 take a wise human-humane architecture still in the claws of COVID-19 and we're increasingly and continuously looking into COVID curing or at least compacting compatible courtyards and for that we've been out and about in Germany and on the west coast and now we're slowly but surely heading back home to Hawaii to where we can hear it's very tropical exotic we hear birds and pretty soon we can see your dog the solo hi hello Martin and yes I'm here all right so let's jump right in and get the first up here which is you know we shouldn't be unfair there's actually several homes especially from mid-century that aren't growing courtyards many or several of them are actually by the architect of your childhoods the house you're sitting in by Vladimir Asipov yes we choose this one here where and you have just said sometimes in the future we maybe us as doko momo gonna get the chance to see your house which would be yes yes and doko momo actually took a chance we're seeing here on the first slide which is our host was an organization that's basically restoring historical fish ponds on the way out to Hawaii and the gentleman you see at the very top in the middle picture was the community leader and that way they got also taking care of the house here that we see that was Walter Lam's house and Asipov was as we hear you know part of the creating team and the house you can you won't you know really realize it that much when you're out on the busy highway they're out of Hawaii Kaiba it's right front in the street and right behind the wall is the first entrance courtyard and when you go through the house you end up immediately in a backyard courtyard with lots of open lani so it's it's really kind of an ultimate easy breezy corporate lani example and you to Soto who have once again very rather personal access to him explain to us who Walter Lam was well Walter Lam was a person who became famous for designing and using and creating outdoor furniture and he had there's a very interesting story as to how that furniture was created we see in this slide here some examples of the Walter Lam furniture but let's go to the next slide and this one we we can see details of a Walter Lam chair and this chair is made from copper piping it's copper pipe and Walter Lam got started right after World War two when there was a lot of military surplus material left over in the Hawaiian Islands because a lot of army and navy personnel were here they had to build buildings for them and then they all left when the war ended so here was this here was this extra pipe he bought the copper piping and he used that to start his furniture his outdoor furniture company and you can see in these pictures which is an example of one of the Walter Lam chairs there are the pipes that have been welded together to create the framework of this chair and I might point out this chair actually was used at the Holly Kulani hotel and my mother and I bought it when the Holly Kulani shut down in 1981 and that's when our friend Ron Lindgren built you know designed the whole new Holly Kulani hotel so here's our inspiration for what we're going to lead into for the rest of our show and we can go to the next slide and this is a presentation that I did for a visiting German merchants group that we can talk about more later if we want to but this is about the history of innovation here in the Hawaiian Islands and I don't think people realize how much stuff was innovated here in the upper left corner here is a drawing by King Kalakaua from the 1870s or 1880s about a torpedo he wanted to create that would look like a fish other things in here include the alamon of building with its exterior louvers that could move as well as the rotating restroom on the top Laurent we also see some equipment that was created for the sugar industry the sugar and pineapple industries innovated things the first aluminum beer can was actually invented and used here in the Hawaiian Islands by Primo beer but the main picture here on the left in the center on the right in the center is shipping containers the pacific ocean and the matsyn navigation company were the first users of shipping containers in the pacific after they were invented on in the u.s mainland we were the first place to use them outside of the east coast starting in 1958 and that is what we are going to be focusing on for the rest of this particular show that is shipping containers all right gets us the next slide and talking in the sense of Walter lamb right repurposing something that's sort of contemporarily abundant um this is my when i was still back in in our hood from my Waikiki grant one night here's doggie and join and so i was actually looking at the cargo ships driving by this is a picture i took from my one night and i was thinking how could one repurpose them for the you know increasing the origin uh use of dwelling and we're laying out a grid of eight feet which is the the width of the container and also the length because it's 40 feet that are weekly math here is five times goes into that so we were doing this checkerboard grid of eight feet and then placing and suggesting to place containers in this sort of pinwheeling configuration and let's go to the next slide and and see how that would feel and you but before that we were using automobiles as vehicles for thought and we've been pointing out you guys the lines obsession with german vw's and we did an entire show about that at the top right this one here tell me do you remember which one that is and what does it have to do with our topic today well what we're talking about here is what was sold in the united states as the Volkswagen thing was actually developed as you pointed out for nefarious evil purposes for the use of the nazi army and it was a intended to be an amphibious vehicle and fortunately as time passed and it was put back into production and sold for civilians starting in the 1970s and 80s again as i said in the usa it was referred to as the thing the Volkswagen thing it became kind of a fun vehicle for people to rent it became something that was associated with vacations and warm climates and as you also said in the film 51st dates drew Barrymore has one of those and drives it around here on the island of oahu and the thing was meant to be initially totally utilitarian for military use when it was repurposed and sold to civilians it was meant to be as i said fun but also useful you could fold down the roof you could fold down the windshield you could be in totally in the open air but something else that i think is interesting is the body of the car to strengthen the sheet metal is corrugated and when that was done originally for the military because the german army used it later on too after the nazi period it was just to strengthen it to make it useful but the corrugations are something which you can clearly see but we're going to see that also in the focus of this show which is shipping containers they are corrugated as well yeah so next slide is what came out of this inspiration is to basically do something to totally flip 180 degrees the meaning i mean shipping containers don't have a good connotation either i mean we ship all that stuff we need in them but you know they're not like the things we find pretty right so same with a car that hitler invented and then the hippies basically adopted here in the same intention and also the walter lamp methodology how can you repurpose shipping containers to make beautiful hawaii is in place as we're illustrating here so let's go to the next slide because something is key to we're going to have a show a shipping container project here in one of the shows in germany where it's getting chilly now so you need to prevent them to get cold in hawaii not so much it's about protecting them from getting overheated right because metal is a conductor so here when i first landed on the island i was charged to go to an bia show in the i think in the blaze dale convention that they're going to tragically renovate in a way for not most fans of and there was this basically ocean of ugliness of all these vendors trying to sell stuff that you really don't need and then there was this island of hope of meaningfulness which were these two guys that you can see there that erik and brandon from eco shade and they are basically promoting and selling this very exotic based in their native australia roof system out of just like the alamona previous you know enclosure which unfortunately took away but here horizontally these aluminum movers on tracks that can open and close so we were suggesting to basically make this canopy out of eco shade hovering over the entire house through the next slide and so talking utilitarian the soto by spacing them out on this checkerboard grid of eight feet the container doors that you don't need anymore if you're doing another screen infill instead but then basically become the quadrant doors so when you're thinking you're like the new farmer and this is your country court your cabana farmhouse and you coming from your day of farming you're basically seeing the containers closed and then we're cutting out the three fifth in the middle of it which is where fittingly the the medicine signage sits and then we put what we cut out back on sliding track yeah so those would be on sliding tracks and what you would be then doing would be you open up the space and this is something that we just were talking about martin and i before the show how these can be used in different manners and let's go to the next slide oh martin is back so let's get martin to continue to talk about this there we are yeah okay so that's the condition thanks for bridging uh that we then get is when you have it slide and basically the only thing left is the corners of eight by eight feet that depending on how you want to go resilience wise in the storm you can yeah so back to me the purpose of this is you can open this space up and you've got two two options if the if in the case of a hurricane and yes we do have hurricanes here that is a consideration you can either shut the thing up completely and try to be as protected as possible and of course the shipping container is a very robust exterior so that would possibly protect you or you can leave it open for the wind to go through to then be more safe in that respect because you're not going to get pushed over and you can take refuge in the parts of the container which are still closed off and that's the way that that could work and again overhead you see we've got this canopy of the rotating or the maneuverable aluminum fins that could either shade it or be opened up as you wish okay go to the next slide and let's see if martin is here to talk about that well i'll just keep going on the right is a magazine ad for the Volkswagen thing and this is harkening back to what i just said earlier the text of this ad points out how useful the thing was because you can shut the you can close it up you can open it up completely because the top is open you can carry big tall things and basically your it's a box it's a corrugated box like a shipping container except it's on wheels and you can move it around in the picture on the left we see how again this reconfigured shipping container might be used in a habitat in which it is inhabited and you create enclosed spaces and that's the point that we've been talking about in previous shows courtyards enclosed spaces which are open to the sky which are useful not only because they're nice to live in but here now in the age of COVID-19 they are physically safer for us because you have moving air that keeps the virus from hanging around too much and let's see if martin can rejoin us and we'll go to the next slide all right can you guys hear me again yes your your function okay good good thanks and so here one of the fans of the projects endorsing it was our friend kaini chun who i considered to be the best hawaii and hawaii artists on the islands and she basically said martin you know this is pretty much along the lines of how my ancestors have been living you know each different function of life had a different holly and they were assembled around and they created what you can call a courtyard in the middle and since we're cannot latch and fetch anymore for various reasons for the demand grabbing the shipping containers might be our most abundant local building material and so she said you know one of these days i want to build one of them on my family property on the big island so we wouldn't go forward to that but above and beyond next slide is we have to house 10 thousands of people as we were pointing out in the last show with with ron where we were observing the eichler phenomenon who had built 11 000 homes overall all the entire california so here we were proposing to make little communities out of them where these courtyard houses would then also gravitate around the communal courtyard so the courtyard theme repeating and reoccurring next slide we again this is then up and now and and now is down there and it's literally and figuratively down because when i first saw that what dhgl is doing the department of hawaii home lands who had reached out to us so this is a next project that was actually before the previously shown project i was rather shocked because i thought this has little to nothing to do with the way one used to live in in balance with the elements in hawaii this is an invasive american track home assembly and what we see as is not a courtyard but it's almost like a prison yard right yeah so how can you improve that the next slide so when i first came i was approached by my school and my dean at that time claire louis and if i would like to take on a project that dhgl had initiated together with the building industry association which would be to rethink the way dhgl is building for their local people and we drove out and visited this rather charming smaller community out west in winni but how how does that come across to you so what do you see well the picture on the upper right really to me we've got a lot of extra space that's used up in the ceiling area which is not really of any great use at this particular moment in this configuration it also as you pointed out is a hermetically sealed box there is no visual access to the outside because the windows have curtains on them and it's called it's completely air conditioned so you're spending money to air condition this big open space up above rather than being able to use it and as you also said when you're outside you really you have a beautiful view you've got a fantastic view of the mountains but you're not really able to make use of it just because of the way the house and the exterior backyard are configured and it's kind of a lost opportunity and martin okay let's go to the next slide and uh i these are these are drawings that martin has created and i'm sorry i can't see them very clearly in this particular moment to be able to give you more information and martin's not available right by right now but these drawings exhibit or show looking for you know better opportunity yeah okay martin is is cutting out on us again but but we're we're hard again this is a look back to how hawaiians ancient hawaiians set up the way that they lived and they had compounds in which they had separate holly which were used for separate purposes and this is something that rather than turning the interior of a house into specific rooms this is the way the hawaiians didn't go ahead i still can't see where we are right now okay poor martin is is not able to join us martin we've had technical problems so let's go to the next slide and here is the overall configuration of the small development that the department of Hawaiian homeland has created that martin was a part of and this is the overall you know picture that you can see and there's one little tiny yellow spot and that was the that was the potential space that they could work with what martin did on the right was to show a progression of how the spaces could be used at the very top it's the way the space normally would be used in the american suburban development and gradually it turns into a situation where you have more communal spaces and you have the negative spaces between the the structures as being common places which various people can use let's go to the next slide okay now again martin is the person who really knows about this so i'm going to do this to the best of my ability in the open spaces here that we can see we've got first of all a kind of an a-frame roof that is overhead over the open spaces those are potentially to be constructed of the system which we just talked about which is the eco shading where those louvers which in this case are placed horizontally can be opened or closed based on what the weather is and what your needs are and i'm hope i'm saying this all right to you martin let's go to the next slide and here again um i apologize i can't clearly see what these are to be able to describe them and i'm i'm sorry that we're doing this uh so makeshiftly but these again are pencil drawings to show how if you're talking about a series of shipping containers placed so that they have a communal space between them they also have where the open space becomes something which is more used now we talked about the eichler homes as having courtyards and this was something that we've been continually discussing in our series now what we see here however different from the eichler homes the eichler homes were private these would be spaces which most of the tenants around them would use so it isn't exactly comparable to what we talked about previously but it is very similar next slide okay again um one of the things that is in in in the courtyard cabana setup the kitchen remains a place where again because of the plumbing that you need to install that's something that is very specific and you have to build that in but the other spaces in these in these little compounds do not have to be as necessarily segregated or specifically tasked with just one thing in other words they are more useful for more than one purpose and this is something that i said earlier about the ancient hawaiian way of creating a living space you didn't have rooms those holly did not have interior partitions for rooms what they did have however was just one open space but they also there were separate structures for separate activities so what we're saying here is not necessarily segregating the house into this is strictly a bedroom this is strictly something else you've got open spaces that are more useful for different things next slide okay here is the overall view of how this might work and what we've got here again are the separate spaces one of the things that martin pointed out was there's also a carport incorporated into these and carports locally are the place where we do a lot of socializing because they are open spaces because they are they don't have solid walls in most cases that's where people have parties that's where people have gatherings it's very common to drive by house with a carport and see that people are sitting outside and folding chairs or that they're having a party and so here again you see the two containers are placed so that there's the negative space between them there is the roof over them and that is the configuration that we've been hoped can be worked towards next slide okay now if the the eco shading system was possible to be installed and one of the things that martin brought up is unfortunately the eco shades are expensive and this housing is not supposed to be for wealthy people it's supposed to be for the proletariat so if it was possible to use a great deal of the eco shading and to therefore buy a lot of it at one time you'd be able to bring the costs down if that was possible they would be powder coated in a sort of a warm metal color not necessarily gold or not necessarily brass or bronze but probably more like bronze and if that was the case at night when they were illuminated from within or below you'd see this warm glow and as martin said it's really somewhat similar to the ancient oil system of using kukui nuts to eliminate burning kukui nuts to eliminate the interior of the holly pealy the grass houses next slide so what we also see here is these are a series of houses that our friends ron and larry had designed for the mamalani hotel complex and these very expensive homes were never actually built but these are the plans that were made for them and the renderings that were made for them and these are not proletariat housing but they do incorporate a lot of the a lot of what we're talking about for the courtyard covenants in other words the same basic structure with a space between them that is used for communal living of course these were private homes but that's that's what you'd use for your outdoor living where there also would be for example a water feature a pool a swimming pool or just decorative water next slide now using that same type of attitude and again trying to bring down the cost because again these have to be low income these have to be affordable for people martin said look if you're telling me this is too expensive what we need to do is break this down into the components that we would use and these exploded views show how the same basic components would be reused in the standardized cabana courtyard cabana subdivision or development if that was built next slide one of the one of the suppliers of this would be the the aggregate company that's here on a walk and martin went out to visit the company and he's had people visit you know he's had people represented or some of this company come on the show and here is the guy from the company on the left looking over the proposal for the construction of these concrete concrete elements that could be used manufactured locally and used in this in these developments and martin said that when the first proposed dhhl sort of tried to get him out of the picture as the architect they go directly to the supplier and he didn't find that to be that offensive because he said look that means it's an acknowledgement that this is a successful proposal and that they want to pursue it even further next slide so what are the elements that you can use and we don't want to necessarily import everything what was suggested was that we use locally grown woods that are exotic or invasive species such as eucalyptus which grows really quickly and which can be used for other things now the native wood coa is extremely desirable it's extremely expensive it obviously cannot be used for mass housing but it was possible to take this nasty particle board which is this American invention of wood chips that are encased in a resin that's used for inexpensive develop inexpensive things like kitchen cabinets if it was heat treated it turns into this other rather elegant looking wood that again is super cheap it's super kind of nasty when you look at it but it can can be treated to make it more robust and it could actually look a great deal nicer next slide so here's an overall view of what might be happening with the courtyard development and what we see here is again you can see all of those are individual shipping containers between them there is the communal open space that is shared by everybody who lives in those you also see that there's a central roofed court area and it's where people are living together and using this space together facing out onto the road next slide and here is an example of that communal open space here is how vital it could be here is how people could be using it here are how the inhabitants of this space are using it communally rather than separate private courtyards but what we've got is the idealized system you can see the wall the wood that I just described to you as as being used for the exteriors of these and this is the way that we can think of the use of shipping containers as well as and this is an international concern of the use of shipping containers which are all over the world all the time there are millions of them in transit what do we do with them when they're no longer in use can we repurpose them to become housing and is that our last slide can I assume that we are at the end of the program again I apologize for not being prepared for this but if this is the end of the program thank you everybody for joining us and Martin I'm sorry that you weren't able to talk to us there's Martin I can see Martin I don't know if Martin can actually speak to us or not but in any case I hope I managed to carry the ball just as well as I could we will be seeing I won't be on next week's show but we will be back with more of our courtyard discussions in the near future and until that time everybody Aloha from Martin who's silent in Germany and me in Honolulu Aloha