 Welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii humane architecture here in downtown Honolulu on a Tuesday afternoon five o'clock. So welcome back. In this show we're going to address issues around architecture on our islands of Hawaii and way beyond actually particularly in the in the tropics and who was actually supposed to be my first guest was kind enough to let Mr. Les Wally go first because he happened to be on the island last week but David Rockwood is our first or actual first guest because I could have to think of no one else to be perfect to introduce what we're talking about. So welcome David. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. And so actually the the title of the show today is called Tropic Caring and we have quite some interesting discussions over the summer with Jay and Zuri about many possible names for the show and this is actually one that was also part of the list and now it became humane architecture which is exciting too but Tropic Caring was sort of a major sort of suggestion to call the show for a certain reason so why don't we just dive in and you talk a little bit about yourself where you come from literally and figuratively speaking relative to Tropic Caring. Okay all right well thank you Martin. Always difficult to know where to start but the when I think about the tropics I think my first exposure was I was going to school on the east coast in New Jersey and my family had a reunion in Mexico and so that was the first time that I had the walked into the hotel meet my extended family and the lobby was completely open there was no glass there was no entry doors so similar to what we all know from some of the original hotels here in Hawaii and it was on the ocean just like we have here in my key and and the the sea breeze is blowing through and I was so struck because I just come from New Jersey everything was sealed up and there was snow drifted on the outside the doors and that the sense of kind of enclosure and isolation was it was completely reversed and that sense of openness to other people in the environment was was just dramatic for me so at that point you know I really started to think at some point in my life I want to live in the tropics and and and so I sort of directed things and fortunately I was happy that that worked out so but maybe maybe Martin you can talk about kind of your experience because I know that you've had a similar uh of coming from a very very different climate and and what that what that sort of really means that's true so we both come from the this is sort of the the statistics we come from 60 percent of the world climates which are basically tempered which you got these swings of cold and hot and then for the 60 percent the minority of 40 percent of tropics is obviously a paradisic sort of illusion maybe that we both became basically lured into right and myself similar to you a group in a temperate moderately tempered german climate then checked out the us the way more extreme midwestern climate with a 12 minute walk to school in Nebraska having to wear a full facial mask not to get a frostbite right went to the other extreme in Tucson Arizona where 120 degree and people say oh it's no problem it's dry heat but 120 degrees is 120 degrees so finally work my way west obviously as you right so here we are right you've been here 12 years about it's your 13th year I've been four years here so right so here we are we we have a job as well here which is we teach architecture at the school of architecture here at up in new age but we're I like to call us practicators because we're first and foremost coming from practice so maybe you want to talk a little bit about your your practice background okay well thank you um well I actually started in Portland where I grew up and I first opened an office there and then I lived in New York City for 10 years and was teaching and then doing some practice as well I was an adjunct Professor Pratt Institute and so again sort of in terms of architecture and thinking about the the tropics in those instances I didn't really have the opportunity to work on buildings for the tropics so again it was a real revelation for me to begin to think about how you design for the tropics and as you know when you're designing in temperate climates it's you know there is the there's the summer where it does get hot but for a lot of the year you do need to really close up the building and so the idea of energy conservation and the kinds of kinds of things that you need to do in terms of insulated glass and insulation and and thermal brakes and all those sorts of things was was completely changed for me and then I think really thinking about this whole sense you know that I kind of first described this feeling of of the breeze kind of flowing through an interior space which was also very much almost an outdoor space was so powerful that I felt to be in the tropics one really needs to always feel that otherwise why why kind of be here right and so there's this wonderful sensibility that that really comes through that so how how to design buildings that allow that to happen and there's a lot of things that do become difficult and to do that and to do it well so that it truly works and I think you know we're both admirers of some of the the architecture that happened here you know in Hawaii sort of mid-century and a little bit later prior to air conditioning coming on board and and a lot of the architects when you really look at the buildings understood how to do that and I think they work quite well so anyway those are just some of the things yeah I don't know if you want to and I remember we share a lot of things and one is these early memories of coming here we've both interviewed and they put you up in the Queen Kapliani building hotel right they put me up in the Alamoana building and so I remember you know us sharing sort of this moment of coming from you know the temporary climate and then getting off the plane immediately the sort of multi-sensitory kind of lure of the traffic the the smell of the flowers the sort of sweetness of the air and the gentle breezes blowing and then having going through Nimitz which was a little sort of disturbing what kind of is that you know but finally arriving in the hotel and then all of a sudden you come into hotel where everything is closed up and then there's this sort of thermostat that basically says like 68 or 72 doesn't matter right and all of a sudden I was thinking wait a minute that is like how it fell outside so I basically opened that sliding door luckily this is a mid-century these are both mid-century buildings so I can still do that right and all of a sudden there it was turning off the AC which also has an environmental sort of advantage just on the side but for us way more importantly maybe in traffic hearing in general is sort of the feel right and that sold me on coming here and basically if I can sleep you around with the door open right and that's it right and ever since we do it that way right you're in your building we choose a building that is conducive of these sort of systems right and we pretty much do it and then this sounds like too good to be true right because why isn't anyone and everyone thinking like we do if you look around the more recent developments the very current ones all have fixed glazing they're all hermetic they're all air conditioned right so where did this go we ask ourselves on a daily basis and I just want to let the audience know that what you see in the background here is is one of David's sort of applications of the philosophy of traffic hearing that you're going to talk about along the show a little bit but unless you want to you're not going to dive into specific details it's just basically to illustrate sort of visually the the philosophy but but Zura being our great orchestrator I love the synchronization when you were talking very empathically about the breeze and she was showing the diagrams of the of the breeze and the wind flow so maybe you can talk about that oh okay oh thank you yeah um well it's interesting you know the the transition that that you described and I think you know there's a lot of a lot of reasons probably why that happened you know the the equipment was there and was available it you know it did it did allow people to really give a high degree of control over their kind of you know their their their comfort you know their thermal comfort and and and if a building isn't designed the right way it does become uncomfortable so it actually gave architects a lot of flexibility in terms of how they design things and you know as we know buildings are very expensive and real estate is expensive housing is expensive and so to try to be as sufficient as you can with the overall layout right of a building is is very important you know so you know the the the typical high-rise building has a double-headed corridor so you can enter the apartments on either side and as we know that's the most efficient way to do it because you share the circulation with two rather than just one and so that's become the norm but the problem is you know I don't need to tell you I'm sort of talking to the to the audience out there uh is it is very difficult to get cross ventilation and if you don't have the cross ventilation then you probably to be comfortable in most orientations in the tropics you need air conditioning so something so simple as that so you know as we know there's many buildings here again kind of around that kind of era that we were just discussing mid-century and a little later that have what we call the single-loaded corridor so that they have exposures on the two sides so I think maybe just to you know transition into this project I was I was fortunate to get a Fulbright specialist grant in it was actually an urban planning in Da Nang Vietnam so I was working with some lecturers and I think we had about 27 students that were that joined us on the project and it was very short six-week period but it was really brought to actually my attention by the lecturers there at the University in Da Nang about the kind of world-to-urban migration issue that they're facing there and so we wanted to see if we could do something about that to provide you know more humane higher quality comfortable places for these people that were that were moving into the city and it's a real challenge and again part of the the issue is this thermal comfort of and then the connection to the environment. Da Nang is very much like Honolulu it has a beautiful shore and this this project this project is actually located near the industrial zone but also just a few blocks from the ocean so so it's an interesting kind of juxtaposition of of having the and I think we were talking about that the other day the kind of pretty and the and the gritty right on on either side I think that's an excellent point to make a short little break and to dive back into that after the break so so you back on humane architecture and David Rockwood about tropic hearing soon. Aloha Howard Wigg I am the proud host of cold green think tec away I appear every other Monday at three in the afternoon do not tune in in the morning my topic is energy efficiency it sounds dry as heck but it's not we're paying five billion dollars a year for imported oil my job is to shave that shave that shave that down in homes and buildings while delivering better comfort better light better air conditioning better everything so if you're interested in your future you'd better tune in to me three o'clock every other Monday cold green aloha and thank you very much welcome back to humane architecture today with David Rockwood talking about tropic hearing and we just stopped before the break about some break catchy terms the contradiction of the the gritty and and the pretty and maybe I want to say at this point that because the show started to be shorter and we only have 15 minutes left and we not only could we talk forever because we love what what we're talking about but also this project is sort of so so so dense so I want to say already now that whatever one sees people might say well this is in Vietnam and but we're in Hawaii so what does it have to do with us so we probably should should mention at some point and I do it now that actually there's many similarities in culture and climate so that I believe strongly believe that this project here has a super big potential to become what they like to call workforce buildings here which I try to avoid that term because I think it's highly sort of problematic you like to call it worker housing and we both also started to call it proletarian so there's also an aspect of that that certain sort of parts of the population are increasingly being cut out and especially in the tropic that seems to lure continue to lure a lot of people that seems to be this this sort of stress right right well yeah yeah thanks for that it is something where you know this this is in Vietnam it's a specific site and it's and it's a particular kind of profile of people but by the same token there's many similarities I think that you pointed out there there you know there are many people that obviously you know it's in the news on the front page every day here right that they can't afford housing in Hawaii so there's there's a similarity here in in Vietnam the climate is very similar as well it gets a little bit hotter there and it gets a little bit colder but but not all that drastically different and there's there's a kind of profile of people I think or families that that are similar so a lot of people are coming in as singles but then they may start a family or their families from the countryside may join them and so there's a there's a kind of dynamic group of you know demographic if you will of people and I think that there's some similarities there so then then the question is like how how can you provide that and how can you make it affordable and have it really work and and not just work in a purely functional sense but you know I think we don't want to forget that you know everyone should be able to enjoy this kind of idea of what we're calling tropical curing or the or really the the pleasure of being in this very kind of privileged climate which is which is arguably maybe one of the most pleasant right on the planet and so how can we how can we really kind of solve that and a lot of it is architecture it's certainly not the whole story as we know there's a lot of things having to do with financing and policy and public private partnerships and all those good things but an architect certainly can play a role I think in and and basically how to solve that problem and so I I I know that you and you know many of the people at the at the university at the school of architecture are really kind of working on this problem and and hopefully we can make some impact so let's introduce maybe some more terms that go through our mind all the time so one is actually relates to the plant life as well which learned a while ago we all know what invasive is and we know this from the plant life the stuff that comes takes over suppresses the local and we allow ourselves to apply that to architecture as well so architecture that is not tolerant of the local relevances and they might be climatically they might be socially we allow ourselves to call that and then there is exotic and there's also I think cross disciplinary we do some research in other areas like music for example that traces back to your early you know started a queen couple Yanni so maybe you want to talk about exotic or exotic car a little bit mine oh okay okay well I think that there's you know and it's it's interesting when you look back and we're kind of talking about that mid-century and and of course that's when you know Hawaii tourism really sort of began and when you look at the advertisements you know it it very much I think is really trying to capture that kind of spirit of you know as you were talking about it multi-sensory even though it's just maybe a magazine ad right or maybe a poster for panam airlines or something of that sort so you know they're trying to bring out where you really smell the flowers where you hear the sound of the of the ocean breeze the ukulele and the you know the sway of the dancers and all of that right which really comes together to create this kind of sense of of the exotic I think the the the the difficulty is you know now is that you know we we need to to somehow you know continue this this kind of feeling and appreciation of those kind of true things right but I think that we've also kind of in our contemporary culture we're so used to images and sound bites and there's the however many I don't use Twitter but there's you know so many characters you can use right so everything is very past fast-paced and we need to consume things and I think a lot of the tropics is is really about the kind of slowness right it's the kind of slow down and to really sort of experience things and again I think some of those early images were were about that you know they were kind of out on the lounge chair and you imagine they were there or the hammock and they were there all day right I mean that was part of that whole kind of experience and I wonder if we've lost that kind of in the kind of you know the the pace of contemporary life somehow and how that really kind of matches up with you know this this really kind of feeling of the tropics I don't know no and it's I think it's it's life and it's behavior so here in the show I always hear sometimes I look a little bit too toasted or roasted when I come here because I just try to you know whenever live that and you do too so I know you basically walk mainly if you don't walk you you bicycle and then you're exposed to the elements and you wish there would be more shade but if not you know you try to minimize your exposure to the sun but you also allow the sun to come so you're not driving in your air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned school which you unfortunately have but you try to live that and we actually came here whenever we drive we're not like you know perfect we drive open with a top down and drive a convertible which we believe that's the way to go on an island where it's always sunny so why not doing that and the studio doesn't have a makeup room so there's no like making you know us look pretty so we are basically how we are and so it gets us to sweating right sweating is sort of an essential thing that a human body is using to regulate sort of its functioning in the tropics and I'm sort of hopefully audience doesn't feel it too much but actually have a pretty bad cold from having to have been in all these AC places and so it's really about the sort of experience so when you sweat you know it's it's part of what your body does to cool you down but it's also part of the experience and here in our relatively mild tropics we basically have the ability to moderate that in a really sort of a playful enjoyable kind of way however the environments have to be supportive of that and that's the sort of what we're criticizing so maybe another word pair would be like surfacial surface and substantial right is that fair to say to use this sort of pair of words and right what comes to your mind when we use these yeah yeah well I think that's I think that's true I think the you know I think another thing and maybe kind of get back to this I think how we've become so you know the fascinated I think by by images obsessed obsessed even right and I think it kind of makes sense because we have we kind of have the ability to really consume a lot of a lot of images and and so and and they're compelling and they and it's even become sort of addictive and I think as a result of that a lot of things you know start to then use kind of symbols right as a way of communicating things you know certainly the corporate logo or or other kinds of symbols right which we can identify very quickly and I think that we've become so kind of used to that as a kind of surrogate for something else and that something else is the actual experience of something actual life experience of something and I think you know obviously we see that people you know are worried about obesity of kids and that's because they're not running around in the backyard playing anymore they're sitting playing the video game right and the video game is more compelling now than actually going out and playing a game with their friends so so I think these are all all kind of challenges and I think you know in terms of architecture some of this sort of sort of applies where certain kind of symbols become applied to a surface instead of designing the building in such a way that it actually provides the experience of what that place really is right we use this term genus loci right which is kind of the spirit of the place and I think we have to really kind of now push for that and in a way I think it's a struggle because there are there are a lot of forces kind of financially kind of what we're used to we have certain habits this is the way we make buildings right to to to go back right I don't know do you have any thoughts on that Martin I'm sure you do uh I know you do I do and unfortunately I just got the notification we're like two minutes to close the show so um I thank you Zuri for always selecting we leave it up to Zuri to select the the graphics in the back and the picture she showed you know I think symbolizes what you're talking about where usually you have renderings they're pretty to sell something sell an illusion and it's mostly flowers and people and you can make like I use the example and Jay asked me to run a show about the new and the old international marketplace and I'm about to have the soto brown who's a curator at the bishop museum talk about that so look forward to that show right and you know you can render the new international marketplace really pretty you know and it looks like it has all the senses but in reality it's air conditioned corporate stores right whereas in your case also in this image here uh basically you know what you what you basically render what you suggest is suggestive of actually be representative of the real stuff so a swing for example really means you know I'm outdoors my kid is swinging there I'm going there so so that's sort of the it's you have a sort of substantial approach and once again we would we would argue that this architecture here is very buildable here maybe differently in Vietnam where labor is cheap and material is cheap here it's expensive but we actually ran a couple of shows with mister the mister is free prep on the island lesson adam campers so this would be a perfect project for them and we actually have some in the pipeline together with them right so um I think concluding that um I will share the secret that I'm that I'm hoping to have many more shows with you but also hopefully you being on this seat here at times because I see tropic hearing and I think we see it as sort of a philosophy that is inclusive so net exclusive so it's not owned by us yes we just believe that's the way to go and we reach out to other people so we welcome new collaborators and um I want to thank you David for this excellent introduction to the philosophy well thank you for thank you very much for having me and everyone on think tech and uh yeah that's great so I really appreciate it yeah opportunity yeah thank you very much and I hope you guys liked it so you will tune in again next Tuesday five o'clock downtown Honolulu could be nice to sort of basically wrap up your your work day and wrap your mind around some more interesting and some more sort of um dreaming ways because tropic hearing after all is fun dreaming thank you very much