 Good to see you back for what happens to be our 246th episode of Think That Kawaii's Human-Humane Architecture and you are past our 13,000 viewers. So thank you for that and we are broadcasting live from the opposite ends in the world again from Honolulu, Hawaii Bishop Museum with you to Soto Brown. Hi to Soto. Hello everybody. And me, your other host, Martin Disbang from near Munich in Germany, back from Honolulu last week via Chicago in the Midwest. And so if we can get the first slide up, thankfully we have consultants and advisors as J. Fidel who rightly so addressed us that we please continue to report on what should be on our mind these days first and foremost, which is the horrible crime against humanity over in the Ukraine. And our exotic escapism expert Susanna brought to our attention that we should address the most recent tragic crime of humanity, the shooting in that school in Texas, where, you know, two handfuls of people predominantly very young ones with who had the life still ahead of them lost their life because some stupid guy having taken their life through shooting. And I want to quote some material that she has given to us and that is that 73 mass shootings have been happened within the last 10 years. There are 40 million weapons and you to Soto are going to address that in your country, which is also my country because I also all the American citizenship on top of my German so I can't sneak out of that one. And in the last 40 years, there were 128 attacks more than a thousand people died, almost 200 of them in school. And you see that little quote up there in the middle of the black, this is a screenshot that the Bavarian local radio TV here had been broadcasting Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, who said nowhere else do little kids go to school thinking that they might be shot that day. Nowhere else does that happen, except here in the United States of America. And it is a choice. America's gun problem is a choice. Pass laws that make this less likely. And also we quote President Biden here below as you can read President Biden said on Tuesday night last night, these kind of mass shootings never happened with that frequency that they happen in America. He said, why do we keep letting this happen? And your take on that to Soto is? First of all, it is shocking and horrible that these occurrences are so commonplace now that we just think, oh, yeah, another one, which is horrific. And one of the things which has become conflated in the United States culture, which is mind bogglingly bizarre to me is the right wing support not only for gun ownership and free, free access to guns for everybody. But also, as I said, the conflation of guns with Christianity in the right wing world is goes beyond bizarre because it's absolutely the antithesis of each other. And yet they are put together as though guns were sacred, guns are worshiped. And literally the phrase the God given right to bear arms is something which is repeated by people who support this. And therefore, it's tremendously ingrained with a significant part of the population in the United States. And I cannot be able to say, and here's the magic solution because I don't know what it is. But there we are. And they haven't even done any further investigation, so no one knows why. And we're all wondering, and it certainly has to do with the complexity of sociotel issues that are all intertwined and woven. But if we want to cut the angle back to architecture, what role does architecture play? What kind of negative role? I'm always starting my lecture about school diners in my introduction of environmental systems, pointing out to what wasn't the first, but the one that many of us remember most vividly is the Columbine shooting in 1999 in Colorado. And if you look at that school diner, that in which that happened, it's a horrible space. It's artificial lighting. It's dropped ceilings in the most cheesy way. It's just trashy put together. And the medical realm in their analysis of illnesses, basically in the 70s, have identified buildings, some bad, brutalist buildings that exist as well. And these were not by the masters who invented it, by all the copycat guys who just followed this style and didn't really know what they were doing. These buildings have been then analyzed and identified, diagnosed by the medical profession. And they called it the sick building syndrome that people literally get sick in certain buildings that are deprived of natural elements of daylight, of fresh air, all these things in nature. And on the other side, there must be a healthy building syndrome in buildings. And we want to encourage everyone in our realm, in our discipline and professional to basically go that route. And we have just been befriending Phillip Moiser, who is a publisher from Germany who asked us to help him to write the guide about architecture in Hawaii and Honolulu that we're happy. And here we see what else. This is a precedent book that we're told to look into. And although this is the German version of it, you know what's behind, right? Well, I can see it right there on screen. That's one of those guides that you just mentioned from the publisher that we just met. And I got to meet too here in Honolulu. And this is for the city of Hanover, of course, in German. So I don't know what it says, but you know what it says because you read German. Yeah, it's my hometown. And it says architect Führer, we know is a tragic term we remember from some dark, the most darkest day, not some, the most darkest day in Germany. But in this case, it's meant in a peaceful way. It's the guide and not the one who dictates. And so it's about my hometown. And it features, amongst others, our first kind of force, passive house off the grid, carbon neutral kindergarten preschool that we were asked to do for our hometown. And it got a nice review. And it's basically, if I subsumize it, it says it's a very planet and people friendly architecture, they say it's post fossil. So it's off the grid and the kids grew up in it. So they know it from intuitively. But at the same time, it's a very nice environment where the educators and the teachers are having a great time with the children. The picture I took at the bottom right was when I was doing my post occupancy evaluation evidence based design life cycle assessment routine with Lenny here and the director, Mrs. Sevitza and her designated one was taking over in one or two years, she said, and you see the kids here, obviously with skin color and ethnical diversity, where she always says in 2015, the show called top right there at the bottom right of that one, where Christian Wetter and Siraj Sharif were stopping by. She just had the kids basically from Syria, you know, thanks to Putin at that time already. And she said the more the merrier, now she has Ukrainian kids. And she said, we are practicing world peace right there in its smallest units, which is the families, of course, and also preschools and kindergartens, where that is practiced. So again, our profession has to do with world peace in on different scales. So let's not forget about that. But first and foremost, again, think of the tragic victims. And that's, yes, let's do everything with joint forces in all disciplines in all areas of society to stop this, as Biden here correctly claims. Next slide. We gonna go back one should probably dedicate to talk a whole show about it, but hopefully, you know, we're all a little speechless still here. So we leave it with this for now and pick up from there later. So we're going back to Honolulu, but stay a little bit in where we were last week, the Soto, which is the Soto part of the Midwest, right? And you know this climate well, here's little the soda at the very top left and you're used. Yep. That's that's in 1961. And that was on a when I lived in Boston for one year, we went on a trip to New Hampshire in our 1960 Plymouth and that's what's behind me. And so yes, I know very well what it is like to go through bitter cold and snow and ice and all those horrible things. Yeah. And I want to remember this my was my home, this building here at the bottom right and top in the middle, that was Century House in Lincoln, Nebraska, which is only a block away from Bertrand Goodhue building is most famous, one of his most famous, which is the state capital, as we see on the show quote top right on the left side of it behind my Lincoln town car. And below there is again, is Century House. It was a nice mid century building 65 built a year before I was built. It basically has, it's a clean modern international style, it has a little bay window twist, which was nice, fully glazed. And it was positioned orientation north south. So I had the choice to either stay on the southern side, which is the one at the very bottom, where I would have had to have the curtains pull closed in the summer and have the AC blasting, which I said I cannot do that. So I choose the other side, the north side, which was keeping me cool in that, in that, in that summertime, but we're talking tempered, meaning very temperamented climate. So how was that in the winter? So how did that picture at the bottom left attract you? Well, it does not attract me in the slightest and there's ice on the inside of the window of your apartment. That's how bitterly cold it was and how uninsulated, perhaps the apartment building was built in 1965. But that's not someplace I would want to live, where there's ice on the inside of the building. Yeah, and I had to turn that single, you know, unit machine from refrigerating to heating, right, and have that blasting all the time. Your right, technology wasn't really up to, you know, paste and it was, firmly did not connect, disconnected, basically frames. And if so, double pain, as you can see here, that wasn't really keeping the cold out. So next slide is a more recent development that gets us back to our typology of mid to high rise. There is a new tower that they built, a slab tower. This is all the left part of this page here is the new development. And our quick check is its orientation. It's facing directly north and south. The north side and the floor plan is also north is up. There's a little end in there even provided by the developer. So north is that all the units are facing basically with a glass north, which puts them basically the same I was in my institute would think so and probably could hope so that it's now triple pain glaze and not quite as bad. From my pacifist experience, you cannot make this a passive house off the grid building with passive solar because there's no insulated glass in the world that could justify such massive, basically just opening to the north that I was told and taught. And so, but again, at least, you know, for the summer condition that because the cooling loads are still worse and more energy, you know, requiring than the heating loads in the winter time. Also, unfortunately, some units at the end units have west and east, which presents the same problem as we in Honolulu. And here the sun doesn't even come around in the winter to the degree that would really help you passively solar that but the southern facade here the solo reminded you of something from back on the days on the island that you guys had on the roots of buildings, right? That's right. Well, you were talking about sort of a way to passively capture heat. And it's you build the space, you paint it black, it heats up from the sun. And it reminded me of the early types of solar water heaters that were in use here in the 20th century. When my brother, my oldest brother bought his house, which was built in the 1920s in the 1960s, he purchased it. It had one of these passive solar water heaters on the roof, which basically was a metal box with a number of back and forth small pipes on the inside with glass over that. And all that did was just get get hot in the sun because it was all painted black and you heated up water without using any electricity. At the time, of course, we thought, Oh, how stupid in old fashioned, we'll just get an electric water heater. We don't need that. Well, now we realize that's not the way to do it. But you were telling me that this building has a similar type of sort of capture of heat in an enclosed space with a black painted interior. Well, I was hoping so that was wishful thinking, talking, speaking, right? Because I said, it should have that we call the Trump wall, which was a bell engineer where you have that system of a black wall that soaks up the heat and then behind glass and then you have holes at the bottom at the top. So it gives this sort of hot air rises up. So it gives this sort of natural flow. So it's a natural convection heater, just powered by the sun. With we have the Lincoln Journal Star, which is the Lincoln, Nebraska equivalent of the Star Advertiser, both have stars. And the bottom left number nine is the publication of the project. I would say if they would have had that they would have featured in the article. And kind of ironic at the very bottom right picture number, number eight there, there is a publication of some years ago by an emerging talent in Nebraska, named Matt DeBoer, who we see on this zoom in with his lovely partner Leslie was now his wife and mother of three children, wonderful children. And Matt, as we had pointed out in the show tracing back to 2017 at the top right, had been proposing a similar building volume and basically suggestion of very slick and slender slab towers. But they were all basically by climatic in a multi in a different way. There were three different iterations here that if you're interested in that, you go back into the show. So once again, the audience, the readers have read that, but somehow, I guess capitalism, development, water things down to the banal has once again survived here and presented a missed opportunity. Does this make us feel better? Not really, right? Only, you know, it points out to us that this is a national, if not global phenomenon. But again, doesn't, of course, make us feel any better that we have that we would feel better if we would be the exception to this tragic rule of designing buildings the wrong way predominantly in the United States. Next slide. Because I'm very proud of Matt continuously because although he is now the Vice President and great planes principle of HDR, which is one of the largest corporate firms in America, and since America is not going the progressive way anymore that continues the ever since Reagan reactionary, I can only imagine the conflict of interest that he has, as you can tell, being a brilliant designer, but having to feed hundreds if not thousands of people. But he keeps up his basically his virtues and his standards by still taking out the time, I don't know how he does it, to design little things as you can see at the bottom right. And this is his little tradition, a show called Top Right. That was his first one that we featured in that show. And now he did a little new bank branch there, which again is pretty much reminded us of Ron, right? You remember what he was talking about architecture being, you know, being on the stage or being more backstage, more being sort of backdrop architecture, right? That's what he says. We need more good background architecture in Hawaii. And Matt, I think you're a modern master from the same region, Ron being from the Midwest. Matt has heard you here. And that typology of little bank branches we also know from back home in Honolulu, right? And that point out the top three little pictures there. Yeah, right. And we were discussing whether we think this is the Bank of Hawaii or First Hawaiian is probably a Bank of Hawaii, but unfortunately at the moment, we can't be sure. And this was from a time in the mid-century where the local banks were building innumerable branch banks in a number of different architectural styles, mid-century styles, because the economy was growing so much in those days. And they were being very forward thinking in what they were commissioning for their customers. Today, we see a number of those banks are still standing from the mid-century period. But because banking is mostly not in person anymore and is done electronically, those banks are closing and the buildings are being repurposed. But nonetheless, we can look at them architecturally and enjoy what they achieved. Particularly in this one, you pointed out that you looked in through the exterior window, took a picture, and inside is this wonderful blue tile, which reminded us of the tile that was used for the paving of the Mount Akea beach hotel. And then the Mount Olani hotel, which was inspired in turn by Mount Akea. Unfortunately, Mount Olani has lost its blue tile flooring, which has been replaced by wood. But the Mount Akea still has its original blue tile, which is a real signature of that building, and is really a part of its fame, I would say. Yeah. And Mount Olani, there's a couple shows about it with its designer, Larry Stricker, who's a design partner off on Lindgren, both with and with Killingsworth. Correct. So yeah. So again, the the backdrop architecture as to explain background architecture, the background architecture isn't about the big gesture and like jumping in your face and saying, ooh, I'm the prettiest, right? It's like standing in a, you know, back row, being humble and, you know, quiet but nice. And then once you refrand it, you see its inner qualities, its core values as the beautiful, you know, treatment of materiality here and refinement of textures and all these things. Okay, so the blue getting us to the next slide might be also our last one for today. We are looking again into the relationship of climate and culture and architecture. We see here the weather chart and it clearly points out and then the appropriate clothing is on top of it or below of it. And we see above the Honolulu, we see Philip Moiser here by visiting us and here meeting you the first time in person. And he just coming from Germany, he asked me when I drove him there in our P.I. mobile and see on the right, said is it like that, like all the time, like all day and all year and all night. And I'm like, yeah. So and he, you know, if you come from somewhere else from these temperament and temperate, you can't believe it unless you are there. So he yet has to acclimatize as you can tell probably next time he comes, he would be dressed like you are dressed there and I can confirm having known you for a long time now, you are always dressed like that. Maybe sometimes you're sure depending on the occasion when you have to dress more formally, you throw another shirt on, but by chromatically and shorts and slippers, you are all the time rightly so because that's the weather condition you have all the time. But in our temperament and temperate ones, look at us in Chicago at the very bottom left, how do we look there? You're all bundled up because you're in the open car, not unlike the P.I. mobile, but in Chicago, the day that you arrived got picked up by your friend. It's considerably less warm than Honolulu. You said it was in the 50s maybe and felt perhaps even like the 40s while you were there. So you were not wearing light color, light clothing, you had to be bundled up and you got on your puffy jacket. Yeah and only, you know, the day before it was almost 90 degrees that you could read there and when you picked me up, it was considerably more chilly. Dan picked me up in his Porsche Boxster that has technology that traces back as you taught me from the 40s and 50s, which is the automatically retractable roofs. So it can very sort of immediately respond by putting the top back on, turning the heater on if you need so, or putting it back in and let the breeze cool you. So again, automobiles are engineered to be biochromatically dynamic. Architecture unfortunately these days, not so much anymore. However, us being nostalgic about our Ella Moana building, that is exactly what it did because it had the equivalent of a top that retracts because they were louvers and they were either opening or clothing themselves. And our exotic escapism expert here in her back culture in her home culture down there, we put in Kiev, which is not where she's from or where she is, but we just also don't want to forget the tragic going on there. Luckily, if one can even say so, unfortunately, the temperatures are out of the freezing. At least the nights can still get cold to the 40s. And in Chicago, the third day was like nominally in the lower 50s, but it felt like mid 40s. So they're still fluctuating quite a bit, but they're out of the brutal freezing. So at least the weather is helping a little bit the conditions because again, if you can imagine you're bummed out or you're wounded and you have to sleep outside. But again, the swinging can also be or is very hard on the body, not forget about that. Because the constant temperature we have in Hawaii is the best because your body doesn't need to pump again by keeping itself cool and sweating, which is quite the effort. Or again, you having to eat a lot to stay warm or to wear lots of clothes, which is quite an effort, right? Just so to remember us of again, why paradise is at least theoretically so paradissel, potentially, and how that relates into the architecture or not in this area, we're looking into the Alamoana. We're looking next week, but very quickly about the slides on the very right, segueing into that, because the top right is basically when our P.I. mobile, which is actually designed more in a way to be only for winters and summers, because when winters come, you throw that hard top on, which I made you do recently for the reason of keeping it for the summer with you and barely driving it. And it's quite the effort. It's quite heavy, quite German engineering. But when you would take it off for the rest of the day, it's just easy breezy, right? So that basically is the way it is. So the easy breezy one you see at the picture at the bottom right, the building behind is a mid-rise, mid-century residential high-rise that has a lot of opacity in the facade, so no glass is going to be baked. And then if there is glass, there is a lanage, and so the glass is pushed back. So we can say a pretty biochromatic building. While the image of the P.I. mobile being ready to be stored by you, that reminds us in not just the color, accidentally, of the car being the same color of some blue in the background, and we're afraid that would be some glass again that might be fixed. And by the way, also you were worried about some crack in the window of the hard top, which you were then happy. It's not a crack, but it's a tinted foil that the previous owner basically glued on to minimize the solar overheating. That just reminds us of the problem of fixed glazing without any shading in front of it. So how that will play out in that building as to start out again when we pick up from there next week, that we see there indicated at the very top in the distance, we will leave to next week. And until then, obviously, all please stay very peaceful, first and foremost.