terms, right? But in the best sense of the terms, right? If you look at it, that's what the project tried to do is actually the opposite to a conventional development is an additive. You start to add things and systems, right? One over the other. And the result is that it's not affordable anymore, nor in its initial erection, nor in its maintenance, right? It's too much. It basically enslaves people, right? Or taking on mortgages that they can never pay off for the rest of their lives, rent they can't afford. So this project is, Giorgio is recalled, you know, for us is fried again. There is the, his mother called him fried because she was a woman in the early last century to fight for women rights and freedoms. That's why she called basically her son like that. So the tower is basically the sort of the mechanism, the intention to mechanism to free people from all these slaveries that they're kind of tied into. So the design process then accordingly was more a reductive one. It's like, whenever we came up with an idea, we thought, do we really need this? Because this is what nature is about, right? There's nothing more to nature than it basically and essentially needs, right? So I'm going back to this sort of, you know, show that UGA did with Scott back then. And there was actually this sort of most iconic project that was just new at that time was an Italian architect, Burri, who was doing this beacon project of a tower in Milano, which is in Italy, which is still temperate climate. And he put these large trees on what we call the knives in the balconies. And that was your guy's background picture, Jay, if you recall. And then he started to elaborate on that one. At the end of the show, which we probably have to get to soon, you were asking that critical kind of phasing out question, well, who in the world is supposed to do all that? And then Scott basically scratched his head and he said, well, I've just been talking to this weird architectural professor named this Fang. And I think, you know, his students and him, they're gonna do it because who else is gonna do it? And that was one of the many motivations of this investigation, right? That this group here in this collaborative effort did was what one of the most outstanding and non-traditional members, not just of the discipline, but the profession set. We need to step up because if they are doing this in Milano, in Milan, which is still a temperate climate, all buildings should look like that here in Honolulu, where we have the endless summer, you know, seasons and climate. I wanna add one other thing, Martin, which actually your recollection is about to show where Scott remind me of, and that's this. You know, we started out with single family homes, be simple in this state. We went to, you know, Leesold, which was a problem model, if you will, it still is. And then we started doing condos, we did them be simple, we did them Leesold. We have a lot of rental properties now coming up some of these new projects. But what you have presented today doesn't fit in any of those categories. How are these people legally, structurally, conceptually there? All the figures you have walking around on those ramps and, you know, playing in the water and reading and all that stuff, how are they there? Did they own something? Did they own a condo? Well, it's not a condo. Is it fee, is it lease, is it rental? What is their rights? And I think that, you know, to look at this in terms of trying to integrate it into the city, into a new world, a new ecological world, a climate change, you know, sustainable, resilient world, you have to consider that. And I think that, you know, that has to be part of this. It is no form of ownership that we know today. It is a new form of ownership. It is a new way of being there. I have no suggestions for you, but I just think you have to think about that. Your team has to think about it. I know. And I was about to say maybe we need a lawyer to get on board, so you know where I'm going. But you're absolutely right. And I'm referring back to another show that I did a long time ago with Ulf Meyer, who's an architect and architectural critic out of Berlin. And when I was visiting some summers ago, I was expecting him to show me around the city and the capital city and the most fancy and funky architecture. And he was like, it needed him all night to basically answer my question, what I should look at. And he said, Martin, I know I can't impress you with the new emperor's clothes here, so to speak, using the metaphor of additional skins, right? The new facades, they won't impress you. So he basically, his wife is Japanese. And so he wrote a couple of tour guides about Japanese architecture and to make a living, he basically takes German architects to Japan and Japanese architects to Germany. So he had a group of architects from Tokyo there and the project he showed them, he invited me. And it was a group of people who were basically young families, starting families, and they were afraid, like everybody else, including Honolulu, they're gonna be pushed out of the city into the birds, having to live a life they don't want to because they can't afford to live in the city anymore. And they all got together and talked about this and basically said, okay, let's all chip in the resources we have, all the little savings we have, let's all put them together and now start to think about what do we want and what do we want for ourselves and collectively? And then thinking about, can we afford that? And for that, we need an architect. So the architect was nothing else. He wasn't the great genius, right? Master of mind that got us to the kind of the reputation that we have got as architects. They were the facilitators of people's dreams, aspirations and resources and abilities. And the project was, of course, being in temperate climate in Berlin different than Primitiva, but the notion and the philosophy was the same. It was something that they made happen together because they wanted to and they crafted it around itself. And so they were successful in saying, we can still live in the city where urban people, we don't have to be pushed out and we all in the building together. So this is the precedent I can recall in reference to that show that we should look further into and learn as we all say, this is as much an educational devices project as everything else, as you perfectly called it, Thomas, that we will learn from constantly. I want to follow up on what you all just said. I want to make a good metaphor for this. And you kind of touched on a little bit when you're talking about people in wheelchair and they have to cooperate, but you're building community. So imagine if there's any kind of stratification, those guys who live on top, they have to be much better at socialization and having buy-in because they have to actually walk past all the communities to get up to the top. That means they have to be friends, like it's like the Higgs Boson. You have to shake hands before you get to the top. And if that's the premium position, that means you're the most suited to figure out what socialization is. And since there aren't any walls, you're committed to a larger community. And so if there's any kind of stratification, you're forced to figure out what the socialization skills are you need and what type of structuries. So I think you have built into this so many experimentations of socialization, politics, the advantages of being high, low, here and there. You're just touching on a larger fabric that we have to think about. If in fact, it's an open environment, an open structure and you need the assistance as you go up, as you go down and you're invading someone's space, in order to do that, you got to be a really nice guy and you're helping them to get to the top. And that's figuratively to the top. So imagine you have a network of communities where you have to learn those skills. And so those who have to be down below because they can't climb up, but those like the social ladder climbing up, they have to learn the skills to work in a larger community. Whether they stayed on top all the time or it's just they rotate, I think it becomes a beautiful microcosm of experimentation. Is that what you want? Isn't that what you want Martin? That you're not experimenting with? Because he was already nodding in the right direction. I don't care. DeSoto wouldn't know about this because native Hawaiians, that's the way they lived. I mean, there was really, there was the Ali'i, but land was held in common. It was supposed to be for the royalty, for the king, but land was held in common and people would go and they would farm the taro fields and whatever and everything was done in a group kind of communal kind of situation. Same with the Native Americans. So that's the precedent of that type of living. It was the native cultures, native Americans and native Hawaiians. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but that's why it was a communal kind of thing. And I've studied the Hunzes up in the top way. And that's wonderful. And you know the study of Noah Lincoln. So Noah cares about going back historical farming, but he also recognized modernity. So that going towards the future, we have to be able to adapt to different staple foods. And so we have to have capacity to all the convenience that will get us efficiently to produce food, exchange ideas beyond what we're localized to it and we shouldn't lose those types of things. So whatever we built has to incorporate larger network like a larger ecology to include both high technology, sharing of ideas so we can build them. So we don't feel isolated too. So the key thing is that it's an experimentation by which how do we go into the future where we learn to adapt but caring about value systems as well. That's what Jay was talking about. It has to incorporate all those things because we don't want to abandon all the technologies, the advantages of it and the convenience of it because it is still, those advantages opens ideas and that's what we don't want to lose. And I'm bringing into Soto via the phone because he's just emailed because he had to step out. He says, I thought this was very well done. This goes to the team kudos. What I saw showed that everyone had thought of all the possibilities for all the inhabitants and had also addressed them at the beginning of his message, I want to relate to his sorry, I had to pull out of my out but my mother was calling for her dinner and other assistance. So that is where I went and you Thomas can relate very well to that because you both had the blessing to have and had mothers in that upper age of a hundred, right? And you didn't shove them into some 96 to 96 nursing home, right? But you took care of them. And that's basically what the foundation of Primitiva is caring and not outsourcing that to systems, right? And I've been dealing as an architect and sharing with you, getting things up to code and making things ADA accessible, the American Disability Act, we mean well, but we basically said, well, we fund people who are healthy. We can walk the stairs and if it's now a new generation thanks to Tim Hu and Howard, easy breezy external staircase, that's a lot of fun. You go into the stuffy elevator, right? We mean well, but in this case as George pointed out, you know, having people volunteer and saying, hey, I'm going to help you out. I'm going to push you up the gentle ramp. And just to chip in from Larry Medlin, Larry said, when you're stretching tables really tight as they did for the Expo Pavilion and for the Olympics in 72, it's very sturdy. It's not a bouncy trampolini. It has some flex, which is good for the bones and the muscles rather than walking on tough concrete, but it is a very, you know, solid and solidified surface to kind of walk on, right? But to generally basically be walked up the stratospheric spiral, you know, is a very respectful thing versus to say, oh, there's an elevator in the back. Why don't you go there, right? And we see you later, right? That's the point about solidarity that I wanted to, you know? Again, that's what you guys are talking about. This is a thought real quick. You know, history happens very quickly for the students. Almost all the high rises in Honolulu were built within the lifetimes of all of us here in this meeting. That's about 1500 of them, more now. And so what we think is there and been there for a long time actually changes quickly. And so this is the start of change. And we're thinking in the ones and twos, but it's gonna change over time and 50 years will go by and a hundred years will go by. And then maybe people will look at what we have now and oh, that was the old things and they had to change. And we came up with a different system. And it's when people believe like how we're talking now that it happens. We have to have the vision first and then we'll come along. Thank you for letting me share that. No, that's awesome, Socrates. And again, it comes from you not being the scary government guy sitting in his office and always saying, no, it's the opposite. And you sharing, you're coming from your own experience. I'm always sharing with everyone when you said, Hey, me and my own self interest for my family, I'm only buying solid wood furniture as I buy furniture because I know only that's gonna keep them safe because way back, before the fossil era and all the modernism and all the composites you were able to have your staff going into a building that's on fire just barely covering their mouth from the smoke. But now these days you have to cover them up with multiple filters though they don't die of the toxic stuff that's within the smoke, right? So this awareness for yourself, you say, I want my family safe. So I'm basically doing it that way. And that's the way basically, think about what's best for yourself and then make that the foundation for what's best for everyone else with what you create, right? That's the mindset that you taught us and that's part of the project. And as you said, it has been evolving into this sort of more extreme and saying, let's have the least possible stuff that could be a problem. So this was a good, a great review, a great reflection. We're probably all for sure the creating team is extremely exhausted, sleep deprived and there's more work to come in thanking you all for first of all the incredible collaborative and collective work and then the excellent feedback on that one which also makes it part of the cooperation. So welcome to the team of the creators of Primitiva 3. Anyways, thank you all. This was fantastic. What a ride down the slide of Primitiva and up.