 and poos to have you back to our and us is the sort of brown in his Bishop Museum and me, Martin, the Spang in his Waikiki Grand Grand Hotel bathroom, broadcasting live to you for our show, think a wise human, human architecture. And this time it's all about the sixes because it's our 260th show. And you are about to be our 13,966th viewer. So we thank you for that. If we can if we can get the first slide up please. We want to do a little bit of a correction or being precise because while you just so to have been speaking perfectly as always and giving us the right positioning of this new tower that we see at the very top right, which is for Howard Hughes and by the Chicago Architect Solomon Court Rebuance, I got a little bit confused and said it will be positioned where our beloved word Plaza was and that was not what you said. So here we were going back to which is also a good thing going back to the archives of our show and having a bunch of show quotes here and at the very bottom left, we see here visualize what you correctly said, which is this department store, a gem but spelled with an E right and there it is. So thanks to me being confused and hopefully the audience not give us a chance to revisit that and revisiting that. How do we feel about especially in comparison of the new their building and our tropical exotic agenda disorder? Well, we continue to have a lot of the same quibbles or the same questions that we continue to have. And just basically to reiterate the types of things we talk about glass boxes that are entirely closed are not good. Glass boxes that don't open their windows are not good. Glass boxes should have lanais so that they are not entirely enclosed as a second best alternative to a lanai that you can actually go out on and live on is what's called the Juliet balcony which we've discussed before and will again in which basically you have opening sliding doors with a railing on them so that you can sort of step out a little bit or lean out but you don't really have any living space. So, yet again, we're finding that these things are not living up to the potential that they should be exhibiting and the things that they should be creating for the people who are going to be living in them. Yeah, and also the show quote at the middle left. This this side has a long history here. Well, I had our beloved war warehouse on it to begin with by Steve Owl. A great piece of hippie architecture which when I categorize in that way are Bundit Kanistakan who is his most upmost researcher because we failed to get Steve out in front of the camera. He said you guys do it on your own by yourself and Bundit for his exhibit was able to do it before Steve left us. At least physically, spiritually, he's still with us will always be. So, when that got cleared, they shocked us with some Richard Meyer towers that we thought were like recycled from the 80s or something and then Richard Meyer was pulled as being the unfortunate main figure in the Me Too movement and so were his towers here and then they came up with this which we thought was sort of like a little bit giving us some breadcrumbs here so we wouldn't be impatient and that was this part that they were proposing with this weird elevated walkway that we thought was once again copycatted as again the article that is the kind of the mentor for the show from the best journal that says we have an important skyline. That one here failed copycatted from New York City the highline and we didn't quite know what that was good for but then we got really shocked after that because that little show quote in the in the middle almost exactly in the middle is the Victoria plays by the same architect of Chicago, Sotomayor Court Rebellions, which has Nolan eyes whatsoever. So once again these Juliette Lanais that you said is sort of better than Nolan eyes but it seems the same breadcrumbs they're throwing these at us to make us not quite as disappointed but again this pushing and pulling of every other fourth floor isn't really and the Juliette Lanais isn't really cutting it because us revisiting this gem department store with these highwriters we're talking high and residential right when we had our German Chamber of Commerce people here with us and we toured them through Kakaako we got this appointment with Howard Hughes and there was this first president who was a previous former football player a young guy and when these ambitious Germans said hey how about sustainable features he scratched his head and he said well we looked into this but it really didn't work you know financially budget wise and we like give us a break I mean we don't let the excuse that you can't build sustainable which we try to avoid deflate a term to begin with housing for everyone we don't let allow that excuse either but in high end he's not but down there a big box store that's a whole different ball game this is like the lowest in budget right you spent the least you make it a box which this one is granted Lee but then you make it give it a nice entrance feature which this one here isn't just aesthetically as this push and pull wants to make it look I mean the top right makes me look makes me feel like they want to make it look like the picture of palm trees something filigree texture but it doesn't have anything what a palm tree does it just wants to look like that but this entrance canopy does it on multiple levels right to solo yes it does and this is something that we just discussed and there are two levels of protection here and and this is right at the front entrance of the store which by the way and let me just point out was a discount store it was a discount department store the the letters GEM stood for government employees something I can't remember you had to be a member of it but it was a discount store not high end so there are two levels of protection here at the main entrance we've got this much more high soaring thing that's got arches it's very delicate it does in fact perform because it does in fact cover you from the sun it does in fact provide cover from the rain even though it's so tall that the rain can still blow in but right over the right over the entrance there is this bouncy canopy that's got these arches which are not exactly the same as the arches of the bigger one but they do mimic each other now the other thing that struck me when we were talking about this beforehand is the higher canopy does mimic the appearance of one of the main structures of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair which didn't have any performative function but it was a symbol of that event and it's still standing to this day in the park that was created there so this is very much of the time period it's of the zeitgeist to use a German word which is also used in English and so this little these two these touches add an elegance to essentially just the big concrete box that this building was and by the way that's the same building that is still there to this day which went through a variety of other tenants including sports authority and which is now empty in preparation for demolition for the construction of yes another Howard Hughes high-rise and we see that we see its backside at the very bottom right on the show called and this is where it is fronting this park that they're they're they're so proud of but you said you know when you when they call their um Belkanese lanai is it's the same as when they call this so grandiose a park you say it's more like a green strip or something like that right it barely deserves that term they're kind of hypering it once again for marketing reasons and they're positioning these towers slightly offset in plan so that the the the park sort of opens right towards here while a basin which is once again also critics say it's going to be gentrified and basically be privatized that all these people can have their super mega yachts there and that way we're also losing you know it's kind of public kind of feature for for everyone which is that gentrification issue we're having here so that being said about having been digging out the history of this place here i think where the city should make it mandatory for any developer whatsoever to visit you at work dig out the archives and see what was there on the side before and it should be hold accountable on the performative features of that site right because once again you said this wasn't even a blooming dales or a macy's or something that was even in already the range of a department store was on the low end and if a low-end department store does something more tropical exotic than in high-end you know dwelling developer and then there's seriously something wrong and again once again top left genie gangs gulu tower that we excessively covered in this stage here this is a very well meant position looking at it because looking from very close to it above it looks the most tropical exotic and here which ticked off our emerging talent Derek Korea when he saw it being painted here the concrete wasn't painted and the wrong glass guardrails weren't on so you know once again in this condition here it looked way more tropical exotic than it is when it is a finalized thing which it is now so next slide which gets us back to chicago here we are a show called top right is how we ended on once again emerging talents help us hardening in my studio who is from Arizona when i told him about the very top right in the very top right picture by this architect who also built these greenish bluish glass towers said martin and by the way just to let you know this is high-end residential so here we go again this is actually something we don't even want to talk about because that's not what we need more of on the island we need more for the little people and for the average people and not bad but you know this architect does way more tropical exotic in the desert than he is doing in chicago and chicago has this tricky climate we've been talking about that a city that you know gets denser and denser and denser while glass supposedly or potentially has a chance to help you stay warm to pass a solar gain not so much in a tight urban fabric because the cities are so close to each other and they're constantly new ones being built so you hardly ever get any sun through this glass to warm you up and in the summer condition that's why we threw in these climate charge from our iPhones here and sorry Ron that we don't have yours because you're topping as of now as last weekend phoenix arizona because you had that heatwave of 120 degrees and our on the phone also new york times newsletter blog of today was adding and you know all these heat waves we had obviously you know in in india big times in china big times but continental us and europe which i experienced when i was there over the summer so global warming less than ever we seem to be able to argue it and what does architecture do we have here on a lulu in chicago these days and we see these similarities why we're hitting not quite as bad as you had Ron had the last couple days but in the 90s which is hot enough so why in the world are we building microwaves for that reason we shouldn't neither there neither here and architecturally speaking if we look at the towers what are the features that we see in these zoom ends to sort of well what we see several things first of all we see the in the big picture we see that there are windows that open and they will tilt out and we like that what we also see these kind of indented strips which are more probably just decoration than doing anything important we did see in the boat in the building that we've looked at already in chicago what is the open floor which was placed there so that the wind could be able to blow through this extremely tall building and not cause too much sway back and forth so that actually performed this is probably more just for looks and so that you're not creating a completely featureless glass box what we've also seen too is in the sort of what was supposed to be the low and howard hues high rise we've got this indentation with the yellow box which hearkens back to miami vice of the 1980s and the famous buildings in miami which got a lot of attention at that time for being so cool and different unfortunately that building has had a lot of problems in terms of remaining affordable and having a lot of maintenance issues and having people have to pay much higher monthly maintenance costs so it's not fulfilling what it was supposed to be doing despite its cute appearance we also see a building which is proposed for another site on Kupilani Boulevard which is where everything is happening right now for high rise construction and this one has a two two towers that are connected up at the top that really is again not something that performs better I mean it is nice that the wind will be able to blow through that open space but that again is something to distinguish the building from the other ones around it more than it is something to really do something for the people who live in there and provide conditions that are more livable for the inhabitants yeah besides the spectacular glitzy sky bridge there you also see these indents on the on the main tower which is again they're not doing much we can call them whatever blow blown in floors or something but not blown through floors and they just seem to be the newest thing for architect developers to make buildings look interesting and less bland which is like they should think about again in there about their design not in a formal way oh my god we should have you know gotten out of formalism of post modernism but we still seem to be in there which which when it's a shame so again we urge be developing an architectural word to think more performatively than formally next slide that gave you a lot to think about share that with us to show though well one of the things that I really notice in this view of Chicago and the picture on the left is the density of the buildings and I mean that in a positive way these older cities and parts of downtown who will be true are like this as well do have a tightness of how close all the buildings are together and to me that is a positive thing in terms of vitality and energy and how a city I think a city should be in other words you have a lot of things together and that adds energy what we are not doing in Honolulu with our current crop of high rises is mimicking that and I don't think that's necessarily good we've got a bunch of widely spaced high rises each on its own raised parking plinth that does mean that yes there's air circulation etc but it does mean also that you have open spaces which nobody really goes to nobody walks to nobody travels between on foot because nothing's happening there that is what Waikiki does have which is why people still enjoy going there as tourists it is not a tropical environment but it is a dense urban environment in which there's a lot to see and a lot to do so what we also talked about was how does this affect the performance of the building in Chicago it's not necessarily a good thing for buildings to be shading each other in the winter when you want to be gathering solar energy to help keep you warm because it gets really cold in Chicago whereas here the denser the buildings are they will in fact shade each other that means that the denser the buildings are there will be less direct sun on them and that will keep our cooling costs down so conjecturing we could say that this density is perhaps better for Honolulu than it is for Chicago but our current development of Honolulu is not like that that's ironic right so if we import we should switch that's what you're saying right right do what we see here we want in Honolulu and we learn once again from nature we talked about bamboo growths right where the plants are as close to each other as they need to be to shade each other to keep themselves from getting dehydrated but they're loose enough to still get air light and rain into it so a bi-climatic building code which this one here is demonstrating as we will see further down in the show that's we have been investigating that with the emerging generation in jungleism where skinny towers are positioned in such a way here so this is interesting so here at the very left of the big picture you see these two towers that we saw in the previous slides here and also shows depending on the time of the day the angle the way you hold your camera admittingly too they look either a bluish or greenish but doesn't really matter because again they're not really performing living up to the environment in such a way it needs to be the evolution of the generation of glass high rises and here this group of buildings is really iconic the very right building on this bigger picture here is the Chicago Tribune Tower that was one if not the most spectacular architectural competition at the beginning of the last century that architects who had names at that time like Ropius from Germany and Sarenin from well he's American immigrated but originally from Scandinavia and the Sarenins I should say Elio that was the Elio the father of Errol they were all participating by the Americans one Howells and Hood Raymond Aimee Hood is the architect of the tower with his partner a business partner here and that's the Chicago Tribune Tower where the main newspaper in Chicago is been printed or has been printed because in the next slide which we probably talk about in the next show and not today because we have to stay on this one for a little longer here is but thanks for having shown it anyways Eric that was good glimpse good pre-glimpse was the architect and these were the times when basically a stereotomic construction as we also will show a little later down in the show here had ended where there was one building that we will feature which is the Manette knock building which was still built primarily predominantly with brick ending up being massive at least at its base and then tapering getting thinner to the top that era then has ended once steel was introduced and steel allowed the building then to be glad with anything but architects at that time didn't feel comfortable until really nice find a row and make sure drive apartments that we featured which are by the way not that far away from here you can reach them in like 10 minutes foot walk to the left so to speak on this picture he has orientation architects still felt more comfortable to clap them with stone as they did but they did in different ways you see at the very left is probably from the mid century from the 50s or 60s as an international style building where one facade very sort of surprising me because it's facing Michigan Avenue which the nickname is the magnificent mile that's the equivalent to Kallakaua Avenue glitzy glitzy going to Waikiki this is where the main high-end chopping is and to make an opaque austere facade facing that is rather surprising and then you see the other facade you see Rockefeller like emphasizing Rockefeller center like New York City emphasizing the verticality in there then inserting the the windows as bands into there so this is this is interesting on the right side that little skinny image there is a proposal by the architect Smith and Gill and that name rings a bell because we've been talking about Adrian Smith who was with SOM when I took the students there the last time in my prairie days and they were shocking us with the projects on their table which one was the Borsch Khalifa the tallest tower that just wants to look like a desert flower and has no ambition to perform like that and the other one is which we don't want to talk about either but we have to because it's associated to a gentleman that will always be addressed in the show following our show which is the former and hopefully not again President Trump who also had to leave his print mark here with Adrian Smith having helped him which is the Trump power and there is this little image here at the very bottom in the middle that is from the Chicago Tribune these icons basically show the competition of height that these buildings are doing and one is still sort of unbeaten in its pole position and that's by the original firm that Gordon Adrian Smith has partners first business partners is Gordon Gill they were not no one was beating that and this is the firm they work for SOM this is the Sears Tower and now Willys Tower but this proposal here will go and basically be the second tallest and that way even beat Mr. Trump and also beat who had just very bravely fought her way up there literally and figuratively speaking as one of the few too few female architects Genie Gang this building will basically put that on number four and it is a very tall building as we've been pointing out and been talking about is also very skinny it's kind of a bundle skinny so that one is not built but it's intended to be built on the east side of the historic tower and one thing we were talking about that Adrian was basically splitting off SOM by saying I want to be more sustainable than this big firm has ever been and he built at China building in China at town on China that we have been sharing and showing that tried to do that has a lot of whistles and bells a lot of high tech features in order to do that so you would hope that this new tower here would follow this his own footsteps but what you and I did so to do just because no one else does it not that we are trained or born to do this what we're doing having become this our city's main architectural critics in Chicago it has a professional that's Blair Kamen he's a very esteemed and actually Pulitzer Prize awarded rightly so writer and he had an article about this tower and he hasn't been talking about that which makes me suspicious he had talked about a postmodern feature which who is also a headquartered in Chicago which character from the movies the solo that man exactly so Blair was seeing the top of the building might remind one of the ears of Batman okay whatever that's postmodernism reminds us also of not very far away from here Stanley Tiger man at the peak of the postmodern probably most famous example of a rose Roy's Grill decorated parking garage but we should have been going past these times which this makes us curious if because the tower and as you look at it it has it's not the generic tower as the ones on the very left where the fenestration is the same all around this has very distinctively different besides to basically north and south and east and west so let's keep the hopes up and hope Adrienne and Gordon will still infuse that their sustainability sales pitch you know a trademark to this building as well because otherwise again it would be disappointing anyways I think that's it for this week has to be because we're the end of another 28 minutes to continue with this comparing to cities that seem to want to learn from each other in certain ways should and sometimes in the opposite ways as we figure it today so with that until next week where you hopefully you will join us again stay easy brazy brazy easy we have Kaili Chun who is the author of the easy breezy term educate us about her culture and your culture Hawaiian culture tomorrow in school which we can also desperately need so see you next week bye and donate to us at think.kawaii.com Mahalo