 Good afternoon, I'm Ethan Allen, filling in for Howard Good, here on Code Green on Think Tech Hawaii. We're talking about architecture today, and I have Field Camp, principal at High Archie, LLP, about a 10-year-old architectural firm here that does very high-end, LEED certified LEED platinum construction projects. Yes, a lot of sustainable projects. Welcome, and good to have you here, Phil. Thank you, thank you so much. Maybe to start out with just a quick, what is this LEED business, so in case our viewers don't know. Well, LEED is a certification program for sustainable projects. It's probably the most recognized internationally from a sustainable certification process for new design and construction. They also get into retrofit efforts as well, but from a certification process, it's probably the most widely recognized. What it effectively does is it registers and recognizes the projects in different levels of sustainability. So the upper enchilon is the platinum and steps down to gold, silver, and then there's just a baseline certification level. So depending on how sustainable the project is, it'll meet out at different level of certification. Right, so that has to do with where the materials sort of sourced ecologically, are they maybe being reused, recycled, or is it their energy-efficient building right? It runs a gamut, so it'll go from everything from site sustainability, how you manage water on site, what kind of infrastructure you have, how you deal with the grading, even where the site is, in the center of urban infill site, or is it out in the middle of suburban site? Right. And then it gets into the building, the materiality, where the products come from, big issue in Hawaii, because we're a small little rock in the middle of the Pacific, so most things have to come here. So you get credits for products that are locally sourced, you don't have that extensive carbon footprint from shipping things in and out from the state, and then it gets into energy use as the building is turned over, and it's operating the life cycle of the project. Typically that's one of the most intensive uses of energy, not just during the construction, but also as the building's occupied, right, so what kind of HVAC, what kind of lighting you use, deals with all those things, but yeah, it really gets into everything of the project. So you want to get these high lead ratings, and they suggest that you're building well, you're building sustainably, you're building relatively low carbon footprint, and you've got a building that's going to sort of continue to pay back in that sense over time. That's absolutely it. So the certification process keeps track of the building process, the design process as well as the building process as you move through the life of a structure from designing it to building it, but it also tracks all the materiality that you're using, and even how that materiality is being installed on the project, right, so it will require window tests when you put a window in, so it's great if you have a good window, but if it's leaking it's not very sustainable, right, it'll test the HVAC in the system, so as your ducts move through a space, if they're leaking and you're losing the energy, it could be a great duct system and a great air conditioning system, but if it's leaking like a sieve, it does nobody any good, so not just the products, but how they're installed and making sure they're tested and making sure they're performing as they should. Excellent. And your firm has done several Platinum level projects, including some that are for affordable housing, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah, no, we're very proud of it, brought two first to the state, and then we'll talk about them a little later. One we just wrapped up, K.O. Lane, so it's the first in the state that's a lead Platinum project for affordable housing that's also a mid-rise, so a higher density kind of product. And then the Kolapua project we'll talk about briefly as well, that's on Kauai, and that was the first in the state to be lead Platinum for affordable multifamily housing, so there's been a few projects since then that hit the Platinum level, but we're proud of it because we hope it breaks the misnomer that good affordable housing cannot be provided in a sustainable manner. So both of those projects reach Platinum certification as the highest level of sustainability and their affordable housing product, which we sorely need here. Yeah, absolutely, and it's critical to try to advance on all those front simultaneously, right, have more affordable housing, but also be sure that it's appropriate housing, right? Yeah, absolutely, we try to fight that constantly, affordable housing should not mean bad housing or cheap housing, you can do really good housing or office or any kind of construction, but you can do it sustainably, and in Hawaii we have to be doing that. Well, do you want to pop in and start talking a little bit about what it is? Yeah, we can jump right into K.O. I think that intro slide just kind of shows that three projects we'll be talking about. So on the left, K.O. Lane, in the middle, Kulapua, in Princeville, in Kauai, and on the far right, that's a local project and a historical project right down the street here in the Dillingham Transportation Building, that's the offices for Haoli Maolo, also a lead Platinum project. Excellent, excellent. So very different kinds of work for very different sort of audiences and different uses, but you've managed to, on all of them, put this high sustainability, high energy efficiency on into them. Yeah, I think in every instance it was really critical to have team partners that bought into that, namely the clients that really felt that was an important part, so they helped shepherd the process through and then good contractors and an entire team. So it's not just hierarchy. I mean, we're very proud of the projects, but it's a full team process and we bring some of the best team members to the table when we're doing these projects. So certainly your clients have to be interested in this process to pursue it, right? Again, it's a bit of a misnomer that sustainability or a high level of sustainability is unattainable. It's too expensive. It can't be done while there are extra efforts in every project. It can be done and it really comes down to the client that buys in that makes all the difference in the world. If there's an additional effort, they'll help shepherd that through, but it's really buy-in that makes it happen. Right, right. Everyone's got to really be committed to that process and realize the real almost unmeasurable value of doing a good sustainable energy efficient project, right? Yeah, I mean, I just go almost beyond simply money. And it's the sharp clients that really understand that because it's not just the day one cost. The sharp clients understand they're going to be carrying costs for the project in perpetuity, right? So if they own a structure and they're going to manage it and operate it for 20, 30, 100 years, which is what we really should be looking at, having an efficient building that's built well is going to pay for itself much faster than the one that was just done cheaply the first five years. You're going to be replacing things all over the place. Exactly, exactly. So should we move on? Sure, yeah. We can talk about the care whole project. So the first slide here is kind of the front shot. A really interesting project in that it was a joint development agreement. So in the back of that shot on the left side, you'll see our project is in the front 209 units of affordable housing over about 31,000, 32,000 square feet of retail. Behind that project is a for sale product. It's a tower that Stanford cars team did behind it care whole place. But it's unique in that our project and their project work together collaboratively developed the entire block and eventually the transit will land right in front of our project. So you'll have transit connectivity moving in. But this picture, and I think if you move to the next slide as well, both of those pictures show some of the highlights on our project in that it was all locally sourced and it was a precast concrete construction. So you see some of those fins jutting out and some of those feature items that come out. Those are actually all precast. So they're panelized concrete built here on the island. And then they became additional elements of the project, not just from an aesthetic, but they help shade the project. So you're reducing heat gain on the windows, which reduces the cooling requirements inside the unit. So it's kind of looking at the whole package. It seems like this is a lot of very systems thinking, right? You're really considering all these things from the surface transit transportation. Absolutely. To the shade on the windows now. And that's something as architects. I mean, you know, we always beat our own drum. But I think realistically, you have to look at it as the entire system. If you're just looking at a specific element and saying, hey, I'm going to get really efficient air conditioning in here. Well, that's great. And we love efficient air conditioning. But, you know, if your windows are letting all that heat come in and you don't have shading, that really efficient air conditioning is going to be cranked up, you know, exactly high speed. So you got to look at the whole thing collectively. And that's what architects should be doing. And we try and separate a good team, bring them together. And then we try and look at it holistically. Because if you're just looking at one element, it is not going to solve the riddle. It's too easy to miss other things, the wind flow, the general direction, the airflow, everything, sunlight, as you said, surrounding vegetation, how all that plays together. Absolutely. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, we could jump to the next one. So I think what you're seeing here is a little sample of the interior of the unit. So this project, again, was affordable housing. So we had micro units on it, some small units, but small and very efficient. I think the key for small, efficient units are pointing them well, giving the amenities to the tenants that, hey, your actual living space might be smaller, but you have good amenities on site that you can take advantage of. So if you can get them well appointed and make it fit, you can still live well in a smaller space. What that does from the construction perspective and ownership perspective is it brings a huge economy of scale. So you can build more units, reduce the construction cost. So again, rather than reducing the construction cost just by making it cheaper, the theory being we'll improve the economy of scale. We'll try and build in some redundancy so we can drop those construction costs, but still deliver a really high level product, whether it's affordable or not. Yeah, excellent, excellent. That's very important. So some some interiors and just some fun stuff in this one. The slide on the right is actually a portion of the entry lobby. If you go there today on that wall, a fun side note is you'll have that lead platinum plaque on that wall. But no, it's the entry lobby and you'll see some little features in there. That ceiling in there is all reused and reclaimed wood. We got that from reuse Hawaii and it became a feature of the lobby. And then we tied that in to kind of help display the feel of the entire project. So the first thing you experience, you're already engaging with some reuse and recycled products right when you walk in the front door. The image on the left, that's a community amenity to meeting room for all the tenants to use. They can reserve it. It's their own little space on the wall that you can't see in that image. There's a large TV screen so you can either have meetings in that room or you could have viewing parties or then there's an adjacent space that has a smaller kitchen and opens up to Illinois. So again, their spaces are compact and efficient, but they have great amenities throughout the space to make it. Yeah, it's important if you want to have a place where you can bring people in. You want some larger space that you can use. But you don't need it very often, right? And sustainability is not just about the product, not just about construction, it's about how people live, right? So it's great if you have this highly efficient space but if people don't want to be there, that's not very sustainable, right? Exactly, exactly. You got to make it, you got to design it so that it's the spaces that people want to be and congregate and live. Exactly. And some of the key aspects, I guess, that you would deal with it. So I probably don't want to dig too deep into the lead weeds here, pardon the pun, but these are some of the lead specific credits that we pursued. So we share them because they're important to the overall composition of the project. So on the left, it's access to open space and amenities. So it's a credit, sure, you check a box from the lead perspective, but it's important to the project in that all the tenants living there will be able to engage with mass transit eventually. So when the mass transit stop right at the edge of our site, and you can see in that site plan in the middle slide there on this image, you'll see the future transit stop is literally right at the end. So all those riders will be able to dump right out into our promenade space and vice versa. All of our tenants will be able to jump on the mass transit and move either way, but it helps to create opportunities for alternative transportation, which is another credit we pursued. So the adjacency to the transit and our owners and our project went the extra step. So one of the prime retail spaces at grade in this space is turned over to the tenants for them to store their bicycles and work on it. So rather than that being grade A retail space, they turned that over to their own tenant. So it's really speaks directly to how important it is to the landowner and our development partners, Gerning Edelman, that people are allowed alternative transportation. So they really buy into the multimodal transportation, they give them a bike facility where they can work on their bikes, store their bikes, all that stuff. That's beautiful, it really encourages people and makes having a bicycle when you've got a small apartment feasible. Yeah, you're not trying to hang it on the wall in your smaller unit and you've got a great place. It's right downstairs. You can jump on it. You can work on it down there if you need to. And then you jump on your bike and you're just minutes away from the central business district. Super. Hey, this is great. We're enjoying this tour here. Phil Camp from High Archie, LLP. And we're on Code Green. I'm your guest host Ethan Allen and we'll be back in one minute. Hey, Aloha, standing energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show but we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii. Because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Standing Energy Man and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Aloha. Hi everyone, I'm Andrea Gabrieli. The host for Young Talent's Making Way here on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matters to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. And you're back here on Code Green. I'm Ethan Allen, guest hosting, setting in for Howard Big. With me today is Phil Kemp of Hierarchy LLP, architectural firm here. And we've been talking about LED certification, lead certification and lead platinum buildings. And particularly, Phil has made the point in the first half that for affordable housing can also actually be extremely good housing. No, absolutely. And Hierarchy has built several of the first projects in Hawaii that demonstrate it's got lead platinum certification, which is the highest level of certification at our affordable housing for multiple tenants. And we were going through some of the criteria that helped lead up to it. And I think the next slide actually shows a couple, one of my favorites here, surface water management. Tell me a little bit about that if you would please. It's interesting credit. So it basically speaks to how we manage water on site, maybe not the sexiest to the average job public, but it's important. In Hawaii specifically, especially in Kaka'ako where we have a high water table. So it speaks to how we manage and collect the water that comes off of either our roofs or our flat surfaces and percolate. So the issue being if you otherwise just let it flush into the streets, you know, the street system and then we have flooding all over. And we just went through a whole lot of rains this past weekend where there was a lot of flooding. So as code change, this project is far above current code because it's a lead platinum project. This was one of the pursuits we followed through with, but as code changes and catches up to the sustainable building practices, more and more sites will be managing their water on site so they're not dumping it out into the public way and then causing flooding. But that's really critical because you've got to, we need to be recharging our aquifers here too. So you need to be taking the water where it falls and helping it get into the ground at that point rather than just shooting it down a channel somewhere out into the lagoon. Absolutely. And that shows some of the dry well. So there's dry wells all throughout the site that loves the water come down, perk through the site. And most of those stormwater will be managed on site before it even hits the city streets. Wonderful, wonderful. The other item is just some optimized energy performance. And in this site, oh, sorry. We can go to the next slide. This one speaks to the environmentally preferable products and the compact development. So I touched on that early, the environmentally preferable products. This project is unique also that it's a mid-rise product but it's also all precast. So usually in the mainland, when we're doing our mid-rise products, almost all of them would be concrete podium decks. And there'd be stick frame, either wood or metal above that. In this project, the entire project is precast. So one, it's usually more durable but the big benefit for us here in Hawaii is that it was all locally sourced and locally fabricated here on island. So from a sourceability perspective, it's all local. Right, means that didn't have to be made on the mainland but it's trucked and shipped. Correct, so if it was a steel, pretty much all that stuff needs to be, if it's cold road steel or something needs to be shipped to Hawaii, even if it's fabricated here, all that steel comes in. So Hawaii, they have a patch plan here where they're processing all the concrete and cement to make those precast. Wonderful, wonderful. That's great to be doing now. We can, yeah, if you want to jump in. So the next project is coal. So again, affordable housing. This was the first affordable housing, multifamily lead platinum project in the state. This is in Princeville. A unique project in that it, again, was lead platinum but unique in that it was also passively cooled. So this was a bit of a pilot project from the lead certification process because they didn't necessarily recognize passively cooled projects. Most of them have some kind of conditioned element in it. So you'll see for affordable housing projects, quite a few windows we did that intentionally. So based on the orientation of the building throughout the site, it allows us to take advantage of the local trade. So we always say the best thing about affordable housing is affordability. So how much better to come home after work and be able to crack your windows open and get cooled for free rather than having to crank the AC and pay for that. So we took advantage of it and it's been a huge success for the housing product in Princeville. Excellent, excellent. Setting a good example for others then too. We're trying. I mean, there's a lot of other great teams out there that try to do this as well. But it took a little bit of extra effort again because lead nationally didn't recognize that the passive cooling strategy, but now they are. So, you know. For a bunch of the US that's less of an issue, probably with climate change, that's gonna become more of an issue. Possibly, but certainly we're in a climate that should be taken advantage of. So we had a good argument to justify it and we understood the process quite well. So I think we're able to make the good argument and eventually we resulted with a platinum project. Excellent, super. So next slide here. Again, this is a colopua and also might be interesting to you. You see on the site plan I left a lot of on-site water retention. So same principle. We had on-site water catchment or retention basins. This is actually right above Honolay where you typically would look down and you'd see all the low e-fields or the taro fields down below. So we tried to incorporate some of that right on site and make those retention basins kind of a dual purpose effort. So they won, they could be an aesthetic benefit for the project, but also they could generate food and then most importantly for the water perspective it could retain that water and manage it on-site. So you see the retention basins on-site and they actually became a landscape feature later on. Excellent. And then the image on the right kind of shows also in relation to the site plan, how we tried to integrate the units to really have the tenants engage with it because that's a part of sustainability as well. It's getting people to plug into each other. It's not, you know, you don't just have a unit and have people walk around the exterior. So we really tried to promote that sense of community in the project. And again, that's been a huge success for them. Yeah, again, a real nice example of real systems thinking and realizing that it's not just each unit, it's a community. Yeah, that's what housing's about. It's getting people together, getting them to live with us. If you organize that space properly, they will tend to interact more with one another. They'll have shared activities and you can do that in very sort of subtle ways just by the way you arrange your physical space, right? And the developers like it in the long run because it creates a sense of community and when you have that sense of community, people take care of their spaces a little better. So when you have a unit flip or unit turnover, lo and behold, those lead platinum projects, the units aren't as beaten up because the people actually care that live there, you know, where other people watch out for one another a little bit more probably. Yeah, exactly. Excellent, excellent. Next slide. So this is our last project of the three lead platinum projects that we're gonna share with you today. And this is another local project in Honolulu. This is in Dillingham Transportation Building. So it's the Howell-e-Maoloa office space. So it's a lead platinum project. It's a full-gut rehab retrofit in the Dillingham Transportation Building, which is on the National Historic Register. So you have a lot of constraints. You can't change the way the building looks on the outside at all. Exactly. You probably have limitations on what you can do on the inside even. Absolutely. So when you're dealing with a building, it's another one of those misnomers that you can do a sustainable or lead platinum project in a National Historic Register project because there's just too many hurdles to jump through. So we took that challenge head on and you're right. While we can't change the envelope and the historic features of the project, we could work within to really accent the existing highlights. And there are quite a few in this old project. It's a beautiful project with great bones. We're able to really work with what we had. So in this image, you can kind of see the three slides. That's kind of the primary entry. And we'll get to a later image. But if you look in this image, you can see we really tried to accentuate that historic ceiling. So if you look at that ceiling was from the original construction. So what we did was we tried to bounce some of the natural light coming in from the exterior and push it up to the ceilings that existed. So we didn't do those original ceilings, but we wanted people to see it. So it became a huge feature of the project. And then we built around that and told our story within. Wonderful, wonderful. Yeah, that's what you've got to do with that kind of situation, right? There you go. So that's the additional slide I was talking about. So that image on the left, that shows that internalized light shelf. So again, we couldn't change or add windows on the exterior. So what we did is we took what few windows they did have and we tried to redirect that natural light and push it deep into the space and highlight those existing features up in the ceiling. And then a cool story on the right, you'll see that wood panel. No, I'll vote in the panel. One of the groups that this client supports, so they're a sustainable group that support youth education in Hawaii and sustainability in Hawaii. And one of the groups they support in Maui and Hana, they teach trades to. So this woodworking that you're seeing was done by teenagers and younger. So I mean, just really talented young kids out in Hana. We gave them the dimensions, the color tonality that we wanted and that's what we received. I mean, if you commissioned that to an artist, you paid thousands of dollars for that. Yeah, so it became a huge feature for the space and it really speaks to the overall space as well. Yeah, that's great. And it says, you know, you can really incorporate great aesthetic values into this and do sort of community good at the same time. So this is really, it's a win and a win. And a full cycle story. All of that wood is reclaimed wood that they found in the forest in Hana. I mean, just a great story with kids learning trades and just cranking out some beautiful art as well. Yeah, excellent. This sounds very, very exciting here. You know, there's a lot of great stuff going on. And let's see, here's some more of these more details yet right from the same project. So yeah, so again, Haoli Maoloa, some of the details. So we're trying to carry an aesthetic that would pull through the project. So again, we kept the original ceilings and we wanted to pull off of that. So any details that we brought, we wanted to try and bring in those warm hues of wood but also try and keep that linear aesthetic. So we started replicating it where we had that interior light shelf. You'll see these outriggers flying out. There's an eco-resin that goes on top of that. It's a three-form product and it has an eco-resin blend with a sheet fabric inside of the resin that helps refract the light and push it in. So really cool recycled material doing a lot of good work for you. Almost all the wood was either recycled or sustainably sourced, FSC wood. So really important to the overall project and it just really kind of helped wrap the entire story together. But yeah, our projects we're really proud of and we had a blast with all of them. You have good reason to be. It's really amazing to see this body of work here. All these lead platinum structures where you've done them for affordable housing. You've done them for inside historic buildings. It's just utterly amazing to see. It's great to know this kind of works happening in Hawaii and you're to be congratulated for doing it. Well, we appreciate it. We just had a grand opening for that Kale-Hole-Lane project and the mayor was there celebrating with us and he spoke and when he found out that was the first affordable mid-rise project that hit lead platinum. I mean, we've got to do more of those and I couldn't agree with him more. I mean, we need to be doing more of this and hopefully these are good examples of how it can be achieved. Excellent, well, thank you so much for being here, Phil. This is wonderful. It's great. Hierarchy is doing. Thank you. Cutting edge work here. It's good for the community. It's good for the state. Yeah, excellent. Well, thank you so much. We appreciate it. And come back next week and I hope power will be back on Codegreen.