 We, the Soto Brown and Martin de Speng, welcome you back to the show here in Hawaii. It's looking if there's maybe humanity and humility again in the built environment for us here. And last show was a little bit of a sobering sort of up, and we talked about the paradise and peril for the proletarians. So today we maybe want to lift our spirit up again and see if there's maybe some potential progression in that field. So let's go to the first slide here, and we want to encourage the audience to do like we do wherever you are, whatever you do, silly things, errands, you know, you're running. Work, whatever. Exactly. The built environment is always out there for you to analyze. Correct. So look around and look at what's happening and decide if you like it or not, what works, what doesn't work. Exactly. And what was our pying mobile doing here at this point? Well, there's the Martin Mobile in the foreground because it was going to go get a new top in the white building that's directly across the street on the other side. That's the top shop that you go to. Yeah. On the left side is the old Kewalo theater opened in 1940, closed in 1956. But then a wealth of high rises beyond that. And the ones in the middle with a funny little crown on are worth looking into a little bit closer. So let's go to the next slide here. And, you know, me coming from Germany and we had bordered a communist country once. Yes, yes. West Germany and East Germany. Exactly. And I was, before the wall came down, I had the chance to get to the GDR. And so we went to a couple of buildings that remind me of this one here. Not in a good way. That's not good. Yeah. They're double-loaded corridors. They're these extruded slabs. Yeah. And you just slam people in there. Yeah. When this was under construction, the construction fence sign taught me the term of workforce. Yes. They said this is a workforce tower. And another gentleman who I did the show with, the Waikiki Grand, Tom Miller, taught me the term warehousing people. Yes. So warehousing the workforce is something that sort of makes me get goose pimples because I came to Hawaii for different reasons. And another term we're using, we're going to make a show about skins as we were announcing. Yes, we are. This reminds us of moo-mooing buildings because they were so nice and easy breezy and beautiful nature, made them, I'm talking people and buildings. Yes. Right? And all of a sudden you throw this heavy thing over them. Correct. So the skeletal building looks nice and easy breezy. And once the walls and everything else gets put on it, it doesn't look so nice anymore. Absolutely. And next slide here is, so we're looking now, we're back on with stepping back a little bit. This is from Alamoana Boulevard. And we look at what might become the proletarian neighborhood on the island here big times. Yes. And you can see in the very middle, the newest attempt by Howard Hughes that we once were saying this reminds us of Miami Vice. Way back, it's probably the time to do a show about it. And then on the very left side, we see something that we go to the next slide and see more up close. And this is when you turn into Cook Street. At the very left, you see these two Stanford car developing tower projects. And the tower in the back came later. And before that was this box with this Kamehameha helmet stylized thing on top of it. It's the sort of mustard colored one that's the shorter one on the left. Exactly. And then let's go inside next slide because our emerging generation wanted to check that out. And how does it look to you? Well, one of the things you pointed out is that there's a gigantic air conditioner sticking out into the room. It's like the size of a piece of furniture. And that's already something that we don't really care about, but care for. I do see that there are openable windows in that room, which is nice. What you pointed out is that there's this odd sort of helmet like prow that sticks out as an architectural feature. And you went up inside that and it's actually the control center for all of the fossil fuel burning material that the machinery that they need. And this is what Kamehameha's helmet didn't do with things like that. No, it did not. And then as you pointed out in the corridors, this is a totally enclosed artificially lit artificial corridor that there's no access to the outside. But there are panels on the wall saying, hey, everybody, this is the historic background of our location. So it's like this. We're sort of telling you about the environment, even though you're closed off from the environment. That we just ruined. So here are the memories of the place. So that left us pretty depressed, we have to say. And let's go to the next slide because we got to lift our spirit up again. So because something happened to me that reminded me of having happened probably about a century ago. And this is me having been in Portugal in the city of Porto to give a conference. And I've been aware of it. The bottom left, this is a title cover of a monograph of an architect whose name is Eduardo Soto de Moura. And he had this, choose this project, had this intricate wooden model that is very much about texture on the book cover. And shame on Martin, I didn't do my homework that by the time I came there and visited, it was just finished. But without knowing help me, because from left to right, I saw this thing in the distance, which didn't look like a building. Because it didn't have traditional openings. And the closer I got, the more I saw that it was one of the best examples of what we recently called archi-nature that uses performative architecture. Because it has a similar climate, at least in the summer. And so the closed facade sides, which you can see on the very middle slide. And then on the right side of the right image there is the pretty close facade that has these slits that still give light in. And then it's opened with these very deep horizontal louvers to the north and the south to help with the mitigation to get a lot of daylight in, but to keep the sunlight out. So it's got two very different facades. It has. So isn't that what we should do here in Hawaii? Yeah. And so next page is I had a similar moment while driving to the upholstery place, which by the way, the name is Golden upholstery. And David is the guy who runs it. My, you know, my eyes get drawn up to this thing here where all of a sudden it brought back all these memories of this is an architectural feature that we used to have all the time. Yeah. These eyelashes and things, right? Right. Protect us from the rain and the sun. And all of a sudden here they are again. Yeah. I got so excited, overly excited about it. And we've done shows where we showed older buildings that have these similar. Absolutely. Either protruding horizontal elements or the windows are set back. Yeah. And then I went online and did our journalist work and found out that this is a micro apartment project here. Apartments, this is a typical floor plan on the left 300 square feet and a 70 square foot lanai that we probably because of the dimension could call a lanai. But all these previous projects either don't have any. Right. Or they're called, you can certainly call them balconies but not lanais because they don't deserve. I mean, lanais need to be spacious. Exactly. Right. And also, I also put in the North era at the bottom. So this one here is the cook facade elevation here seems to oriented principally the right way that it's facing south where these horizontal ones work. It's also facing a little east and we get to that sort of nitpicking a little bit later now. So we go to the next slide here and look at the project because what else promising do we see? Well, we've got jealousies above those sliding doors. And so this is the again the passive way of letting the air in and out without having to do anything mechanical. And you pointed out also we've got three sliding doors. So that means that you can open in theory two thirds of that facade at one time if you choose to. And that reminded you of something you're very close to. It reminded me of the Asapov house that I grew up in and my mother still lives in and which has sliding doors like that all around what's the living room and dining room. So that's exotic island tradition, right? Yes, it is. Asapov from 1948. Genetically Russian grew up in Japan. But he brought all these duties to here. So we can probably call him a good Hawaiian architect. Yes, we can. Very good. So next picture here is us analyzing it more. Here is the entire floor plan. And probably what the building is probably going to be, you know, most celebrated for is that it has foldable take panels on its southern facade. And we have to say they're neatly integrated. They're recessed flush into that concrete wall. However, if you look at the plan, you see some opening at the ends of the units of the end units. And so if there would have been a structural opening, I want to point out for the next generation of towers. There's a product that's called Onyx glass of ultra lux that's fritted on photovoltaic dots. So you could put like our favorite jealousies behind, have a cavity space that the wind can still go behind. And then you could put this sort of photovoltaic screen glass facade on top of that. And it produces electricity. Exactly. But it also provides a little bit of shading and a little bit of cutting the direct sun. So there are two benefits to it. Well, it keeps the daylight and the views, right? Correct. Now, this is my way. You want to be able to look out and see stuff. Mackay view, right? They're pretty precious. So next picture here. This is going around. This is the other side where the units are facing pretty much west. And west is principally, as we always caution people, is problematic. These little diagrams down there with the sun studies I found online that as a consultant, the Arab was hired, which I commend them for. Because it's one of the most largest and most ambitious architectural engineering firms. I had the privilege and honor to work with them on with a structural department. And that book at the very bottom left came out of it. So I commend them for that. And not basically because I know them, I trust them that what they're doing is pretty much, you know, no fake news as this term we know from politics. And we certainly do, yeah. So to go to the next slide here. But this is when I came back a week later and had to drop off my car finally. So there is actually some sun on this sort of Cook Street facade, which we were saying probably would happen to some degree. The more the sun comes around, the more it gets shaded. And, you know, in the afternoon, obviously it is shaded. So maybe there is something in addition needed. And so we go to them. Well, if you look at the very top, you see a little spot there that you can hardly see. So we go to the next slide where we zoom more into that. I see. And so this looks like obviously the guard rails. There are two, we already say, unfortunately, fixed glass guard rails installed as to mock it up and then two metal panels that have a perforation. And what are your thoughts about these? Well, you were saying that these are actually performative. In other words, they divide the lanais from one department to the next. That they do. So and in theory, perhaps this is a metal screening. It's not a screen per se, but it's a solid metal thing that's got a pattern cut out of it. Or so it appears. Maybe that's for storage. However, anything you put in there is going to be like put in an oven. Because if that's a metal box, it's going to heat up. So perhaps it's useful. Perhaps it's going to be destructive. Even not your thermal comfort behind it won't be so super. Right. It's keeping in heat. And let's go to the next slide because we found online how that has been rendered and probably will look like pretty soon. And again, we've been doing a couple of shows looking at how one has done this traditionally in the past and centuries. And we pointed out there were some pretty sexy vertical metal louvers that you can rotate and things. The Alamoana building had these. And we were running on a small budget. So we got to take this into consideration. Because they were rendered green, we were thinking one of the cheapest things is vegetation. So maybe one could look into that and we've been suggesting that for the primitive U.S. Right. So let's move on to the next image here, which is looking at the project from the north. And how does this come across for you? Well, there are two separate buildings, as you can see in the plan in the upper right. In between them is a space where you pointed out this is the tower to contain the elevators and the stairs. One thing that could happen. So it's got this pattern on it and that's kind of visually attractive. But you pointed out that we can also use open stairways. And there are a lot of advantages to open stairways, particularly for emergency use. It also reminded me of the gateway dorms at the bottom of the east-west center road on Dole Street, which we talked about. And that's a similar configuration except it doesn't have something in the middle. So if that thing in the middle is impeding air circulation, it's possibly not the best idea. And there seems to be at the bottom right, you can see there is this thing going on both with the Stanford Car Tower and this one here. There's a sort of fetishization of coordinating the chromatic staircases, which is, again, there is the tradition of open ones which you get to in the next slide. But here, staying for a second here again while looking, you know, sort of this like vortex of like trade winds in cool blue swirling up. You know, maybe we should have done this more literally. The structural engineer what I read is Baldritch, who's a pretty renowned guy here on the island. While he was able to make openings, you know, into the buildings originally, maybe he could have done that as well in the staircase tower. So that would be another recommendation. And, you know, stressing that even more gets us to the next slide, where this is one of my favorite buildings right in my hood next to the Waikiki Grant, where there's this heroic, you know, for a high rise all the way going up open staircase that people like me do for cardio. I run up and it's such a invigorating experience to, you know, to feel yourself going up. And you're in the open air. And I'm in the open air. And we got these heroes here on the sort of institutional side. Howard Wick, a fellow host of Cold Green here, one of the longest shows in this program here, and working for the state and having sort of fought for that we can do these again. And there's Socrates Pratakos, who is encouraging, you know, us enable. So you get while we're saying is do this. And what comes out of this is like the project that the retop that you did research and talk to the architects at Bull Studio. This is a small little loft in the Moloely neighborhood. And they have been doing that. And granted it's only a six-story building. But again, talk to these people who are willing to work with us to bring the islands back to easy breeziness. And I think in addition to easy breezy, I think they're safer. I think they are safer for emergency use because you're in the open air. It's not an enclosed space where smoke can accumulate. And you also have natural light to guide you. Yeah. And if you go back and watch these shows, I think they think so too. Yeah. So let's go move on here next page. And we were saying, well, you know, the historic, you know, Art Deco theater, you know, it makes sense as being stuck out in plastered and painted. The building, I'm not sure. I mean, I remember when my youngest son Lenny was here, Hi Lenny, you know, we had the repainting going on at the Waikiki Grand. And, you know, wasn't fun. So once painted, always painted. And you pointed out in the show at the very top that the Molaili project, you know, stayed away from paint and works fairly well. Exactly. So plain concrete not only is a statement of itself in its appearance, but it means you don't have to maintain it by painting it. And a lot of, there were a lot of high rises that weren't painted, subsequently got painted, and then it's a maintenance issue. And I haven't gotten a conferred, but I'm pretty sure this building was cast in place once you work with precast, which is another means and methods we've been sort of, you know, making lobbying for. Then as you pointed out, you can pigment the concrete in the plant. Yeah. And then, you know, there's no, it's all the way through. So you don't have to do anything after that. Just maybe power wash every now and then. Yeah. So that's something to go, yeah, or azures and grays and patinas. That's right. In best case. Yeah. So let's move on because we wanted to be both, I was back on sabbatical and your way to work goes somewhere else. So we pulled from the web and here it goes. The building had these openings at the end. Right? Yeah. So maybe why are they closed now and they're infilled? That's sort of unfortunate. And another thing that's unfortunate is that the floor slabs continue from the inside to the outside to the lanai. And we've been talking in a couple of shows here. Please get that afford that coming originally. Sorry from Germany, but made it. That's all right. That's all right. So that little thing you can buy and that structurally connects and only disconnects called easel check. So get that thing next slide because it all comes from that originally when the project was announced in 2015 and these were the first renderings. That's how it looked like. And what was that? Well, to me, it looks like the shelving that you can buy that's a knockdown shelving that you assemble yourself. Yeah. So it's got a steel exterior that looks exactly like the upright members and the cross members that you bolt on yourself when you set up your shelving. And that has gotten and gets so many emerging talents excited. You know, one of them was the show I did with Matt DeBore and he did one of the best ones ever. So that regards, but in real life and you also found out that the capsule tower that we were using as an example. And by the way, talking micro, I mean, we're talking 300 square feet, that one had a hundred or has a hundred. Yeah. But it's in demise you found out, right? It's potentially threatened with being demolished. It was built as consisting of a bunch of different little individual pods that were connected together. The idea would be that they would replace them as necessary. They've never done that. And so now. But you could. So it's built in a way you could. You could. But it also shows the problem of metal and it's, you know, aging in grays and in the tropics. Some say is tropical rock would stay away from steel. So and we ended up at the very top left the stress field and I grows out of cargo steel. I have to careful consideration not to give it another primary structure that you then plug them in and out because it's just like is. You're sort of defeating the purpose and is way more costly and when they ever do it, right? Right. So it's more in theory than than in reality. So next page here so we can see why it was value engineered as we call that this one here was then soon after and it reveals who the developer is. And the name is program Bronx pro group is their name and they come from that bronze half across the continent and they're big, they're major and you can see also projects on the right side that, you know, I don't find that feeling they do. They do a lot. So having proposed that here from the island in this sort of pretty lean and clean way, I think is commendable. Go to the next page and I Googled, you know, social or affordable housing, micro housing in the United States. And this is what popped up. There's a whole movement. I mean, we have a large human not just we here on the island, but anywhere. So they're building like crazy and this developer is very, very involved. Many of these projects happen to be from the same developer. And they're also building some of them, many of them including the very in the middle at the bottom. This is a high rise. And they say it's going to be the world's tallest passive house building. And that might sound familiar to you because Martin on the on the right top here has been an is building with his family company to that standard. But, you know, we're doing this in temperate climate. So it's so cold and it's so hot at another time. So here again, think of that because I looked up the rental rates. They're not that far off of ours. So if we build even more efficiently in effectiveness and we leave away that puffy jacket that we don't need anymore, we don't need to insulate. We can bring the cost down even more, which we need to do so desperately. Right. And originally, let's go to the next page here because right. Yeah. And so this is well, one of the things that this is the tree tops part of apartments that you created that you build and you pointed out that in Germany, you want to have having a glass railing is good because there's protection from when the weather is cold. Yeah. We don't need to do that. So what could we do instead? Well, if we come back to the studio, you can see that I'm holding up or you can see it just right there. I'm holding up a metal mesh that's movable. Yeah. This is something that could be used for that instead. Yeah. And you also talked about should we try to shift to reusing unbiodegradable fishing nets that cause damage. So you can see there's a photograph of a turtle that was killed by being wrapped in fishing nets. Yeah. Exactly. So evolve, evolve and along your great show about the tradition of evolution on the islands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Innovation. Invent things. Yeah. And even the stuff that comes is potentially exotic in this way because it makes more sense but it's still got to be shipped in so why don't we repurpose the stuff that we've already got too much of. Exactly. So that's what we're saying. Well, again, this is all in Germany. So how can we, something that we build here has to look different because the conditions culturally and and climatically are so different. Let's move to the next slide. Something I, you know, I want to comment on is that on the first floor they're saying they're going to have urban farming, which is a hip thing and our previous guest was opting for that. So that's a good thing. But again, if I look at the mullions of the window frames at the very bottom, that reminds us of something next page. Oh, yeah. Yes, yes. So tree top apartments again. And while yes, I can support not to put a dwelling on the ground floor because that might be awkward and certainly not put parking down there. So I support that. But again, this is in Hanover, Germany. This is cold and hot. Yeah. So as we point out at the top right here with Primitiva too, this should be all open. This should be easy breezy or should have water curtain walls or whatever. So please, guy, walk the extra. It's not a mile. It's just a couple of steps. Right, right, right, right. So let's go to the next slide here, which again, again, this was advertised as the next big thing, tiny apartments in Kakaako. It's all relative because Waikiki Grand, having built half a century ago, was pretty much a not similar layout of the sign of spread legs, right? And I have 230 square feet, right? So we should, you know, maybe try to get even smaller and think about sort of co-sharing communal spaces and all these things we've been talking about or next slide. You know, we've been talking about how can you make a super small one very flexible, right? And there's this tradition that Asipov did this a lot as well, right, about all these built-in stuff. Built-in stuff. Our house has built-in stuff. And then you're, you know, back in the days, these kind of beds. Right, the Murphy bed. The Murphy bed was very popular in New York City in the early 1900s. And while, you know, given Kurt Sandburne always gave me crap about, he said, Martin, it all makes sense, but you're sort of underground furniture, maybe not so much. And I give him that. So we got to keep on, we research on that and the emerging talent of ours, basically, when we were talking about, she said, oh, I think this, by the way, the project is called Nohono, Hale Nohono, which in Hawaiian means living and existence and all these things. Probably an okay name for that. But when she continued and she said, well, they're doing this sort of, you know, folding in and out furniture, but then she had to say, well, it's actually for one of the next hard use projects that more on the high end. Exactly, the RLE. That, and this is a, this is a native plant, right? The floor plant at the rendering looks more like when someone broke his bone and you have this bone sticking through your, sticking out at an angle. Yeah. I don't know what that has to do once again. That's might be more branding, right, than anything else. Yes, it probably is. So let's go to the next slide here. Again, this is something that we don't want to see and hopefully it's not what we think it is, but I think it's a nasty single wall unit AC above the door, which a thing has and maybe there should have been more openings towards the corridor. That's probably a fire problem. But again, up there is Martin. I have a similar situation. There is this nasty machine out there. I've never used it and I will never use it. And similar to you, right? Exactly. And I pointed out, I've grown up on the island of Oahu my entire life and I've never used air conditioning because it wasn't around very much when I was a kid. So if it gets hot, I just live and I don't demand or think I got to go turn on a machine to get cool. Exactly. So the next page here is sort of we've used other combustion engines as vehicles for thought. So probably we've been debating this, how many of these sort of little nice little nondescript bit-sensory jewels will be able to be kept. I call the top picture like the Fleetwood, the Cadillac Fleetwood kind of notion or how many, you know, Dodge Chargers, muscle cars from the back we will see and probably not that many Teslers because it's a working force neighborhood. So probably the Honda Rookers that we see there on the right, I see this on a daily basis because it must be one of these workers who live somewhere there. And when I was getting back from having dropped my car off basically there was a young girl who I ended up seeing at the Sheridan later on. And she works there. And she works there. So these are the people. And I think the Rookers is a good analogy that what we need to make this raw and rugged Rookers-y buildings, they're durable and they just have the necessities, right, and not more. All this bullshit we kind of strip off, right. One thing shocking news for us convertible drivers is that David is going to give up his business after 37 years and he has a sign on his building that says for sale. So when we go to the next slide and for the minute we have left, I just reflected back on the last show and how we ended and with like, you know, that the theme for the block party was in the southern sun. And that was Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scottish man, sort of having a thing with the princess Coyolani and she had Scottish blood, right. She was. And we used her a lot in that she really tried to walk this kind of fine line between the two cultures. And then we're also sort of re-reflecting on Prince Coyolani right before the show. Right, and if Prince Coyolani came back to life today, what would he do? Would he continue to live wearing the heavy clothes that he had to do when he was in Washington, D.C.? Or would he say, you know what, I'm going to be more Hawaiian, I'm going to go back to my roots more and I'm going to strip down and I'm going to be less covered up. No, that's a good... I like that. And again, as sort of Tadpole Studio has demonstrated that sort of nakedness if we want so, right. It's... We have to give them a compliment here, the firm, because they came from there, the same architects who did this project here, who came from the very far stretched using the Hukilao as a justification for a wavy, microwavy building, right. So coming from there, this is a good way. A step forward. A step forward. And the next slide here, just really quick, again, there isn't just an inside out, but also an outside in aspect of that. And I comment my project and my colleague here, Winston Welch, here, for having done a show about keeping the... what's the park called, the downtown park, the Wana beach park, right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. The people's beach, right. Correct. Whereas we dream about, you know, retrofitting when Martin swims out in the morning and has these visions about when he floats there, we could make Waikiki into a more organic and a more green one, literally a figure of the end downtown. You know, if that ever is going to happen, it's going to be a long way. But Kakaako has the potential. We're starting from scratch. Because that's homegrown, right. And if you plant the right plants, meaning buildings, tree, texture, buildings, then that could happen. So we want to encourage, and you know, the developers, the architects out there, go these extra steps. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So with that, we're at the end of the show over time. Thank you guys for watching. See you soon again and until then, stay proletarily cool. Naked. Naked. Awesome.