 Hello everyone and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's human-humane architecture. I am this program's co-host, Soto Brown of Bishop Museum. And joining us live from his homeland in Germany is Martin Despang, this program's host. Martin, are you there? Can I see you on the screen with me? There he is. I'm here. It's always bright and early. Hi, Soto. Hello, hello. And Martin is floating in the air right above a Volkswagen Beetle. Photographed in Waikiki in 1967. And that's very relevant because that's what we're going to be talking about today, the air-cooled mode of transportation, the Volkswagen from Martin's homeland in Germany, which remarkably became very beloved here in the Hawaiian Islands. So that's the connection between where I'm from and where Martin is from. There we are. That's true. If we get up the first slide, we can jump right in to the Volkswagen's. So last show, we came up with this idea at the end of the last show about Joey and Clara's culinary cross-cultural conversation. And we have the screenshot of the Wi-Fi O, which looked like a boy in a Loa shirt running. And when you zoom in, you see it has a Beetle, has a VW bug on it. So we want to share, we want to encourage the audience to think about their memories of the Beetle and the bug. And here are yours. They're kind of scary, aren't they? They are a little scary. In the picture in the upper right corner, we see the very inception of the Volkswagen Beetle, unfortunately associated with payoff Hitler in the late 1930s. That's scary enough. And that's scary enough. But stepping forward in time to the 1970s, there are two pictures of me in my 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle, which unfortunately came to an unfortunate end on the H1 freeway in June of 1978. And you can see that in the newspaper photo upside down on the side of the road destroyed. Fortunately, I was not destroyed. I survived. I was wearing my seatbelt. Not many people did in those days. And that's why I was able to sit here and talk to you right now. Yeah, we'll go to the next slide. That's smooth transition, because what kills the beetle, as you perfectly said, we don't have statistics, but it feels for us that there are actually more of these who are from my home country left in our Hawaiian and in Germany. And the bottom picture is the reason why. Talking killing, you didn't kill yourself luckily, but most Beetle bugs get killed here because of the snow and the salt they put on the snow to melt the snow. By the way, we're talking tempered climate. We're here in the office home in Munich, and it's sort of chilly 50s, which is rather low for July. And luckily, Joey is with me here to help me. So thanks, Joey for hanging in there here with me. I provided two pictures. Unfortunately, the one I was looking for my parents weren't able to retrieve. It's us in a beetle convertible riding on the Autobahn, where my favorite little tippy was was tied to the rack in the back, and it flew away and I never saw it again. So that's a very traumatic childhood memory. The one I found is up on the right. My mother here in our native Austrian little town, where a beetle is used to plow the snow off a ice skating rink. And on the very left, my dear friend, Stefan, who always gives us insight into his tiki bar basement, and is also the one we have to add who keeps the little twingo for us, which we have featured in the last show. So thanks, Stefan, for that. And he had this very fancy maroon colored one, and he is still in his outfit of having been drafted for the Bundeswehr. And we're going to get back to that in a couple of slides as well. So let's move on to the next picture here, which gets us back to the island. Our islands of Hawaii, where the show is not called Beetle or Buck Mania, but it's called VW. So there are other models from the Vintage, this one here is called the type three squareback and you have some some memories of that as well from history and from from your family background. And we want to, the show is about architecture. So we, wherever we see cars, we snapshot them, we take pictures. And, you know, in many cases, they're in front of vintage architecture, which is also air cooled because that was the pre-air conditioning time. On the bottom right, we found one in front of my residence, Waikiki Grand, and at the top left, it's the former building of the concrete manufacturing industry on the island here, which is a good example of tropical brutalism from the good old 70s. This car is from a little earlier, it's from the 60s as well. Let's move on to the next slide and see what else we snapped and caught. So here you go again, DeSoto. Oh my word. Well, there's a picture of me in 1978 in front of my friend's Volkswagen. And I don't remember what year this was, I remember what year car it was. Probably a 1960s car, probably 1960s VW. And before we go any further, I want to point out to everybody that today it was officially announced that Volkswagen has stopped making the beetle forever. It had been making beetles in Mexico. And as of today, that has ended. So the reign of the beetle from the late 1930s to the 21st century has officially ended. But we still do have them, the other pictures that you see here are recent pictures that I took in the parking lot at Safeway in Capuhulu of a beetle from the 1970s that is a later one. But even though they made a lot of refinements and changes to the beetle, of course, the overall shape, the overall architecture of it remained recognizable internationally and still is known today. That's true and amazing how timely our shows are today, the end of the production. You sent me a great article before the show that was very catchingly titled From Nazis to Hippies. Right. And we forgot talking from Nazis. A very early one that we saw on the first slide includes your weekly German lessons. Right. So you can identify by the rear window, most clearly, which year of make it is. So what was the word you were supposed to learn from it? I unfortunately cannot remember how to pronounce it in German. But it means I'm a good teacher. I know I'm sorry, teacher. I failed. But it does mean pretzel window. So it sounds like pretzel finster. Fenestration was your bridge. Yeah, which is window. And here at the top right, you can see another word that's kefa. And it has the crazy dots over the A, which only our language has to spray these things. And this is the proof of evidence that your sort of nickname, beetle slash bug also is a literal translation of how we call in the Germany always, which is kefa, which is beetle. Let's move on to the next slide. That is this is interesting, right? Yeah, that's the very first Volkswagen dealership here in Honolulu, which opened, I believe, in 1955. And as you can see, it goes along very nicely with other 1950s, mid-century architectural examples that we've talked about in previous shows, particularly things like the International Marketplace. And so it's got this double-pitched roof. It's got the very obvious shake covering on the roof that's very typical of that time. And amazingly enough, this building, which is at the intersection of Kapilani Boulevard and Kolakawa Avenue, is still standing today, very much remodeled, but still basically the same. And now it's called the Micronesia Mart, for those of you who are in Honolulu and recognize that. That building is still there today. And then hopefully it stays there. So it's a keeper. And you might wonder about Porsche. Ferdinand Porsche, who was an Austrian engineer, who was actually the one who designed and near designed the beetle. So it was a Volkswagen. So that makes sense as well. Let's go to the next picture here. This is our permanent background picture here. This is driving on Kolakawa Avenue. And this is the Outreger Hotel, which we were, I was curious, and you provided another one in this picture of how it looked originally. It's a very clean international style glazed facade. It makes sense because it's facing north. We're very keen on biochlamatics, so it worked. Today, unfortunately, it's cheesecakeed and doesn't look that great anymore. And recently, we found out or we recognized that it actually plays a major role in the opening scenes of the original Y5O, which we're quoting at the top left. Next picture, please. You know, we want to encourage the audience to whenever they see a veteran of this type to step out, get out and see. Here we spotted one again in Kahala. It has this sort of original feature, which they kept until the very end, which is that vase, which is stuck to the dashboard. Next picture, please. And this is Jim Guzakouma's great architecture of roofy texture at Rainbow Drive. And it occasionally or frequently hosts, you know, members of that family, but also next picture, another sort of version of the bug because this one here has the engine of the bug, but it's not a bug, but it's a dune buggy. And you go to the next picture, you differentiate between two different kinds and what was their relevance to our islands to soda? Well, the point about the dune buggy and also something called the Baja Bug, both of those were customized types of vehicles that used basic Volkswagen Beetle chassis and engines, but with different bodies or altered or modified bodies. And that meant that by the 1960s, late 60s and early 70s, there were so many used Volkswagen's around that were inexpensive they could be customized and turned into these specialized types of vehicles. And so the license plate is from one of those dune buggies that I used to see parked at the bank that I went to in Kapa Hulu back in the 1970s. And I used to see this exact license plate. And right above that on the right is a particularly interesting picture. It's Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway driving around in a sequence from the film the Thomas Crown Affair from 1967. They were driving around in Massachusetts, but a dune buggy is much more sensible here, even though we don't have a lot of dunes to drive around on because it's warm. So unlike Massachusetts, where you couldn't use that for most of the year, you could drive a dune buggy here and not freeze to death. And that's why they were popular. And let's go to the next picture and meet a proud owner of one here. Again, we make the connection of architecture and vehicles. This is as featured in the previous show, one of Ernest Harris building. My favorite one. And there's a local guy here who owns on the left. And you saw something fancy that that is the true proof of evidence how you guys are obsessed with VW doves way more than we Germans. As you can see at the very top left, right? That's right. He's got the VW logo tattooed on his body permanently. So not only does he own a dune buggy and a Volkswagen bus, but forever he is marked with the logo of VW and that's. Yeah, as you said, nobody in Germany would ever do that. But here we might. We did. This guy did. Exactly. And he also introduces us to another model series of VW, which is as renowned as the bug, which is the bus, the Volkswagen bus. And let's look how they started out in the next slide here, please. Yeah, well, this is the first time the Volkswagen buses were the first vans sold in the United States starting in the 1950s. It wasn't until the 1960 model year that American car companies copied this type of structure for a vehicle and started producing vans in the United States. So before those were available, the Hawaiian telephone company bought a fleet of Volkswagen buses. And that's what you see here in 1960 with the Honolulu with the Hawaiian electric company power plant behind it. This is part of the building that was built in the 1950s. So we have this juxtaposition of these two elements from that time. And I might also add that, speaking architecturally, the Volkswagen van is the most simple and most useful utilitarian type of vehicle you can make. In other words, you just put a box on top of four wheels and you've got all that room inside to fill up with lots of different things, which is what people of course always did with the Volkswagen bus. Yeah, and so is the architecture in the background. It's precast concrete, it's serial, it's sequential, it's beautiful because of that. This first model was called the T1 and let's move to the next slide and share a little bit more about its history or how it's still present on the islands here. So this composition of images here was you basically scavenger hunting for tourists, things like the t-shirt and the mug there. Talking air-cooled at the very bottom left, you can barely see but if you look close, you can see that it's been cooled for the passengers by just flipping up the front windshield there, hinges at the top, so you flip them, just like when you have glasses and sunglasses over them, sort of the same system. The blue one is a fancy one that you see every once in a while. It's here in front of the, I think it's called the park at the, the Inn at the Park at Fort De Russi, which I almost ended up living. But then I found the Kapa Hulu, my Waikiki Grand. So this one has this stack of surfboards on the same as stylized on the t-shirt. Has like, they put a face on it and it has eyelashes and sort of cute stuff. And this is already the T2, so this is the next sort of makeover of it. And we see one in front of the Waikiki Grand, I think on the next slide, please. So this is a T2, it gets more boxy, it's still soft edge, but it's still boxy. And even more boxy, we see on the next slide, which is my side street, which is Lemon Street here at the core reef, as we featured it in the Crazy Countdown even Canopies and other shows here. This is in fact now the next model, so that's the T3. And the T3 next slide is very sort of zeitgeist, the representative for the 70s, where it was conceived. And it's in front of one of the prime example of that era, which is the Rahuwine Shopping Center, which we dedicated the show to. So here the mobile and the immobile examples of embodiments of boxy 70s. Right, right. Next slide and tell us more. What are you doing there now to sell, though? Where's the beetle? Where's the bug? Yeah, well, you saw what happened to the bug. The bug got flipped on the H1 freeway and was destroyed. And I promptly went to Volkswagen Pacific on Nimitz Highway, or excuse me, all I'm on a boulevard. And I bought another Volkswagen, but this was the more modern version. This was what was called the rabbit. And the rabbit in the rest of the world was called the gulf. But in the United States was called the rabbit for more cuteness, for some reason. And there I am with my rabbit in the late 1970s. And I really liked it because it was four door. It had four doors and a hatchback. And again, very useful, very utilitarian, very good design for a car to be useful. And it is very much of the time period as well that we were talking about cars represent their time periods just as architecture does too. Yeah, and it actually, it was beating. I mean, the beetle in the article that you forwarded from Nazis to hippies, it surprised us or maybe not, but me, that one of the best markets was the United States. I think they had 40% of their sales totally. And the gulf basically beat the already very good sales results from the beetle. So it became even more successful. It was designed by Jujaro, who was the designer. And every once in a while, very rarely, actually, there are a few around and the beetle spotted one that I was joking with you there. I said, it's probably yours, but he said it's quiet, but it's close, even from the color, which you see at the very left. And it's in front of a compilation of buildings here. In one of them, in the middle one are Tropicure Rockwoods lives. And in the one right to it, which is the Marco Polo building, our Tropicure building, so hi to Bill and David. Let's move on here because we got lots more to share. Another one is the, which we call the, well, the original model name is VW 181. You guys call it the thing. And it also goes back to the very bad guy of Hitler. And he imagined it to be an amphibian car, and it was. That's the one at the most top with a white background. But then during the Bundeswehr time, when you guys started to trust us again to have an own army, they sort of evolutionized it. And it got less sort of all terrain. It was a sort of multipurpose utilitarian building. And just like the article points out that you found that says no more beetles from today on, the, which you see at the bottom left, just like the beetle that was from Nazis able to flip from Nazis to hippie. This car here was adopted by the flower power generation as well. And made it one of their sort of status symbols, right? Yeah. And let's move to the next slide and look at, look at the drawings here. I always show to this to the emerging generation. If you can capture something on one sheet with all these elevations. And this is, this is a proof of evidence of the simplicity that you were pointing out. But also you went to sort of a technical aspect of that, right? Yeah. The corrugation. And the corrugation. And the corrugation in the sides of this vehicle and on the hood adds strength to it. It rather, it becomes stronger than just a plain, flat piece of sheet metal. And something that we're going to be mentioning very shortly also does the same thing in the same, for the same path of the same reason for utility and for being of adding strength. Let's look at that. Next picture here. Well, that's your, that's your, yeah. Yeah, that's, what was that? Well, I was just going to say that, that we haven't gotten to what I was thinking of. But this is the building that you designed with your family's architectural firm, which was a dining hall for the military. And you certainly used utilitarian concepts when you did this as well. Mm-hmm, as well. And it was inspired and informed by, at the very top right, that was the one that I bought for my ex-wife here. So we had one and I was still in the military and was able to snap some parts and stuff like that. So let's go to the next slide. I think that gets us back to the, to the island here. Yep. So, this is a film that was called 51st States. You can see the poster in German for it. And this was a vehicle that was used very prominently in the film, which starred Drew Barrymore. You see there interacting with Adam Sandler. And they had a yellow one, but there was, you can see a picture of an orange one. And you can also see the red one in the lower left corner, which is a prop outside the Hard Rock Cafe in Waikiki. And it has a cheesy license plate on it that says, quote, I got laid. Ooh-hoo. Anyway. Next slide. Next slide. Well, this is what we were talking about in terms of utility. We're talking about shipping containers. Shipping containers have corrugated sides just the way the thing does to help make them more robust and just as useful as the thing or perhaps as versatile as the thing was. Shipping containers are facing a future where we may be seeing more and more of them used for housing. And in the upper left corner of this picture, you can see a placement of planned or a theoretical placement of four of those containers to be used sort of in a courtyard type of shape. And one of the things that Martin said was you can slice open the side of this, make it on a sliding track like a sliding door. During the day, when the weather is good, you can keep it open. It's easy breezy. You've got air movement. And then if you want to at night or if you out, you can close it. And we probably will be seeing more and more of these used for housing, particularly for homeless people who don't have housing right now. So we'll see if that's something that develops. But shipping containers are all over the world. We use them every single day to ship things here to us in Hawaiian islands. We got a lot of them. We can reuse them. Well put. So let's move on to the next slide and talk about this relationship of the thing. This is an original ad from the 60s. And I love that because it's so much telling the story about the architecture we are envisioning as well. That is so multi-purpose, so multi-functional. Yet it's able to do that because it's so simple in its initial sort of making and thinking. Move to the next slide here. You found that picture and you said, is this like how you bury them in Germany, right? That's right. I found this picture and I've sent it to Martin saying, do you think this could be in Germany? And Martin wrote back and said absolutely not. In Germany, they would all be lined up very nice and clean and all in rows, not just piled up in the woods somewhere. So obviously this picture must be in the United States. Right. You said that. So next slide here. We want to encourage you guys to walk around and look for them. And you see quite some. Sometimes they're out of commission, but mostly they're still up and running. The youngest generation gets crazy about it. I found this guy in my way home and he had this T-shirt of a band that uses a stylized VW band. Next picture. And this is on all of Y here. And you know, this is not in the best condition. You see quite some rust. But if you look at the price tag, they're almost asking for $5,000. That's still, so they're like, they're vintage. They're collectibles. Next slide. And they're up and they're still embodying that according to your article, that hippie status. And here you can see the dashboard is stuffed with some sort of crazy Polynesian pup decoration here. And next slide. And you see what you rarely see because it's sort of illegal sort of in Hawaii are the campers. And that's what they're most known for. This is also associated with California. This version, which we spotted at the left in the Alamona shopping mall is a Vestphalia, which is that camping version with a pop-up roof. And you have this sort of more clearance to stand in there. But also a very rare version is the one at the bottom right. And tell us more about that one and your memories of that one. Yeah. Well, in addition to the plain box that the Volkswagen company made for the bus, they also made a pickup version. And most of them just have a single cab. In this picture, you see a very rare type, which is called the double cab, because it had a second seat behind the front seat. And my brother had one of those in the early 1970s that he bought new. And I remember riding around it. I remember driving it sometimes. And it only had a door on the passenger side, not on the driver's side. So it was only one way to get in and out of it. But again, talking about architecture, this is something that the bug and the beetle and the bus encompassed, which was the utility and also the very strong association with surfers, taking Volkswagen buses out and putting all their surfboards in them, particularly in the North America, where you could drive and drive and drive up and down the coast, for example, in California, with your van filled with surfboards. Yeah. And this is a T2 sort of a pickup. And they continue that with a T3, which we see on the next slide. And this is very intercontinently inter-culturally again. Go back. You guys, this is me at the Lenny Stark headquarters with my youngest son going through the original Y5O. So you can see how they were used just like architecture mid-century. Here are the mid-century bugs and beetles and buzzes been used as to demonstrate we're inter-cultural, we're international. And there is another of the double cap pickup ones from the T2. But then next picture is the T3. And this is Lenny again, where we were skiing here for a couple of days at the beginning of my sabbatical, and we found one here in the Alps. But if you want to check one out back home on the islands near the fire station of Capahulu in the side streets, there is one, and that's the one on the right side. Let's move on to the other sort of surprises. This is how, I mean, we're talking it's chilly here, but it's really very long winter. This is a computer station, transit-oriented development, high-rises for living. This is Kit down there, who just missed his train and is waiting for the next one. And this is the home of tropical tourist expert Suzanne on the top right there. And let's move on, because she has something to contribute, which is rather scary too, because she had the evolved version of the Gulf. This is sort of a version from the 2000s, and unfortunately she got hit by a bus, same with youth. She had a good guardian angel, and nothing happened to her and her son, Jonathan. But so ever since we were doing the post-fossil, you know, public transport commuting, but deep inside she has this dream to get the most current version of the T6, which you see up there, right. But next slide. As of now, her first boyfriend gave her a T2 as a cake. He's the guy who also has a T3 and puts Hawaiian stickers on it. They're sort of ironically advertising to give you one for free in a lottery. It features another name for them. We call them basically bullies here, and I think you guys don't have that name. I never called them bullies for reasons. Let's go to the next. You call bullies different things and different things. So then I spotted this one here, and this is interesting because they're now launching a new evolution of BWs and buses, and this is, I spotted this while traveling back to the north with a high-speed train, and usually you associate BWs with a headquarters in northern Germany in Wolfsburg, which you can see the plant up on the top right. But in fact, next slide, this one here, the buses are made where my son Lenny still lives here in our hometown in Hanover, and you can see the same advertisement up on this electronic sign, but you can also see the tower, and the tower encompasses another of your weekly German lessons, right. What is that? I can't remember. You have to say what it is. I help you out, Nutzfahrzeuge. So in Hanover, it's what they make in Hanover are the more utilitarian vehicles, so not the Beatles, not the Gulls, but the buses and other ones, and of course we have our public transportation emphasis on there at the very top left is me with Lenny Citroen doing the post-occupancy evaluation, but let's go to the next slide, and you talk a little bit about the history of the buses in my hometown. Yeah, the buses were made in this immense factory, and they are still being made there today, and the crazy thing is if you look at the pictures in the top right, the factory has some palm trees displayed in it, for some reason a little tropical touch. These buses are no longer sold in the United States, so we no longer see them anymore because of tariffs, but they are of course still available in Germany and other countries as well. All right, next slide. This is my bonus son, Jonathan, here who is showing how cool and sexy the buses still are. This is a puzzle he owned, and he generally gave it to these girls and made them very happy. Next slide, because we have to go fast and phase out, and this is an advertisement for an electric go-kart that is a T1, and this is the perfect embodiment of sort of amalgamation of and cross-pollination of our cultures, right? Right, right. And for some reason it's got some Hawaii connection that they are calling it, yes. Next slide. Oh, and there he is. There's the Soto Brown sitting in one of the new Beatles when it was on display at one of the car shows many years ago, and we were talking about that in the upper right is the history of innovation here in the Hawaiian Islands, which of course the new Beatles would fit in very nicely with, and we also see that Martin saw a birthday card somewhere in Germany for sale. It says happy birthday to you in English for some crazy reason with a picture of a beetle on it just to make it fun and nostalgic, I guess. Yeah, and which you told us is history from today on. Next slide. So evolution of things, it doesn't always go into the right direction here. There's this Porsche, and this is not an air-cooled Porsche anymore. It's a water-cooled one. It's a convertible, but the person has the top up versus to have the top down. And equally, the Queen K has been remodeled in the very top left. You see it used to have easy breezy glass gelsies. They replace it with fixed glazing with some gestural sort of awning windows. So that's maybe not such a good direction to evolve for both the mobile and the immobile air-cooled, but positive suggestions. We always conclude the show, so do this as well. So next slide, what are we looking at? We're looking at a building which we are not a real building, but we're saying that this is the direction that we are hoping to go with the Primitiva buildings which have been designed in Martin's classes, which again are air-cooled, which use things like theoretically using water curtains instead of solid walls for things, mixing people together, et cetera, et cetera. So this is the direction that Martin's teaching people to go in then. And let's go to our last picture. I think this is our last slide. Yeah, go back one second. And the one at the bottom, the big one, is one that's featured in the Hawaii 5.0. I think it's a very cute and sexy one again from mid-century that is still standing there isolated, and it's a good grandfather and a good sort of teacher of the Primitiva because it's pretty much lanai all the way around. It's some soft edged. It's a nice sort of built tree, we always think when we look at it. So yeah, next slide. Yeah, so our last picture, this is an interesting thing. There are some of the ideas for the Primitiva, but we're ending with something appropriate for me. This car that you see here is not a Volkswagen, it's a DeSoto. It's a 1930 floor DeSoto air flow made by the Chrysler Corporation. And the remarkable thing is it looks very much like a Volkswagen Beetle. It was built and designed at the same time that the Volkswagen Beetle was designed. So you see that there are a lot of connections in how things are designed and how things are made between different cultures and in different times. We're a crazy mix of our cultures, as you said, and probably the evolution in the vehicle. Everyone is going crazy about electric, but there's criticism about that. Especially the larger electric vehicles, it takes them to hit 100,000 miles to be environmentally competitive with a fossil fuel car. So the batteries are problematic. So in some cars, hydrogen cars and hydrogen is water. And again, we try to use water because our tropics is privileged because we don't have 100% saturation of humidity. So again, it's just again, food for thoughts. And we use these vehicle builds as food for thought, how to progress in an easy breezy, a post-fossil way on the islands and abroad. Yeah, and with that, we're at the end of the show or we're a little over time. So hope to see you in the next show. And until then, stay easy breezy and air cool, right? Aloha, everybody.