 Good to have you all back for another episode, which happens to be our 235th and you are about to be our 12,500 viewers. So thank you for that. We're broadcasting live from if you would drill through our planet then you would get the both ends of it and that is back in Honolulu, Hawaii in your Bishop Museum, DeSoto Brown, DeSoto. Good morning or good day everybody. All right and me on the other drilling end would you wish so back near Munich, Germany, your host, your co-host Martin Bisping. Okay DeSoto, last time we took a break we stayed on one slide which is the one at the very bottom right here because we just had to clear our minds and brainstorm about the unbelievable situation. That little did we know on the top right some few weeks ago we were listing here the three which we thought the most challenges of we should say woman kind because it was woman day some days ago and and children kind and and mankind which was of course still the COVID coronavirus then climate change and civility. We were thinking civility as far as social equity and increasing struggle for dwelling in dignity and giving shelter to people and little did we know that it would be basically in brackets the crime of humanity what's been done to people in the Ukraine right now and that was is extremely tough and it's ongoing and so we've been using as whenever we need fresh a fresh view we use automobiles and cars as sometimes metaphorical vehicles for a thought so we've been looking and remembering that both of us basically heard about the the wars of the past and the current one where we're in in cars and also cars remind us when we pick up at the gas station you know they're climbing and climbing the gas prices which shouldn't be the primary problem the primary problem is people dying at children and women and men are dying there and that's the worst but once we get into this routine of of life which psychologists even tell us we should of course you know update us as often as possible with what's going on and be empathetic and trying to help in in most possible ways but we should also stay on track to not making a drive us crazy right but the gas stations is a reminder because that immediately makes us remember where that comes from from our dependency on fossil fuel and when we were saying you know I was going to skiing then you know next time I should go taking a train because there's actually a train going there kind of coming for circle too as we know the beginning of my professional prototyping which was tram stations for the expo into thousands some many years ago right now so kind of reconnecting to that also my buddy Dan with whom I you know heard about the the iraq war the Gulf War these 30 years ago he then came back and visited me in Germany and this reminds us of that there's been wars here in in Europe before because at that time there was the Yugoslavian war and wars and he is his parents are first generation immigrants and he wanted to get his grandma out and he rented and didn't let the rental company know a beamer a BMW and drove there and had to return unsuccessfully which made him very sad because per the old saying an old an old tree you don't replant right so we can only imagine how tough it must be for people to leave their home I actually had contact with the first Ukrainian when I was on the train station here where I booked my train ticket to see Joanne Lenny over spring break and there was a young woman there her app had Ukrainian you know language on there and she wanted to know how to get to which turned out to be the embassy location there and I was able to you know give her direction to that one so it's you know it's it's it's close to us in so many different ways and again the New York Times feature at the bottom left again cars just like architecture are supposed to give us safety security independence but in this case here as the picture points out the opposite and even more so what the star advertiser about a week ago now already or several days ago was picking from world press here which shows that bullet shattered glass looking out into the Ukrainian horizon there with snow on the roofs and and the soda you said you know we had our European Commission president was of the fundal line who we called quite a bit just speak to us you know Germans and Europeans and saying we should try to get our fossil fuel as frantically fast as we can and they're thinking about mandating PV on the roofs for every new building but they're also urged what we say always cut down consumption into the consumers and you know turn down your temperature of your furnace a little bit I'm doing this here with my puffy jacket put something warmer on because if anyone would do that we all together we have an impact because every drip of oil 35% of the oil we consume here and we don't have any oil whatsoever in Germany or not worth mentioning 35% comes from Russia the gas is 50% comes from there so try to get off that is the utmost mission and you just said to me before the show what the soda about turning down the furnace well again we as we keep saying we here in the Hawaiian islands are in an extremely privileged position where we do not need heating and personally I'm very grateful for that because I get cold very easily and if I had to go through winter with a thermostat way down so that it was cold indoors and cold outdoors I would be very unhappy I'm lucky that I don't have to do that and all of us here in the Hawaiian islands don't have don't have to do that either so the impact of energy on us is far reduced compared to the great majority of people in the northern hemisphere who live where it's cold yeah and and and everything that happens you know is impacting unfortunately the ones at the bottom of the food chain the poor people right Ukraine is one prime wheat chamber of the world and it will triple and trickle through to Africa where they are already starving will be more and more they don't have anything to do directly with that but the beast of globalism that we don't want to condemn but it's dark side you know just really shows at this point trying to keep the spirit I just I just read that the Ukraine has just prohibited food exports because they need it for themselves so as you just said they're cutting off food for people thousands of miles away on the planet that have nothing to do with this and yet they're forced to do so yeah yeah so the main target areas which we did a couple of shows about because of this potential exchange we're promoting between me in Germany and back in Hawaii was again habitation was nutrition was transportation and was education these are the four areas that we need to really target and so that being said again we took the emerging generation to keep the spirit up bottom right the show quote to the upmost you know innovative projects here in Munich that try to make ends meet from an economical side because we have this issue before and it's just worsening the situation and then we have the architect Peter Heimann here who is doing this beehive project that is using innovative technologies besides the innovative you know sort of collapsing circulation and habitation beehive system he's using ultra light concrete which we should introduce to the island because it insulates and he's also introducing or using prefab which we have out there at very specific Rocky Mountain precast so Peter we want your building we want you on the island here and talking emerging generation and next slide while you know speaking about myself to Soto old old fart fogies have our opinion after careful consideration but here is joining us the emerging generation this is Derek Korea who is usually we're talking that Ursula also you know holds back from the past of my childhood in the 70s where we had this car free Sunday you know where we try to demonstrate we can do without fossil transportation she's trying to bring that back Derek was always doing that greatly on the island because he's always on a skateboard that he actually built himself so that's a double win-win situation and this here he obviously an exception to the world might have been in his car because you see these reflections there and let us basically recall his assessment of the cooler project right and he first of all was talking about planters at the bottom left you see these planters that he said well hopefully they're planting plants in there we said this is nice but it's not new right the gateway project we show on top there on number one is from the early 90s look as silly how we looked at there and that's how the building is that's silly but it has planters and then our friend on Lindgren who we're missing today basically this is the at the very top right on the number three I guess it is we have what he called building smothered with green and that was how the ihilani was supposed to be got value engineered here is his project architect his colleague and friend Larry Stricka telling us in that show that he had this plan for every floor then it got value engineered now only every other one has it and the four season people are not even able to manage to have plants and there as of now so that's pretty bad also what Derek was criticizing his painting concrete that's something we've been bringing up as a problem why painting concrete right so these are things he was disappointed about and getting to the next slide please that's one you took the solo you wanted to make sure to say you stopped at that red light there right that's right I was I was stopped at the red light in the left turn lane so no I was not doing anything dangerous when I took this photograph out of my car and I wasn't I wasn't about to call it cause a car crash and this is good teamwork because I think this extra image illustrates pretty well what summarizes Derek's assessment because he called the building basically underwhelming right so there was a certain disappointment that he said it was promising to be sugarcane but then all things considered that we basically talked about and a little hard to see but if you go really if you would go up close you see that they actually started at the top floors and it gets us to the next slide to do something that we've been saying one should condemn on the island's you know abandoned which is Glasgow but here they are and what does this have to do this is very provocative because you know some shows ago at the very top left we're looking in Frankfurt at the newest trends and we saw Björke Ingels somehow doing something kind of sarcastic because it reminded us of a plane having maybe flown into the building and dented it and so well that was supposed to be funny somehow haha not really but then one of the first images that was getting viral around the world is what we see at the very bottom left and that's not funny at all that was a rocket basically hitting one of the residential towers here in Kiev so what in the world does this have to do with paradise right where we're so remote where hopefully we don't have any of these problems well we have because we're talking fossil fuel is in the center of all of that and yes you so perfectly wrapped up last time the solo you said we're using way too much fossil fuel in Hawaii where we where we have a chance to use as little as possible if we would only build as your ancestors have been doing that pretty successfully because they had no other chance because that was pre-contact and oil was a strange and foreign unknown thing right yep nobody was using oil anywhere in the world at that point we had no oil based anything oil came out of the ground and nobody used it for anything yeah and now we cannot live without it exactly and let's you know max which is sympathetic before the show and said he's continuing or he's talking with buddies about the topic of lanais and easy breeziness let's go in for further differentiation the terminology of a logia right and how do we look at these lanais differently when we think about the more suitable terminology of logia right well well that word as you sent to me actually means a building or a room which is open on at least one side usually to a garden obviously that's in a one-story building in this case what we're is this truly a logia because yes it's open on one side if you open the doors so that you've got sliding doors there but is it truly open if it has this additional extra low wall of a glass guardrail because there's that is then doing not very much to increase your air circulation and that's one of the crucial things that we've got to do here is circulate air particularly because we have trade winds much of the time that do that for us and essentially air condition us if we are open to it if we build structures that will take advantage of it yeah so when you carve out when you subtract versus add as can only ring lanais as we did a show about then again the the logia definition is you got to be open to at least one side and that's all you get here because you're actually close to after all five sides if you add the top and the bottom of your slab and all the other three sides and then as you said you already limit your one open exposure by keeping the guardrail closed you're pretty much hermeticizing yourself the lanai and it's less of a lanai anymore and then also telling here you see these ashamed curtains that they put behind that corner glass that we talked about that gets hit by the sun all the time so these are all things you know nature it doesn't do and nature would then get dehydrated and basically dry up and die right if this would be a plant that it aims to be one next slide this is per basically another point that's Derek brought up right yeah so what we have here is the exterior crane support that's helping to construct this building and as you can see it's got a support that actually sticks into one of those rooms where they have not yet installed the glass on the corner and you said that Derek was saying well wouldn't it be cool if this was an exterior elevator shaft and no it's not going to be this is just something that's sort of temporary but when we look at the at the room plan which is right there on the screen as that skinny drawing is we do see that at least there is a cross way corridor that does go to the outside so there is light coming in from either side to light that interior corridor so it's not quite pitch black if the electricity goes off however pardon me it's still not as innovative as our favorite olamowana building and that's what we see at the picture at the very top that was built in 1961 and it had this extremely innovative exterior of vertical louvers or slats which moved pivoted at different times of the day to help keep the interior of the building cooler by shading the building as the sun moved this was extremely innovative for the time and the building as this whole as a whole was very innovative with the la ronda rotating restaurant at the top as well which was the first rotating restaurant in the entire united states so we were there was a time when we were very innovative there was a time when we were doing things outside of the norm and this is performative exterior structures this is a performative thing it's not purely decorative it isn't just doing it for fun it actually makes a difference which now unfortunately we don't see even though we're now in the 21st century but in this building here making it maybe even worse we pretend to do right with yeah and again this sort of sidelit corridor of where the elevator shafts are is what the alamowana building had as well some half of a century ago but then as you perfectly put it it also had this sort of bio kinetic feathery cold and open and closed right so this is so much way more Hawaiian right your ancestors would have loved that embrace and say hey that's like us just here and now right well the other one is more pretending so once again ladies and gentlemen what what are we doing and and again this is not a boutique architect way back John Graham was the most commercial architect so that was mainstream but he came to why he said oh man i gotta do better than anywhere else so again genie is sort of you know a boutique architect and and at that point that wasn't even so that makes it even more questionable right so let's sort of spend the the second half of this year with a polemic positive proposition next slide because they dedicate this little we said careful to call it park but it's a green strip just outside of the building and they plant the tree that gives the least shape which is the palm tree but it's good enough for these people so you got this you know example of raw model nature right out there and next slide while the top part is basically then how the kula basically fits in and after all you know things considered and carefully you know reflected we have to say although the building tries to look more interesting but on a performative level as you said it's insufficiently better than its very fossil neighbors here which is very sort of disappointing and to lift the spirit up at the bottom is a proposition together with the emerging generation of a different nature of the beast as we call them primitivas three that would grow out of the ground and next slide while at the top left primitiva one in the evolution we could call looking back probably a hollow elephant leg but still pretty clumsy at the picture number two at the top right which is primitiva two which is more like a flamingo leg trying to balance on that one but now with primitiva three at the bottom right we rediscover more indigenous materials in a very innovative way because we are a volcanic island so there's basalt and basalt you can make into ropes and cables with a strength that is superior to steel how does that sound and it doesn't rust exactly yeah so wouldn't your ancestors have not just love but use that if they would have technology and grant itself of course you need to set up an industry to make that these don't grow on trees but you have you got the material there on the island so you just got to process it into that one and next slide is showing us the emerging generation and doing that just having one compression massed to the to the left for gravity and then using what bucky fuller with his kaiser dome then he left us with that unfortunately just like the feathery screen of the alawana building is not anymore they stole it from us and we need it back and they were just adding then what bucky fuller called tensegrity to that one and next slide let's share some potential sites for that this photo well as you can see this as you just said this has its own structure which sort of supports itself and it's one really big long continuous spiral and so it's very simple thing well one of the sites that we would love to see this in is the now underutilized site which formerly had the ward plaza structure on it which we admired as a concrete small concrete brutalist building from 1969 which had a lot to in its credit and a lot in its favor it was unfortunately and somewhat paradoxically demolished even though it was still a completely functional building the site is empty at the moment so why not put one of these primitive threes on it in counterpoint shall we say to all of the other large boxy unoriginal and not particularly exciting structures which are being built in that site right now by the Howard Hughes Corporation yeah absolutely and and that one the one we see here is actually just one over but same thing as Steve Owl that was a ward warehouse this is where they want to build the Victoria Place we've been reporting about another Solomon Courtwell Buens Chicago based firm hematic refrigerator that if we run out of oil to power it becomes a microwave and next slide is that location just over of formerly ward plaza you were talking about and next slide if we zoom in to the top right image there when Genie basically was proposing in this diagrammatic way if we can get zoom into the top right image there that the the the basically the bathroom and the kitchen would be connected to the corridor and she was branding that as something innovative we said no this is rebranding this is the same old mid-century excuse me 20th century mid-century way we've been building hotels and apartment buildings they're not easy breezy because double loaded corridor is not but in primitiva free as you see on the big picture here we we zone it from outside in we keep the water where the water is and then there is a green zone behind that list of the water and then there is the dry zone where the people live on the other side and on the next slide this is then basically bringing what Hawaii is all about bringing the jungle and the beach into the building and is this just weird is that just utopian next and final slide you tell me to Soto no and actually this is something which is very relevant for us today because today we are facing in Honolulu how hundreds and hundreds of high rises of residential high rises which do not have sprinklers for fire protection we saw calamity that occurred several years ago in the Marco Polo condominium fire in which four people died in hundreds and hundreds of departments were damaged so our friend the retired fire chief of course would appreciate the primitiva three which is circled and encased in a water curtain and here's a demonstration of how that water curtain could function with an over a pipe overhead nozzles at intervals and always there's falling water there that means you've always got water there you're always protected from fires not only that but the structure of itself does not lend itself to catch on fire anyway because it doesn't contain small contained areas which lead to catastrophic fires yeah and this is further investigated here by Dustin Chang who I had the privilege and honored to work with on his the ARC project at our school of architecture he was a collaborator on primitiva two already and then further developed this more in real scale with a sort of mock-up prototype testing apparatus furthermore and we will continue to do that yeah and our tropical tutor bill high bill basically lives in the Marco Polo his mother used to until very close high age as your mother is still is luckily and and he's now he took over the place and he's living there as he said he knows very well about and again all I news now at the top right is reporting that now code wants to mandate that for for all the high rises and yes the soccer team was always very supportive not to say enthusiastically appreciative about these you know alternative ways that we were proposing to reconnect to the basically indigenous mindset while using modern here and now cutting-edge technologies so with that we're at the end of the show we will continue to look at the newest developments as hard as it is at times as you can tell and so we'll use the next couple of shows looking into an area talking about the alumina building actually how things develop around the alumina building which they call midtown in a very promising way so we will look into that stay tuned for that and until then please stay easy breezy and breezy easy as to save our world 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 linked in and donate to us at think tech hawaii dot com mahalo