 I'm delighted to have you back on our program, which is ThinkPick Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. This is the 266th show, which I thought last week was, but I guess not. And you are about to be our 14,360s viewer. Thank you for that. We appreciate it. And we as your host, DeSoto Brown and his Bishop Museum, hi DeSoto. Good day to everybody. And myself, Martin Despang from his bathroom studio in the Waikiki Grand Honolulu, and we have our guest back, Matt Noblatt, this time from Cincinnati, Ohio. Hi, Matt. Hello, good afternoon. Or whatever it is this morning, I guess, yeah. It's morning here, yes. Five o'clock somewhere, as Jimmy Buffett's saying. Yeah, that's true too. So you've been safely back, Matt. You went to Munich and all the way back, and then they detoured you through Cincinnati. And you're gonna be with us in a couple of days. And can we get the first slide up for that, please? We look obviously much forward to having you and here an extended version and a lot more illustrated than we can do in this, which is gonna be going on for quite a while as we're happy to do. And as we're always looking at things with different views, I have to thank you for having your colleague, Michelle, had been on our review, our studio review last week, and she reported back to you, all the school of architecture looks really awesomely, tropically exotic. So just so you're not too shocked when you come to where this your poster is, this is gonna be that place. And even worse, we're gonna drag you into an all-enclosed hermetic, a seat auditorium. Yes, I've been there. I know the place. So you've been there. So it's not too much of a shock. But before the show, we've been talking about how the school of architecture should have been. And we realized it could have been a project of yours, which I think John Hara likes to hear and is a good compliment because what we see at the top right in the show quote, how he had designed it originally has a lot to do with how you guys design. It's very easy breezy, open and airy, courtyards, orientation is right, fenestration is right. What you barely see in this sort of, you pointed this out that there is, it dates itself as far as being the early 90s, which are these most lovable memories that Matt, you and I have from our architectural education. And there is a little, there is a little dating at little gazebo, little pavilion there as a folly, a foolish folly there, which we don't really see, but that's about it, you know, but the building he did, he did right. And then he gave his little zeitgeist poop there on the side, which doesn't, doesn't hurt anyone. So anyway, so, well, that was then and now is now. And wouldn't you think 40 was like, no, not that, that 30 years later, and we don't make it worse than it is, things should have improved. But next slide, this is in your home away from home, your Hawaii home away from home, because this is as you shared with us in Kailua, where you every now and then reside with your family. And this is me and your Kailua in the food land, looking at some goofy version of my turtles at the top right, they're floating up there under the ceiling. But what was really a shock was when we checked out at the cashier. And there was the star advertiser, you see the title page top left. There was still leaving some, you know, hope because I didn't show the backside yet, which we see at the bottom left, which as to the origin of the paper was upside down. So I needed to like the cashier got annoyed at me by that time because she was thinking, why the hell isn't he buying it? But I didn't want to waste any money for that. And then we went online immediately and saw what we, we see what we realized on the bottom right. And once again, in this new tradition of our last show, I know what you guys gonna say, don't judge a book by a cover and let's wait for it to be revealed more. But probably like with the last project, which was by the way, by the same developer, Kobayashi group, I guess there isn't much left to give us some hope. So let's discuss a little bit what we see here. Well, I wanted to point out first that the way this all developed has got to be interesting in that the announcement about this project occurred just a few days before the review of the zoning variance occurred. And in fact, it did get the zoning variance. So that I think means that it has gotten a green light to potentially proceed. Obviously, of course finances is not gonna make, it's gonna make a huge difference while it actually happens or not. But it is, I do understand what's going on here. They're talking about replacing an area that is just filled with small 50s and 60s, two-story walk-up buildings that are not in very good shape. And obviously those are gonna be very low cost to rent. So they're talking about replacing it with something which would again, potentially accommodate those people who are displaced. And I do also understand why the variance was granted probably, because directly across the street, this is pretty much on the corner of Date Street and Kapilani Boulevard, on Kapilani, just a short distance away, there are already multiple very tall high-rise buildings. So it's not as though this is being built in the middle of absolutely nothing. And I think that's probably why it's happened. And again, as I said, because it's gotten a state variance, I think that this means that any county variance is kind of superseded. What we do not see in this rendering is if there are any lanais or not on these buildings, it doesn't look as though there are. So immediately that's something that we don't like, if in fact, that's the case, because hermetically sealed buildings without access to the open air in our tropical climate are not things that we are happy about. Well, my question was, what does moderately priced mean in Honolulu? I mean... Yeah, that's a very good point. Are we supposed to be really reassured by the fact that they're going to be moderately priced? Yeah, right, right. And we don't know what that means in terms of actual numbers either. Yeah, but I mean, I have to say too, we see this on the East Coast as well, where the land acquisition and development costs are just so exorbitantly high that the only way, not maybe not the only way, but certainly the most direct way to recoup your costs is to just pile square footage on top that is revenue generating. And I think that's not to defend development too strongly, but I think that is a core sort of concern, something you have to get to the bottom of if you really want to do more, like what I would consider intelligent kind of development in a place like that, right? I mean, I think density is not a bad thing inherently. I think that looks like an insane amount of density in a place that really has too much of that probably, but certainly something mid-rise or low-rise high density is would be far more palatable and potentially give you the opportunity to do a lot of the things that you're talking about. I just don't think you'd ever get that many units and you need so much more land to do that. Yeah, and again, architecturally, I mean, this looks like you said, this could happen over there in Boston. And this could actually, not that it should be in Boston because it would be as ugly there as it is here. Might be more. But performatively, yeah, performatively at least it would work there some way with its wall architecture. But here, I mean, what amazes me is that people don't get it that most of the cost as Matt, you and I coming from practice, no is within the fenestration. I mean, the reason why developers want to basically lower the ceiling, the ceiling height, the clearance is not because of the cubic inches of concrete for the columns. That's relatively minor, right? But it's the square footage of costly fenestration of facades. So by bringing, getting things more easy breezy, you automatically make it way more as they like to call it affordable. And they just don't get that. They don't, this is an untapped opportunity that they really don't see. And I, you know, making a reference to your guys, Unilever and the Marco Polo Tower in Hamburg, I've been doing a show a long time ago. Actually, if you look for it in the playlist, you won't find it under a human human architecture but urban transcendence, which a previous one was called. And I did one that we called Germany's Kakaako, Hamburg's Harbor City. And the quintessence is that the reason why it is so successful is because it's exact opposite as far as the political framing that the city wants, that land was very cheap and worth nothing because they went from the old barges and the warehouses where they brought up the coffee and the oriental carpets and bags and that shifted to container which we have here to that shift. At that point, the city snapped the land and then basically gave it on hands to developers with serious homework, one of them being architectural competitions in most cases or in many cases, then high standards of mixed use and ecological performance. And that's why you see one interesting building next to the other one because of that political framing. And here to give land to developers and then you have no saying anymore, right? As you said, DeSoto, they were throwing out the way this monster would look like like seconds before politicians had to okay it, right? Yeah, that's the way it worked out, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Hoffman City is a really interesting example, Martin, because the other things, a couple of the other interesting things that they did there was they required the developers to pull permits on their projects within six months of acquiring the property which meant that they had to have an architectural competition, select the design and actually get going. And they didn't give them enough time to pull a fast one by sort of substituting the competition winners with more mediocre architects who would be more pliable to their pro forma needs. And then I think the other thing that Hoffman City did very, very well was, there is energy infrastructure that's in place that they, all the buildings were able to take advantage of. So all of this speaks to a level of political will that we don't find in the US, right? An investment upfront, but it doesn't mean there's not things you can learn from that either. No, and we sort of probably, we think DeSoto, you and I think probably intentional, we always get Senator Stanley Chang's newsletter just before the show. So we should actually get him on a show and discuss this. And you DeSoto, I wanna have your opinion because again, they already named this project which I put in here at the bottom right. So who we lay plays, right? So that's the name of the street that's already there. Okay. And it's actually, but it's interesting you bring that up because the word place means a street that's a dead end. So this is a small dead end street that serves a very low density neighborhood. So this is going to go into a place where they're gonna have to redo the streets at least in order to service this. And that is something that has come up in other situations where a really big building has been built that's only can be served through a very inadequate small skinny street. Obviously, I hope in this case, that's not gonna happen but that has happened in other places in Honolulu. And it's very aggravating for everybody who already lives there to suddenly have thousands of people hundreds, if not thousands of people constantly coming in and out of a huge development there where the infrastructure cannot handle that. So I'm assuming that's not gonna happen there. Let's keep our fingers crossed that that's not something else that's dumped upon this whole thing that we're looking at. I'm probably not mistaken if I mean they have a good excuse now since you gave it to them rightly so because it's a street name. So they can say, well, we just named it after the street. That's right, that's right. There's a reason why they named the street after. And this is, I looked it up, it's the lane maker but it also has to do something with children. So again, the building seems, again I keep saying this is probably political, ethically incorrect but I say it anyways. This seems like the new Soviet Union architecturally is re-emerging here with us or Henzelman, the old GDR's master planner architect because this is like the most watered down uninspired modernism that you can think of. And by the way, we know this from Ludwig Hilbersheimer who was that hardcore rationalist but I had a hard time believing but I had to admit it's true that the all American cold as suck is actually an invention by Hilbersheimer. And while we, yeah, and it actually has of course some sort of soft qualities to it that the kids can play there and relatively safe but the origin is actually rationality to put as many houses on as few streets as possible so that's something very, very American, right? So I threw in this probably too small show quote on the right in the middle, that is because you guys were saying a big thing and a monster. This is the Ilikai and then there's this funny postcard disorder that you provided where someone threw that lay over the whole big thing talking lake, who we laid. That is a, it's a big, I mean, this is, this was a big shock and wiki key. All of a sudden this monster grew up, right? But again, it has some flair even though it seems proportionally and even architecturally with a double loaded corridor. But when you analyze the thing, which we periodically do always one of the sides is always shaded by the other one. It is all a night. So as you said, Mad, it's not size, right? It's really the attitude and the Haltung as we call it in German behind. And here it just seems, I mean, this brown color is just the vertical circulation, likely the elevators, because I don't think this has any of what the primitivas have is reintroducing the Hamburg Hafen City old hamster wheel wooden elevator on the roof, right? That's not happening here. So this is just the elevator is in the, in the staircases along with it. And that's gonna make up the, the unclits, the face of the building. And then they shove microwave glass units in between. I mean, this is really shocking. I mean, in the last one, and that's probably depends on, again, client and scope of the project, but the one from last week at least had some ambitions and using which we said, we don't give them, you know, the full Lanai legitimacy as a term, but we said at least balconies, but this one here, yeah, sad. And one last sad one before we get the spirit up and hopefully that by then we're not at the end of the show otherwise, but get the next slide up and go through that fast. And the right side there is by you, Matt, and tell us how you ran across it and your thoughts about it. Oh, well, we happened to be looking for housing for my wife's father towards the end of his life a few years ago, back in 2016, I think. And we visited this place right after it was built. And I don't think I saw the outside until after we'd gone inside, like there's a kind of a pork kosher and you go in and up and as we were leaving, I looked up at the building and I thought, my God, I haven't seen anything quite so absurd in my whole life. I was actually tickled when you and Bunda told me that before they installed the actual window air conditioning units, you were optimistic that these little hats were like sunshading for the glass, but it turns out it's just keeping the rain off of the air conditioning units. I mean, it really is almost like a, I mean, I hate to be too critical, but it almost is like a postcard for anti-sustainable, if for the least possible sustainable design you could hope to achieve. Yeah, it's absolutely cynical. And yeah, we were actually at once again, just like giving things the benefit of the doubt that don't deserve it. But here we thought, you know, the small domestic size vertical wind turbines along these lines, we were like so naive thinking they would be on top of these, right? And reaching out into the breeze. Yeah, well, oh well, oh well. I mean, I don't talk about design here at all. I just talk about pure, and you know, this is the least efficient way to cool. If you're going to cool the building, this is really about as inefficient as you could possibly hope to make it. Yeah, but you guys were saying they probably bought them in a bundle at Home Depot or something. Yeah, I was feeling Home Depot was out of air conditioners for like two years while this was going up. And that's not enough. You know, Bandit's beautiful building in Molo-Eli that he's unfortunately, DeSoto's still not allowed to talk about because he got dragged into these nasty lawsuits and stuff like that. So on the walking tour on Saturday, the Docomomo walking tour, we had one of the guides basically being from the Fort Street Mall redevelopment board or something like that. And he was happy to see, and actually the behind it, which is a Joe Paul Rungstedt high rise, it gets converted into a Marriott. So that's kind of reverse. Usually, you know, we talk the Pomo piece of cake along Bishop Street was office and is now dwelling. Nevermind hermetic invasive dwelling, but this one here gets sort of converted the wrong way from dwelling to hotel. So he was happy what was going on. And one can understand that, but then, and there's also a good met ride to bring people not at the outskirts into the burps, but, you know, in sort of towards more the core of the city, but then shoving them away into these, you know, air conditioned warehouse boxes is then rather cynical, right? So, and it's the same. And this is, so this is the next choice, obviously not, but guess what this is the next senior housing. Oh, I wondered what that was going to be. Oh, okay. Well, I'm heading towards senior status. And once again, Matt, we're back. This is back to the, back to not back to the, yeah, back to the future. This is us in school, Matt. We're still in school. Doesn't that look like from 1991 when we were traumatized? I'm constantly amazed how that the grip of postmodernism has been especially strong in Hawaii over the time that I've been there. And it's still, it's not as pervasive as it once was, but you still see traces of it, let's say. Yeah, yeah. And tragic circle here, a vicious circle is that Bandit then said, you know, looking down, he said, well, the developer guy here is the same one that's involved in, you know, the nasty stuff around a beautiful building there. So it's just like, where's the ethics, right? Well, the ethics shows in the absence of ethics here. So now we have to get the spirit back up. And this is all proven evidence why we need that, your BBB, your Boston banish boost so badly here as another bee. And what that will be, it can be, should be, we reconnect to with the next slide with a show quote from last week, how we ended. And then showing your colleague, and I'm intentionally not calling him your boss, Stephen Danish there. Yeah, no, this is, I mean, this is only half of a slide that really is, I mean, speaking to the part on the right here is just about a slide we always use to talk about how important it is to dress appropriately for the climate that you live in, right? I mean, this need, this kind of almost insatiable need for cooling and energy to create comfort is often done. So I mean, it's definitely done on the East coast where I live. And, you know, I think to some extent, Hawaii is actually a little bit more reasonable about this with, you know, the aloha shirt and the kind of broad acceptance of that as formal wear as well as leisure wear. But most places you go, people insist still on wearing three-piece suits in the middle of, you know, say August, if you go to City Hall in Boston, you have to look like all the regulators who you're meeting with. And it's absurd, right? I mean, you sit there freezing even with your jacket on and your tie. And the energy that we have to use to create those conditions of comfort is absurd. So that's sort of the genesis of that. And then, of course, this is something that with all of our employees and colleagues in the office, we're constantly advocating for in our projects, which is before we even talk about technical kind of gadgets and techniques to make buildings more comfortable or perform better, we have to, as people, actually improve our performance, right? And create the best conditions for success for buildings. Yeah, and with that, you just qualified to be back on another show of ours that's the longest in the making. We don't know when it ever will happen, but we have a working title for it. And that one is address code, address code. So, and it's an interesting because DeSoto with your ancestry and them different to other Native American tribes that really never made it anywhere else with all respect then into their immediate surroundings. The Hawaiian royalty was all over the place, all over the world. If you go into Iolani Palace, they were part of the crowning ceremony of the Tsar and the Queen and the German Kaiser and all these people. And of course, going there, they had to bundle up. But as you taught me DeSoto and continue to do is they also wanted to because they didn't wanna come across as the wild people from somewhere at the most remote corner in the world. But then as I then, you know, who am I to criticize your royalty? But I'm saying when they came back which the Prince Gohio bronze statue on Kalakaua reminds me every morning, he should have undressed again, which he didn't for various reasons. And there is- But one of the reasons, yeah, but the reason he is dressed up is because he also was in Washington, DC. So that's why he had to dress like that a lot of the time cause he was interacting with all these people who wear suits that we just were talking about. And so he had to play that game. Absolutely. And that's many more facets to that. They're fascinating. So we again, have to at some point do that show and then we're gonna have you met on it. Yes. So- Yeah, Matt, you've been hooked into this. You don't realize it, but you- Martin has his claws in you now for this is the long-term thing. Just so you know. Like flypaper, yeah. It's right. You're stuck. You're on the flypaper now. You're never getting away. DeSoto knows how it has happened to him so many times. There we go now. It did. Yes. So why we would not have time to talk about the line. The next slide, we will still show it as an appetizer because we're at the end of the show already but this is how we will pick up next. Well, next week we take a break because you have to do logistically. So we're gonna do one with Ron about Chicago and Honolulu, another strange pair. But the week after we will reconvene. And this is obviously also what you will see and hear on Monday when you please all come to met your lecture at the School of Architecture on Monday, the 24th at six PM in this chilled auditorium. And once at the end of it, we're all gonna rush outside to awesome poo-poo's and great talk with Matt, which is even better. So looking forward to that. Yeah. Equally. Awesome. Okay. Until then, stay all planet and people friendly and see you all next week and see you all on Monday. 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.