 Welcome you all back to another episode of Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. This happens to be an anniversary show because it's our 200th show already and we have together. That is magnificent. It is and that was one of our three most proven panelists here and there was Yuda Soto from Bishop Museum back in Honolulu, Hawaii. Hello again. Yeah and the other location we have is Long Beach, California with Ron Lindgren from there. Hi Rob. Hi I'm in the middle of a hot spell where my acquaintances out of Palm Springs are enjoying a sort of heady 120 degree weather. Oh boy oh boy and I can't quite compete with that but still back in supposedly temperate Germany broadcasting from the city of Würzburg. It's finally getting summer here and also somewhere in nearly as not nearly as close as the years but pretty comfortably warm here. So again this is human-human architecture and wouldn't you think that for such a special event you would maybe show the best piece of architecture that there is in Hawaii but we have to disappoint you sort of because we have already done that in the past 200 shows or 199 shows both the best work from the past which you have been creating a significant part of that run with your business partner Edward Killingsworth and Larry Stricker and also the ones from the present we find promising but you know other than that we still have to say you know if you know considering how much we talk maybe more should have happened so I this shouldn't sound like resignation but we thought maybe we try a different angle and maybe try to approach architecture from where we can get the audience relate to it better and for the longest time we've been using already automobiles as vehicles for thought so at some point we thought we dedicated an entire show or a massive series to that so this is volume five of it here now and if we can get the first slide up here it basically is another sort of subtitle or topic which is talking about the aspect of loyalty and this is also a dedicated show to my son Lenny who was 24th birthday it was last week and I drove up to him by a train a couple days ago and he I shouldn't say surprised me anymore because for the last six years that he had his driver's license he was basically surprising me or not anymore because ever since he had been staying loyal to this one model which we ended last show with Citroens which our family has a affiliation to because of the Deuxchevaux and the ugly duck without I wouldn't be and Larry basically stayed true to that brand and bought himself a Citroen that Citroen calls DS and that sounds familiar to us because it's kind of a remake but not of a style of a car but reusing or remembering sort of the brand name and at the top left the white one was the first one he bought and then the one next to it a number two is the one that he came out of the bushes with literally and figuratively speaking the day before yesterday and we want to the audience again to think there are certain things when you do them the first time they're most memorable so your first love right you will never forget your first love and also somehow your first you know your first your children I have to say there isn't just your first child but every child you have seems to be the first child and you know you remember most vividly and Lenny basically was born around the year that I built the first kindergarten and somehow you know I was always on alert I drove there with a car and that was you know I was always on alert you know would he would it be time and would I need to have to rush back and again Larry and Joey they saved all their money from family you know holidays and birthdays and and Christmases and stuff to buy their first car and and he bought that and and the point is he's still staying true and loyal so loyalty do we have loyalty in architecture as much and to Ron I would say we've been talking about the case study houses at the Iclohomes right and probably if you ever owned an Iclohome you always want to keep owning one right but with cars I think I find this sort of rather unique again sort of Lenny's way and especially as such a young guy where there's like all the options out there he's basically very much committed to do that one thing so loyalty is something we want you guys to think about how loyal are you to your house your first house or whatever house right is there's the same relationship that's one of the things again we're less than ever sort of providing answers here but basically raising questions so yeah and I think that that's a very I think that's a very good thing to bring up that the loyalty to a brand or a make of automobile is far likely to occur than to the loyalty of any type of particular architecture house or anything that has to do with living versus you know your habitation versus your car yeah yeah no and if we get to the next slides the other topic we want at a point we want to make what's you all think about what's the first car you ever drove right and America obviously that's why you know you know for kids uh German kids it's unimaginable that you can drive you know earlier than you can in Germany and driver's license are cheaper and you know easier to get and that's what I experienced when I went there during college where I you know also made my American driver's license but in either way it's like nothing beats this excitement when you're most likely you know it's still in a sort of a gender loaded culture when you're when your dad's mostly right allowed you to drive the first time and this is the car that Joey and Lenny started illegally and and other following generations actually the bonus son of my best German buddy our picky basement expert Stefan Malta he learned to drive in that car all illegally before they were ready for the kind of the official training so they will never forget and this car is a is a Renault Twingo so another French manufacturer this car is a quarter of a century years young and thanks to Stefan's mechanic who has always kept it alive and like you know closing one or a couple more eyes of all the little things that happen here and there and now it's our exotic escapism uh expert Susanna's childhood friend uh basically who uh Marcus who keeps the Twingo on the road and and that car is just an amazing survivor you know it's it's old and it's always been beaten it's never gotten taken care of it used to be our construction supervision car and every intern kind of drove the heck out of it and you probably can never get a softer more wobbly transmission there the gears you know but it's but it's still up and running and so um that that's something that here in the city of worksburg is actually a a university town and this seems to be the the retirement headquarters of the twingos because almost like felt every fourth car seems to be like a twingo and that's because why because they're so affordable and then they are so reliable and that's something Ron we discussed before the show that you know you said even other subjects like the heat you're going through right rich people are able to do handle it right and basically just crank up the ac but the little people you know less than than ever and and so that that's uh that's both an architecture and and and the automotive realm the question of affordability and reliability um is an increasing run right yeah and also the the more of them there are the easier and cheaper they are to fix so if there are tons of them all over the place mechanics are going to be able to fix them that is an advantage that you do not have if you have in a very expensive one of a kind car that nobody can fix where you live so if it's twingo town then that's a good thing for all the people who have them but you know before would before we went on the air and one of the things that I was saying to Ron was neither he nor I are familiar with these two makes of cars because they're not sold in the United States they were in the past in the distant past but they haven't been for a long time and yet yeah there are a lot of similarities that we're about to get into and I think in the next slide that are applicable not only to cars but architecture in that all of those are made to accommodate humans they're made by people to accommodate people they're the right size for people their things are within reach we create things for our human bodies to be able to live in and drive around it yeah yeah and to just let you know what's the reason behind a couple of the pictures here the one number nine at the bottom right is one that Joey basically took somewhere and this is funny right because that twingo obviously wanted seems like it wanted to go to Hawaii but as you guys said it never made it there right in the middle the middle number eight is recently where you know Joey and Lenny stopped by and you see then Lenny's DS that would just showcase and you see how large it is although it's a small compact car as well compared to the twingo and at the very bottom you see Joey and it wasn't his first car but his you know basically his his first new car that his family supported him with was an A1 and that's for the Audi fans of us which you Ron are one and I am but that model you've never seen and this is weird because it is a very great car it's a small car it's it's the entry level Audi that is you know by now there were times where people with all their big ram pickup trucks and stuff were afraid of small cars but you know that has eased a little bit and people you can see smart cars on the road so this is this is way bigger and it's way bigger than the twingo but also one point we want to come up with and that's at the top left the cute little frog up there is basically despite the really bad postmodernism that we want don't want to get into or even talk about where architects made you know buildings look like other things but in cars there is this sort of impersonation and all our kids all of our kids basically call the twingo the frog and if you look at the front end there's little doubt why that is right pretty much and and we and we also talked about a couple times we shouldn't talk about architecture without crediting the architects so we shouldn't talk about cars without crediting the the the designers although not naming them all the time but actually you know ironically or intuitively um um Lenny and I found out through research for the show that actually the designer of the twingo and his DS is actually the same guy so that is that is rather interesting and another thing so we should we should encourage you guys to do your own investigations and research because you can find out strange things and that gets us to the next slide because um for and I let you guys talk about that so let's go to the next slide and and and you tell you know what we discovered here recently well you're talking about the this multi-use interior here yeah yeah yeah yeah that one yeah well the thing that struck me is that as I said earlier cars just like houses and other architecture are made to accommodate human bodies now a car is like a little house or a little room that can be driven around it's like a little piece of architecture but unlike where you live everything is built into it so you don't get to move the furniture around the way you would in an apartment or a hall everything is attached to the floor because it has to be for safety yet you can accommodate a lot of movement and a lot of changes even with the restrictions of all these built-in features so this shows how you can either have the back seat pushed up so that there's room for things to be put in the back or you can actually put the back seat down and lie down so a car can accommodate things the way as you see in the lower picture on the right a tiny house can't a tiny house is kind of comparable to a car in that you live in it but it has to be small and it has to be designed specifically to be as efficient as possible as we see in the car interiors that we see the different configurations of yeah and I might I might say that uh in the United States especially today there are two groups of people who are taking that idea of living in their vehicle or living in their cars that first group were those after the 2008 recession who lost their homes and actually went out on the road and became urban nomads their situation has been celebrated in that Oscar winning movie Nomadland that just came out a few months ago but a less fortunate group unfortunately living in their cars are those who have lost their jobs in the pandemic they are getting pandemic relief checks but they're using them to buy old cars or old RVs and they and their families are trying to make a life in these vehicles yeah and absolutely and for people like that that the the tiny house for people like that that's what the entire tiny house concept is or little house in which you can move people hopefully either off the streets or out of their cars into a house but the house again is going to have some features that are going to be comparable to the interior of a car yeah and so the three terms we want to throw out to adopt to architecture is obviously versatility is durability and transform ability and so the what you pointed out at the bottom right there's just the door prints of the the office home which you can insert very strategically very you know little additional walls which are the black lines the thicker black lines and you can basically transform it into three individual parts of the house that you can that you can rent out because you know when you know shit happens and recession again or divorces and stuff like that you don't need to sell the entire house yeah you can rent out certain parts of it and that's like the same which we try to illustrate with a car you know when here when you need to you know go and buy more in bulk you can actually have very easily have the rear bench slides towards the front on a track and make yourself more more more trunk room and then a little less passenger room but there's still a lot which is surprising for such a small car and then again as you know I was when I was being trying to be lazy and not go out and take a picture of my own car I was sort of googling for that and I found a picture where it was all flat where the front seats basically are pushed all the way to the front and the the back of it back and and the same with that with the back seat and you make it into a bed that Suzanne is demonstrating here and and there again you know if you're thinking about the students here in town their students they don't have a lot of money and they can afford that little car and not more and when they're on a on a trip they might not even afford a hotel or even an Airbnb or whatever right so they want to just might just want to crash in the car so that's something that that again the twingo and I want to put this into the context of time because also in the previous picture we don't need to go back but you guys saw the ugly duck again and the ugly duck was discontinued in the early 90s and this one he has started in the early 90s so thinking about it in many ways I think it's the successor of the Citroën De Chavaux and again being this very very basic car and again to that extent obviously family tradition go to the next slide we're still here we want you the audience to think about what was our first car and my first car we are going to share what our first cars were and I start out here was actually my mother's car you see here on the picture number two up there standing next to my sister and my sister is in front of her car and that's you guys that sounds again very exotic to you guys because this is an Alto Bianchi and this is the Italian version of the Mini Cooper the original Mini Cooper very small car yeah there's also like you know we guys I was a sandbox miniature car nut kit that loved to do that but the one at the top right I wasn't supposed to touch because that's one by my mother who has the miniature version of that one and she always kept it at a safe place so I wouldn't ruin it in the sandbox and I'm the beneficiary of that now because otherwise I would be gone by now and my father kind of took a picture of that one and she had this sort of mustard colored ones and then the blue one was actually the one that she had after that that she gave to me and that was was I you know Ron you've been talking I mean Eric Bricker who's going to do the movie about at Killingsworth and you guys you know was lives in Texas and had this horrible situation not that long ago about this you know other extreme of temperatures being low where it usually doesn't happen and water pipes bursting and stuff like that besides these sort of more rare and unusually events you know houses are still pretty sort of safe while cars by their nature you know is is a lot of mass that needs to be moved and you know and the technology needed to make make that happen basically and also cars by moving are vulnerable to be hit or hit something right and I you know this is the car that I it was my first car but what you know I really worked it hard I I I got off the road on a trip back to my army base and you know got on on an over ice bridge I basically we my my my first wife we got on the farm we got stuck in the tractor pulled us out but didn't put the chain to the frame but to the hood and pulled the hood out and I banged it back in with a slide chamber and the most spectacular for you guys is when we were all butterflies in our stomachs and we're thinking we needed to kiss each other that was when we got close to a to an intersection and we ran into the guy in front of us so but I have to say the very little small picture in there the red one I want to thank a guy who basically bought it and he was the brother the little brother of a classmate of mine deep my shop and he brought it back to original pristine condition and he painted it Ferrari red as you can see there and these cars are an absolute rarity they were pretty rare back then but now they're absolutely I don't think I ever seen one ever in the last couple of years anywhere in Germany anymore and and Lenny here many years ago is posing next to one of the few ones we found on the road and that was one that parked next to our conversion of this apartment building the pair of apartment buildings where and this particular model was actually the abariff and the abariff we know now from the chick Vicentos the new the retro the fiat 500 these are the hot rod machines the ones with the more horsepower and that one had had one like that and the Italians called the flying coffin because it was so light and you know relatively to that much horsepower which was only 70 which sounds ridiculous but the car was so light so again a similar kind of an approach regarding our remodeling of the pelt apartment sort of like a hot rodding like enhancing certain aspects of it so here there's this thing you know the popping out of the hood which is the kind of the hot rod thing so so again you the audience think about your first car and the first architecture you were exposed to and think about do you have same feelings do you have same attitudes and what are similarities and what are differences okay so yeah and Martin when you were mentioning automobile accidents that sort of ping something in my brain rather dispiriting statistics for the United States from 1899 until this very year over 3.8 million Americans have been killed five to six times more than that injured and even today automobile fatalities as an average each year run a little bit more than 36,000 people lost absolutely and and that basic yeah and that gets us to the next slide because that has to do with your first car this photo oh it certainly does and this is a picture of me with my first car and now for right which was in 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle that got imported all the way from Germany to the island of Oahu but I wasn't the only one who had a Volkswagen Beetle in those days because they were very popular here there were lots of cars there were lots of Volkswagen here and you are saying that you saw the thing like every fourth car was a twingo in the college townals practically every fourth or fifth car here was a Volkswagen Beetle and they started being imported here in the 1950s and into the 1970s there were lots of them but my car speaking of car crashes met its end very spectacularly and you can see a little picture of it in the middle of the top row of pictures here because it got flipped on the H13 way in 1978 and that was the end of it was not the end of me because I was wearing my three-point seat belt with a shoulder harness very few people did in those days but that's why I survived why I'm alive today to be able to talk about and one of the things yeah thank you thank you seat belt but one thing I think that we can mention too is which we'll talk about in the next slide which we probably won't get into all our next our next show but the styling of the Beetle one of the reasons it stood out so much in those years was because it was a very old design from the 1930s so by the time the Beatles weren't becoming really popular in the United States and worldwide they were already a very old design but that is another whole topic of design in the 1930s streamlining etc which we'll get into at another point yeah and since you invited us we still made it to that next slide so we're honored to Soto and I think you're making it a good point because again the most darkest figure of my culture from the past Hitler was the inventor of the kefa how it's called and kefa means beetle and again you know you don't need to have much imagination again if you call it sprinkle frog why you call the the vw you know the bug the kefa the beetle but you you luckily thanks to you guys that darkest era didn't last it long enough too long but you ended it at some point luckily and so after that you know no one hardly ever remembers the the car you know for for that orange and it almost flipped its meaning right 180 degrees but there's also one thing again comparing architecture and automobiles and climates you probably again could have been rolling down your still crank equipped windows and basically cruising the island without anything else and if you guys are more interested we actually the picture from your legendary accident that made it to the title page of the the paper news we dedicated an entire show to the comparison of vw's in hawaii and we we called it air-cooled architecture and air-cooled automobiles because that's right what they are and so you could have used you know obviously the the trade winds to cool your engine obviously and also cool yourself just keep the window open where they come from which is here not so much because this is temperate climate and it's either damn hot like now or it's it's really crazy cool and so you see at the top my mother in her hometown standing in front of one that they used for an ice skating rank to basically scrape the snow and the ice off at times and you can see how it's starting to get really rusted and they put this sort of rad you know desperate kind of attempt to keep it away from from rusting puts this kind of rustproof stuff on and the other one picture at the very bottom right there is basically my mother again and my sister because something you share the soda is that both your first cars were beetles were bugs and and here it is and again here's the poster that you contributed at the bottom left party f that is the origination of it that we sort of again luckily don't have to remember every day but we should also never forget because that's right what it was and and next time and we certainly maybe we we bring up the next slide but this one we really will start out to talk about in in the next week is basically that there's also the other side of Germany which is the east side which was the former gdr and they had certainly a very very different the circumstances although we said no both were dictatorship one lasted again thanks to you you know it lasted too long but thanks to you lasted not longer but this one here lasted like what like four times as much which was which was the gdr so what that sort of meant basically for the automotive world and the architectural world you will hear us discuss and you hopefully join us uh next week so until then you guys stay mentally mobile as much as you can will do