 supposed to be some mainlandish where supposedly many of our imported high rises come from. So anyways, welcome you all to our 244th episode of Human Human Architecture here on Think Tech, Hawaii. And you're about to be our 13,044th viewer. So thank you for that. We, you the Soto Brown, hi to Soto. Hello, everybody, and hello, Martin, and hello world. And you're obviously, unfortunately, not in your easy breezy home, no birds, no dogs, but just a seed indoors, which it has to be for your books and such. That's right. And me, equally tragic, not out there on my wife, Grant Lanai, because we got all these distractions that we're not supposed to be. So I'm broadcasting from my bathroom in here. So we're both not in the places and spaces that we aspire to and are inspired by. But anyways, so let's bring up the first slide here. And we have a lot to talk about that first slide. First and foremost, sort of a late entry to what you have been saying, the Soto, when I was in Porto together with our exotic is kept as an expert, Susanna recently, you were sharing this encouragement for our rim colas to come supposedly on the corner of Iikoi. And then I always keep forgetting the name of the street, just parallel to Capulani at the mall, the backside of the mall. What's that? Corner street. Yeah, that one. So that building to come there. We were telling that Rem was really sort of provoked by the architects in Porto that are pretty good to be even better. And his Kaza Damusika we also have to add is his music house that he basically designed is pretty much what you see in the show called with the heart at the top right there. But we forgot to say that Porto prides itself of having two Pritzker prize, which is the largest highest recognition and architecture that you can get in the world. Most cities would be lucky if they have one of the architects to have one, they have two. It's Alvaro Zisa and Eduardo Sotomura, the two of them, but even better, there's a bunch of their mentees to carry that on and push it even further. So these are all these people that we have these talents here too. I'm very close to them and you're two whenever I drag you in, which I do a lot. We have a lot of these emerging talents here. We just got to let them be in charge. Then we got to have a similar situation and I also we have a new friend having just visited us. So who is that? Well that is Philip. Philip is from Germany. He's another German cookie German like I like to say people are and he is the publisher of city guides to architecture and we just had a visit from him and he has talked to us about doing a book about architecture of the Hawaiian islands and that's something that we are excited about and looking forward to and it's a huge job. So we won't, we don't have too much to say about that yet because we got a lot of work to do before we figure out how we're going to do it. But also it's pretty much what we're doing here anyways have been doing for 244 Wednesdays and so we're going to compile this all and we're going to add more. We're going to have a team to support us with that and so all of that. Yes and how valuable his books are. They are he does a lot of books but the ones we're talking about are city guides or regional types tour guides and he insists to say they're not just that they're an introduction to the building culture and in these different places and spaces. And so I'm going to go we're on to having discovered investigatively here that according to an article from some while ago we have an imported skyline which we then make the differentiation. Well, then the question is, is it an invasive import or is it a tropical exotic import because one is bad the first in the letter is not bad. It's actually good. So that we have to make but we're finding out that many of the architects of the recent high rises are actually coming from what's considered to be the cradle of high rise architecture in the United States, which is Chicago. And I have the chance to revisit now inspired by our investigations and I'm stopping by my best buddy from my college days, Dan Kubrick, who works for the the architect, his boss and friend, who unfortunately passed away not that long ago was hit on his bicycle by two cars, Helmut Jan, and he has the majority of projects in the book about Chicago that Philip made with an author named Vladimir first name is predominantly dominating that book. And I learned a lot from that book as what it's supposed to be. And they're really great. Thanks, Philip, for having given me an insight into the just out guide. For example, that our genie game who blessed us with the cooler that we have been talking excessively about is actually a mentee of guess who will ram Kolaas. So there we go. There we have a connection. And that's why we encourage Genie to basically as mentees should be and most they are and she is to excel their mentors and and and move on and what she's doing. And our friend Ron, who we miss on the show, hopefully have him back at some point. He was pointing out Genie's most recent project in the tempered Malca of Colorado, which we see at the very top left. It is a hotel. And as it seems to be her thing that she themes things after nature, this one is in the press told as one can read here is inspired by aspen trees. We think looking at it more, they mean more than not on the on the trunk where the where the branches used to be as what these windows want to look like. But also in the article, they're talking about that this is a carbon positive hotel achieved through a multitude of means, one that got us curious and excited as a carbon neutral concrete. I have not, you know, been too aware of such a thing. And we've been talking about carbon or carbon franty concretes where the cement, which is the carbon pillar gets compensated by fly ash or by iron powder and things, but a total carbon neutral concrete. We're excited to hear and to embrace and to get here as well. But another thing we want to point out is the is the middle top show quote here, which is one of our talents. Speaking of this is Kelly Keanu, who was doing what the soda way back? Well, what's happening is that he is using coconut products to create a bunch of different things. And one of them being, as I remember, pegs wooden pegs that can serve in the in the place of nails, metal nails, for example, and coconut trees are incredibly productive. And coconut trees actually serve to keep people alive in a bunch of different specific locations where the coconut trees will grow and almost nothing else will. So to make use of these natural products in lieu of things which require a lot more energy to create and in lieu of things that have to be shipped long distances is something that is very admirable and something that we are looking towards and hoping that we see more of. Yeah. So that being said, again, the kind of more figurative figurative alluding to a raw model in the plant life as an aspen tree. Maybe next time one could also do it literally in building it out of solid timber, which is something that's really picking up on the mainland a lot. Colorado has a lot of forest, has a lot of trees. So it used to be cross laminated timber. And now as Kelly picked up on from my encouragement, using more cross nails, using wooden dowels, the industry is evolving in that sector could actually get even more closer to a literally and figuratively alluding to some natural phenomenon project. So what we're saying is, yes, Jeannie, you're going the right direction. And, you know, with this one more than the cooler that we got blessed by her. So the next step, we would encourage you to go that way because that's what the emerging generation is doing, as we can see at the very bottom left. And what is that excitingly? Oh, that looks like a shrouded building to me and or it looks like a giant tree that's enveloping a building, but it's what it's doing. And you encourage your emerging generation students to think outside the box and to do a variety of things with a variety of different materials so that people are living in different conditions. And there are a whole bunch of ramifications to this, which we don't have time to discuss right now. But this is the type of thing that I've seen with people that you encourage the young students that you encourage to not just do a concrete box with glass, but to open it up, to use water, to use other types of materials, this this steel or basalt, fiber, netting, for example, is something else, something that we're going to be potentially seeing. And anyway, again, it's just being different and thinking differently. Yeah, and it's going back to the vernacular of the locally available materials. Another sort of addition to having been talking in the past and actually having to do shows about our findings in Porto is picking up again on Southern Mora. So one of the two Pritzker Prize winners as at the bottom right, we had already briefly talked about his Borgo Towers and his Borgo Towers that we then also took the emerging or Hawaiian emerging generation there via Zoom when we were in Porto, as you can see in the middle on the right column. This is a building that is clad with the original local material, which is granite granite is the geological foundation that basalt is ours. And that's why you're referring to when you had been on the review last week. Yes, we're we are finding that you can make basalt into cables and cords and span them, create tensile systems out of a local material, as Sotomora has been doing in Porto with granite. He basically used it for a rain screen, which you need there. I think it's very rainy. And Suzanne tells us that he's never been that cold as in the winters in Portugal as a sweet 16, although it doesn't get subzero, but it just stays above and it's really damp and cold. And we even know this here from our microclimate zone up there in the mountains where people are saying, wait a minute, I'm not down in Waikiki where you are, where it hardly ever rains or on the Eva Plains, where it's like desert. I am getting cold at certain conditions when it's, you know, not that the temperature is not that high and it gets moist. Then you get that situation. But again, there is this movement, obviously, you know, internationally and it's a culturally to revisit sort of, you know, and re revisit indigenous practices, which, as you know, more than anyone else. And Philip has also toured your museum after we met. And that's the best documentation of these indigenous practices, how people have been built with what's there from scratch, so to speak. Right. No Amazon button pushing possible at that time. Right. And the young generation is very, very, very exciting. We rediscovering that, which we're happy to be around them. And so the last couple of shows rightly so as encouraged by Jay and, you know, everyone else, how can you not think about again, the circumstances that the emerging generations is operating under. When I was in school some 30 years ago in the early 90s, which we'll get to at the next slide next, not now, but that was the last time of like fossil formalism. Where was the next thing you want to know? You don't know. We were pretty much OK. I mean, there were issues here and there, but ever since there's climate change, there was a there is still a global pandemic. It was about to say there was it's still there. And, you know, on top of that, we have unsubility at its worst ever since my culture did that to the world. We have that now Putin doing to the world. And so it is intense. And we've been pointing out that first and foremost, it's for the people in the Ukraine. They're losing their third skins, which now it's luckily summer. So they reports by doing farming in her town with a friend of ours who's 80 or young, and he's the last regional farmer in the community. And she was saying it basically went from somewhere in the Chile 60, somewhere lower 60s to mid 80s all of a sudden. So we're out of the freezing, which is great for the people having lost their thermal envelope, but the summer only lasts so short. And then we're going to have that back. And so we have been there for all the past shows starting off with these terrible images of facades blown off buildings, buildings being totally gone. So they're going down right here. They're going up this time. We wanted to take a little bit more encouraging angle to solar right because Philip was also reaching out to us because he actually before he is teaching currently as a visiting professor at Brown University on the East Coast. But before that, he was teaching in the Ukraine and he reached out to me and he said, Martin, are you interested with a couple of other schools to basically do a competition to student projects in rebuilding that? And when talking about that before the show, you got really excited about to share that a little bit. Yeah. And one of the things that we're seeing, we're seeing mass destruction of the country of Ukraine. And at some point, the war is going to be over. At some point, it's going to have to reconstruct. And as you keep saying in the 1940s, much of Europe underwent the same terrible destruction. I'm saying that I would love to see in the case of Ukraine an international effort to not only rebuild and restore, but to do it better, as we keep saying, to use new materials, new techniques and whatever, and also to see it as a cooperative, international, not necessarily competition, but group of people who get together to assist Ukraine, architects themselves. And it shouldn't be that outsiders come in and dictate. It shouldn't be that outside people come in and say, here's how you're going to rebuild. We're going to make you rebuild your country. No, it's assist and it's to cooperate. And it's the antithesis of a war. It would be the absolute opposite of destruction. It would be the opposite of conquering. There would be a cooperative international adventure and venture. And I would love to see that as something that replaces the destruction in the death and the terror that's going on in that country right now. So let's look forward to that. Let's let's keep our hopes up that that is something that's going to happen. And that when that occurs, we're going to see innovative buildings. We're going to see new things that are being done that aren't just like everything else, but Ukraine could be a test case to show off all of these things in a more hopeful, better time in what we hope is the very near future. Yeah, that being said, again, preparing for being in Chicago soon brings back the memories of when I was there last time about a decade ago, where I took the emerging generation to one of the leading architectural firms in in the U.S., which is Skid Rowing's Meryl, that we have talked about as sufficiently as well, because they blessed us with two buildings on our islands as well, one being the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, which is a fine example of tropical modernism. And then when my university was still smarter, they followed best practices and commissioned SOAM to do the engineering school, which is a very nice tropical exotic building as well. And so they have been doing also talking high rise. One of the beacons for me for by climatic high rise is the commerce bank tower in Jeddah. That was in the mid eighties. And that's actually besides that Bill Chapman rightly so called our friend Ron Lindgren the best postmodern architect. I think he rightly so he shares that recognition or that award with SOAM for that building, because in the eighties, otherwise was the epitome of postmodernism and prestige and the fake and the pretending. But these are real authentic and engaging buildings with with the people and the planet. And it was basically analyzing, you know, indigenous practices of courtyards, keeping the sun out in the heat and incorporating that and blending that into the all American typology of a high rise. So it was not as what you're saying. We're coming there as the imperialist. We're coming there as the diplomats in the best sense and trying to blend and merge our cultures. Unfortunately, when I was there with the students last time, they had a project at that point, fresh on the table. That was what then became talking the desert, the Arab desert, the Burj Khalifa, which it then was finally named after, and which prides itself, I think, still to be the tallest tower in the world. And when they were went, walked us through the excessive construction documents at one point, we said, well, what's the concept of the building? And they said, a desert flower. And we were still giving, you know, keeping up the hope and giving it the benefit of doubt. And we say, oh, it functions like like a desert flower. Like it can, you know, retain its hydration in a hostile climate. And they're like, no, it just looks like a flower in plain. We're like, oh, my God, this firm that many, including me, believe basically had brought an easy an idea. And we will get to him in a little bit. You know, has, you know, built on the couple of handfuls of buildings. They basically mass popularized the Measian idea. So that firm sank basically that low. I had one more time, actually, with my desert, with my mainland desert Arizona students to build there some few years after. And I was relieved there was another cookie, as you call them, right? We sold German guy and walked us through the firm. And when I asked him why he works for the firm, he named just that project of the Jeddah Tower as his favorites and as an inspiration and motivation to go to that firm and encourage them to go back to their origin, which there are signs they're doing that. And there's actually a project in Chicago that Ulf Meier reported on, who is Philip's first author of one of the first guides was Tokyo. And Ulf just reported on that on being sort of a revisiting of the Hancock building in blend with I think the Manette building. So it's like out of solid brick and steel. And so it's, they're kind of revisiting their roots, which is really, which is really good to see. So again, not as imperialists coming in as saying we're Americans, we rule the world. That was then and now is now today being sort of equal collaborators. And again, as you pointed out again, if we wouldn't have screwed up so badly and doing just what Putin is doing right now back then under Hitler, there's always hard to say under these circumstances, but say it anyways, there's always a good thing about even the worst. You've got me's fund a role because of that. And while he had built very little in Germany, he really came to full fruition in the United States, including in academia. He built the whole campus of IIT and Crown Hall as the architecture school, but also in town. So we can say this is Lake Shore Drive apartments is the ancestral raw model for all the glass high rises we're getting here now. However, Chicago has a significantly different climate and I'll never forget that image I saw somewhere and have to find it again. If you would be the Chicagoan historian, you would have it in your archive. It's where the residents were scratching eyes like you do on your car window, but from the inside in Lake Shore Drive apartment towers because at that time talking technology wasn't as developed as this idea. So only what he had was single pane glass and when it gets not just brutally cold, the Arctic pushes down temperature but also you get this wind, lake effect snow stuff there and then you try to keep it relatively comfortable inside. You get the dew point where your beer bottle gets it but you get it out of your refrigerating compartment right on the glass. So these circumstances we don't have but positively speaking in winter time that sun can also heat you, which we don't have a condition here. So of course, again, what's been done currently to uncritically import to say the least, these towers is not a smart idea. You have to go through that process of tropicalizing your mindset. The good encouraging note that we wanna use here is the picture at the bottom left because Ukrainians, it shows that Ukrainians don't even need us principally as far as being skilled. This is from, there is a competition for fictional high rises that called Evolo and just yesterday the winners of this year were announced and there are fantastic visionary speculative projects that should all be built. Last year, these guys here were the winners and they're credited up there and there are young upcoming architectural firm from the Ukraine. So they, again, but when I look at that picture, we looked at that picture, which is obviously in New York, it's kind of ironic because as you said before, this looks like it would belong to Hawaii and should be in Hawaii while not in, when that picture obviously there's leave on the trees. So this is a summer picture of New York city, but we know these and you've lived there not that far away from that in your childhood, which we're revisiting frequently with heavy coat on. So you know what that snow is. So that tower might actually be, and if you read the description of the project, we provide you the link at the bottom. It is again, it is just like as we're recommending for Jeannie to do next, it is a both basically literally and figuratively inspired by nature system. So it's less, I guess, mimicking nature as biomimicry, but basically being more biofilia, trying to understand the principles of nature better and apply them to architecture. So yeah, we can't thank basically, you know, Philip enough to have this idea. We're excited to join them in this effort of an international and intercultural kind of brainstorming for rebuilding. And we pointed out, you know, other architects like Lord Foster, who we pointed out to as for whom that SOM, this is how intercultural things work. He's a Brit, right? But he got inspired by Americans, by SOM, by that power in Jeddah that was talking about for his commerce bank. And there you go, you inspire each other from different continents, from different generations. And that's basically how it works in best case. And yes, we just have one of our mentees here watching us him and Pia, hi, good to see you again. And just so that you've been at their review. So it's all coming full circle and that's the way it's supposed to be. So we probably end on that note on the one slide today, but there was much to talk about as to chair encouragement. And until then our hopes and prayers are for the ones who are still hanging in there for the time being. And as you said, hopefully that tragic, you know, crime of humanity is gonna stop soon and we can start the re-humanizing phase there too. Yeah. Okay, so that's it for today. We're gonna continue with looking into this area here of high-rise development around the Alamoana Mall. Next week, I am reporting from Chicago, you're reporting from Honolulu, the teamwork. And until then, please all stay increasingly human and humane, bye-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 LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.