 We're delighted to have you back to this show, Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Hubane Architecture. This is our 255th show and you're around our 13,700 viewers. Thank you for that. And we, spiritually with us, our co-host is Soto Brown in his Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii and he has to be there physically and on duty because unexpectedly he had to give a tour of the recent exhibits. So physically it will just be me, your host Martin Despang and I am back freshly to our Honolulu Hawaii which is great to be back and also who's back Eric, our producer, hi Eric and both of us share as we were talking just before the show and escaping the heats in his high summer here in Honolulu. Don't get that wrong. We're like somewhere in the upper 80s or so but we were escaping 90s and 100s so climate change is inevitable. We all feel it and we escape it so Hawaii must be even more attractive for people. That is great but it puts more stress on the islands and that's what we're going to talk about. Also we are in the middle of nowhere because we're the most remote from all other landmass but we want to look at it as the Soto who grew up here as a state that could want to be looking at it as as they were in the middle of everywhere and that's a mindset issue and matter that we will work on and so that means we need to get our mind out and across the somewhat limited horizon that we have here and we need to do that spiritually and mentally but also every now and then physically. So mostly we sent me out from time to time to check out other places and that's what the show sequence is about that we sent me to Chicago Illinois that is just you know west of where you Eric have been on the east coast and it shares the same climate. It is very cold in the winter, wind chill of multiple digits below, freaking freezing cold and in the summer it's really really hot. It's actually hotter as we were just saying and it's getting hotter through us screwing up as mankind and heating things up even more so it gets into the 90s into the 100s and it's very humid there. We have very high humidity even higher than here. At the bottom of the first page if we can get that up Eric please you see a recent publication. I have a physical hard copy of that one this is mine here for the archive as the sodom knows what that is about and so this is from a German publisher D.O.M. Dome and they publish city guides of cities they think worth while it from all over the world and we got approached by them to write the Honolulu one that we are working on and one of the precedent is the one that I was just holding up and then you see at the bottom there which is the one about my hometown and at the bottom left is a news from you know a little while ago that's addressing what we're just talking about the heat and the heat is particularly you know we feel the heat particularly in our urban environments in the city we call that heat island effect because all these thermal massing surfaces of streets and buildings they soak up the heat and then they give it back to the surrounding atmosphere to the air so you're having significant you know hotter temperatures in the city than in the countryside which is a big issue and the you know the news on the bottom left wasn't particularly about a city but they choose the picture from my hometown this is downtown Hanover the building is a building that about 10 years ago they tore down a brutalist building a brutalist mini high-rise in place it's replaced by this rather generic a commercial building no concern was to I mean if you if you're picking if you're picking up a carbon footprint that has been created by something that was poured in place likely you know in the 70s some 50 years ago you better you know continue to get that footprint out of it if you demolish that I was just sent by one of my emerging talents colleagues Jess sent me a YouTube of the architect Thomas Heatherwick who was addressing that and saying we should try to keep things everything not just architecture keep buildings renovate rejuvenate them we should you know recycle everything we should upscale upcycle things we should drive our cars until they break down and not before that you know you know you know become victimized of the temptation of the car industries that tell us to buy new ones and that is even true with electric vehicles that takes for a tester around 100 000 miles to break even to be more ecological than a fossil fuel car so with everything we should do that in that case they were tearing this down and if you tear something down as we keep saying you should replace it with something significantly better especially these days from its performance its energy performance that building hasn't been so my little you know weekly German lesson for the soda would have been they say here come outside and it comes shut in this position by temperature in the insides of 40 grad translating that means its heart it's unbearable and there's hardly any shade to be in with temperatures around 40 degrees and that converts to 100 Fahrenheit so damn hot you know our contributions which they feature is in the book try to mitigate that in terms of not just architecturally but typologically it's important to have primarily here educational buildings as kindergartens in school and walkable grocery communities because the number two energy consumer fossil energy consumer is mobility is cars is combustion cars and we want to get these out of our cities i'm broadcasting by the way from our Waikiki Grand Hotel which is privileged because in many ways it's i keep it easy breezy but we're broadcasting live from the bathroom because otherwise the noise of the combustion engines wouldn't make it impossible for you to hear me so we got to work on these issues get the cars out get the buildings open again and then we're really a paradise what we used to be before contact and what we should be again in the future so the top row show quotes is you know the majority of people actually live in cities in 2008 statistically we reached that point that more city live in urban areas then on the countryside in the united states i looked up that already was true in 1920 that early so they were a trend center into that trend and again the cities have we talked about the kinds of city they overheat they're congested so we got to need to work on cities to make them more like the countryside because the constant conflict with our exotic escapism as per susanna is that she's a country girl and i'm a city guy so in order to make her being equally excited about my city she the country girl i gotta transform the city which we're working on to have the same qualities as the countryside because we cannot afford to waste any more land we need this urgently for agriculture to keep the country country as we say it here and to make the city the city that's what we really really need to do and then especially here on the island where we're basically squeezed in between two mountain ranges we can't afford to stay on a few stories i know and our publisher philip moiser i philip and i appreciate the agreement to disagree the way i grew up the way you grew up was the four to five to six story walk-up in my case even without elevator it kept me in shape and our you know boss in the building just turned a hundred you know a little while ago so this is all this is all good this is all true but again with the population growth we're having here i believe although if you compare that's his point if you compare and saying you built really dense at this european city model five to six stories blocks keep the street profiles really tight have courtyards to breathe and in the center you could get a density that is rather close to a high rise where traditionally you need space in between the high rises not so much here if you would introduce a different generation of high rises that kurt sandburne calls like stacon eyes that we used to have in that century and we want them again then you could get really really close and shade each other just like the trees do in the jungle or in the forest and we will increase you talk about that but for now we want to look again above it beyond our horizon and look at another city that we have many similarities with or at least we want to have as we found out in the last couple of shows i counted them there was like the last 25 shows were about developments on the island here and assessing them and evaluating that so now we need to and we found out that there are certain ties and references to the other windy city which is chicago how they call it it's by the way it doesn't have to do with the trade winds as here but it's sort of the political story behind that we get to the next slide please so how do you approach the city obviously the city guys it's a great way to have a handbook in your hand but in this case here a recommendation for us in hawaii there is the aia and they have a downtown office but it's not open all the time and it doesn't have the capacity that this institution here has this is the architectural center in downtown chicago right on the chicago river that is behind me and very close to lake michigan and that's why we call show how we call it with a four s s because there's a shoreline affinity between our two cities this is perfectly positioned in a meese funder row building that german architect who because of hitler left germany his own country and made his major career in the united states and meese funder row built a building that we see down there which is 111 east flecka drive or one illinois center and it's one of meese's late buildings because he died in 69 and this building was completed in 70 so he didn't even witness it's inauguration anymore and and what they have as the display there which we zoom in at the top is what energy revolution right everyone cares for so sustainability ecological concerns however you want to call it is in the forefront of our attention as a society and as a profession and a discipline as an architecture and so here it says blueprint for a carbon free future the project to the right on that one is the bullet center that's actually ironically not in chicago that's in seattle washington but the one at the top left is this is probably the most iconic building that i was holding up my old as our son yoni taught and told me now vintage little lego tower of the formerly called or initially called sears tower and now being called the the willis tower and the willis tower was built just after the first major oil crisis than different than the ones we have now thanks to or not thanks of course to putin and others this one was politically cost and not just not just resource course obviously today they're cost by both reasons so the building of course didn't have you know energy efficiency on his radar because that was the big wake up call ooh there's something you know you know fossil fuel and you know the Arabs giving it to us this is not you know a thing that can go on forever or it could be disturbed and disrupted and so that was that that era of that building and obviously here with a sort of thermal camera taking the picture the question is how do buildings in skyline cities perform and to say this already again we described the climate in chicago in the summertime you want to shade yourself from the sun just like here or even more because this could be even hotter but in the wintertime the the buildings you know want to bundle up and so the glass that we see that really makes little to no sense as we keep saying at least not as fixed blazing in Honolulu makes sense in chicago because it keeps you warm but again it would be great if that could also basically passively heat you but you know because land the scars still there and very valuable you put the high rises pretty close to each other so you're hardly ever getting any sun in the streets which again here in Honolulu great thing all year round keep yourself cool through shading each other but not so much in chicago and next slide let's quickly look into the chicago architecture center here this is one major exhibit that we're focusing on here at this point that is by an architectural company they're called Smith and Gill Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill they used to be head designers chief designers principals whatever in the firm of Skidmore Owings Merrill who is headquartered in chicago and the show court at the top right we talked about that firm because we're blessed with two great buildings by them one is the famous monarchy beach hotel on the big island and the other one is our school of engineering richards hall both s o and buildings and again here even back then in the show we showed their most iconic building the sears tower now willy's tower um i might have shared but it's worth repeating um that uh when i was previously in the desert at the university of arizona on the prairie my home away from home we had and took the chance more because it was easier to take the emerging generation to other cities and chicago was our favorite that we frequently did field trips to and before right at the end of my prairie era we toured the office of s o m they were kindly to show us the office they had two projects on their table major projects that they took a lot of time explaining to us with a big stack of construction documents both were projects that rather shocked us uh one was the trump tower for obvious reasons um of who's behind that who then we you know wildest dreams we wouldn't have known that that guy would represent us as a president uh and so um they were working on that one and they were really appalled because they said well we had designed it in a way that we gave it these um clip on glass fins on the on the on the post and be mullions and and trump was value engineering that away and we said well you should have known that if anything isn't he known as a capitalist and capitalism basically only does what it's can make money often trump didn't think that was you know fancy enough i guess glitzy enough so he basically nixed it um and then as far as the the building designed they basically said well um when we asked for the concept they said well we go so many floors and then we step back because of the neighboring building and so on we're saying well wait a minute that sounds like zoning in 1930s in order to get that light and air into the cities and not suffocate yourself and also look at the sears tower again that's what the sears tower does so there was really nothing new but it got even worse because the other project was was what ended up being called the borsch califa the at that time and still tallest building in the world in the desert in the arab desert and we once again said what's the concept and they said well it's a desert flower and we were still keeping the hopes up high and giving it the benefit doubt because we had a little bit better the preconceived taste already from the trump tower story and they basically indeed said well um we said well how does it perform like a desert flower that survives and keeps its hydration even though it's dry and i said no it just looks like a desert flower in plan and we're really really shocked and paralyzed and had to talk about that a lot um next time i went there with my arizona emerging generation and there was another german guy who gave us the tour and he basically when i asked him why he choose to work for s o m he basically said because of one building that is his favorite and that um is compatible with my taste uh that is the building that we see on the show quote on the very right the three pictures above each other and that is as we stated here the national bank of commerce and jeddah in the erp world and that is amazingly from the time that we remember as the least progressive because that's the regan era this is the 80s where even though we had learned we should have learned the lesson from the oil crisis in in in the early 70s jimmy carter who wanted us to to to learn that lesson and to change things then was next by the american people who wanted that guy who told them well keep on going the excessive way of comfort commodity and convenience that were so used to and they choose the guy who promised them that and that was a cowboy ronnie regan and in that mindset unfortunately i believe little exceptions to the rule some terms were we're basically still in and s o m very bravely uh was fighting that with his tower in the in the mid 80s or in the early 80s 1983 by basically looking very close at the culture how they built with courtyards and always staying in the shade and blending and merging that with the all american typology of a high rise and they're basically in this in in planned triangular building they basically included inserted these triangular courtyards and twisted that around the building and that's why you get this rather opaque facades with these big cutouts that then they have greenery there and and hanging garden bevel onion garden so really really innovative for its time so um anyways so uh who was at that time the chief designer of the not so uh you know thrilling buildings of the trump hotel and the board califa was adrian smith and he then basically split off the firm however at the bottom right you see a project in china about a decade ago that he did and that was his big sort of coming out or getting off starting his own firm with his agenda to make the most sustainable high rise and that's the one you see at the bottom right there that one has all the whistles and belts it's a high tech approach has you know wind turbines and foldable takes and double facades so all the whistles and builds you can think of not passive systems not easy breezy stacked when eyes but basically taking a high tech approach and so he will do with um eric if you can stay on that zoom in for a little while that you just were that little foot of that model you see at the bottom right is there is the next project and that's in jeta again in Saudi Arabia and again high rises are a very sort of competitive um vein typology and they always want to top each other and everyone wants to be the tallest one so this one that takes the next step and aim to basically even the tallest high rise and they have this pretty large scale model in that architectural center and showcase and we can only believe and hope that again it is not along the lines of the trump tower or the bush califa but more of that china tower as you know being ecologically concerned and and and interested and committed so to speak next slide please so there is an architectural guide out there by dom a chicago that philip moiser kindly gave me the the pre version of it that i had began again if you go to chicago how do you going to navigate yourself and we basically use the book um intensively we're very happy to but we also you know try to find things on our own um as sort of informed citizens being on your own at the very top right you see show quotes from when i came back to coach in the prairie and got myself my second american dream big bolster awesome clots on my linkin continental our host of this show sequence he is dank hubert my best buddy in the us who without whom i wouldn't be where where i am at all and so he basically one year had me drive over these only nine hours from on linkin nebraska to chicago i leave my town car there to then have my family come for what i was calling and planning to be the promotion to trip to have them come over and stay with me and so when i had my um my big boat i used a guide book that i had since school days and that's all there was at that time because there was no internet at least it was premature at that time it's how time flies by and how one feels really old and i was driving into the burbs to find this project um that i only had a picture i took from the book at the very top right these are courtyard houses that uh disciples um of me's funder row basically had built so that was then now is now this is the courtyard thank you exactly exactly so um do i am publisher makes it really easy because there is qr codes in there uh that basically give you um the link to google maps so it's very easy for you if you put this in your gps and it navigates you the project where where you want to be we will take advantage of our farm i think the kawaii and our 255 shows to also qr code link them so you guys if you want to know more about one building or the other you can watch the show bottom right is another publication that we show quote here this is when i wrote an article in the chinese detail magazine and i featured chicago this is here uh mesis most iconic residential high-rise residential project uh the lake shore drive apartments and back then i saw the lady up there with the bananas in the blue home dress basically we saw and next slide at the back of the building on the ground floor and i went there again so who this is a proof of evidence that mesis was a sustainable architect which no one would have thought and of course the building envelope isn't quite because that one technology wasn't as advanced as his idea so it was single pane glass and their images that i couldn't find but i saw them i swear where the residents when the winter comes and the lake affects snow and they want to keep it like 70 ish inside and outside of 20 below and with the windshield of 40 below they basically the condensation happened on the inside of the window and they were scraping the ice of the window by now i believe um likely in some of the renovations ever since uh because the building as we stayed down there was built in the early 50s has been replaced at least by double pain but still the building you know is basically a fossil formalism of basically a hopeful one at that time because again in the 50s one was decades away two decades away from finding out where the trouble of fossil fuel basically is but as far as typologically he was he had a sustainable concern because sustainability means again cutting down uh transportation so here you don't need to get into your multiple multi-story parking garage below underground that most high rises have and have to have per codes to buy your banana or your donut here you can go down into the integrated into the building convenience store grocery store in kakako we have one big whole foods or whatever it is right but that's one big thing here it's rather decentralized and we once talked to the owner and he said he had one in another building that there were some arguments and some issues and so he got kicked out and at that point when we talked he said they're begging him to come back because even the property value went down because that humanity wasn't there anymore so that's something to learn as well potentially for us in hawaii whenever we build a high rise why don't we have a little let's even go further and say a little farmer's market uh in each uh ground floor of each building so this is another suggestion as we will have more of these for you uh in the next couple of shows where we continue to be in chicago through me and uh walk around and see what's different there and what wants to be the same and what can we learn from what maybe we want to do and maybe what we shouldn't do so with that we're at the end of the show um see you next week uh the solo back then please please even it's been too long two weeks that we haven't been together and until then please stay healthy of course and easy breezy breezy easy bye bye thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at think tech hawaii dot com mahalo