 Thank you for being back on our show, Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. This happens to be our 302nd episode and the accumulated viewer you are, you see down there. It's going to be the two of us around our extinct volcano of Diamond Head. So it's you, DeSoto, and you're also designed Diamond Head home. Hi. Yes, good morning. And it's me nearby as well in the Waikiki Grand. You could throw a stone to reach us, but we won't. And we're reporting in these crazy days in the desert of Nevada with a burning man, a massive flooding as it is in Libya. And these are the hot arid where you think that you wouldn't have. And obviously here that's what we continue to address where you think it's lush and moist. We had the tragic Lahaina fire destroying Lahaina and killing too many people and displacing too many. So that's what we want to continue to talk about if we could get the first slide up for that one. And we won't have any solutions or answers, but we allow ourselves to ask many, many questions. And we want to encourage you guys to do that along with us. Just keep the heart and the soul going. And this is basically a couple of notes that went through our minds here catching up on where we ended up last time. And our utmost expert in planet and people-friendly architecture who was sort of fusing our two cultures, the American side in you and in the German in me, Matt Noblett, who also through his wife has been on the islands here for many decades. He will join us next week. But he got us, he kept us updated about a, you could say, extinguishing waterways image, right? Where was that? Tell me again, I don't remember what we were talking about. He sent us a hello from Venice in Italy, which again has trees out of water. So this is obviously a good, you know, side effect would be putting out fires. We have Hawaii Kai here, who's been driven different differently, not by that in mind. But obviously, if you have water in the streets running, we got Alawai here, which isn't quite as close to, but Alawai is also kind of the double-sided sword because it kind of drained and dredged Waipiki, which used to be all wet. And now all the water goes into Alawai, and it's very filthy and dirty. And so that's, you know, not as easy of a, again, we won't have any solutions, but a lot of food for thought. So let's jump right in. And I want to do, thank you, Michael, our producer following us. There's a star advertiser link bolt down there. I read that. And, you know, it's now, I mean, first you were like shocked about, you know, anyone living there and having died and having lost everything. And now in the news, if you follow it, it shows the different shades of the tragedy. This one is about the Filipino people on the islands here, which play a large role ever since they came about 100 years ago. And I have to say, wherever I run into Filipinos, might it be our ray of all trades here in the Waipiki Grand, or might it be my students, as you see the show called below there. This was Chris Chupueta, who was a jungleism advocate. And we did a show with him about that they're all great, hardworking, the hard at the right place and totally talented. So this article is about that they played a large role in running the tourism in Lahaina. And now they're worried about not making it anymore. And they have this example of this lady here who was able to, you know, barely buy a home of $500,000, five bedrooms. And now she's worried about that she's not being able to get this back, that she might be bought out. And, you know, she was like they are, they sent money back to her, you know, family in the Philippines to her mother. And now, you know, they were saying maybe we have to go and move back in with mother, because we can't make a living. So along these lines of what can we do to rather than saying, okay, bring it all back to how it was, maybe that sheds a light on that how it was, maybe it wasn't so perfect. And maybe it just looked perfect from the point of view of a tourist walking through it, and all cute and pretty, but behind the scenes as we were debating last time for cultural reasons, you know, maybe there is a challenge there too. So, you know, if you go back, even if you don't rebuild there, and you rebuild somewhere else, but if you rebuild with permite food, fire vulnerable stick frame that is overpriced, you know, who's going to run the whole place, right? That's a different layer of tragedy here of human existence that we want to just throw ideas out there of very, very unconventional, non-traditional, kind of edgy, intentional as to push us to think as you like to say and kind of quote, you know, quote, unquote outside of the box, right? Yes, exactly. And I think one of the things you touched upon is another major consideration. You know, we tend to focus. I've been focusing my ideas on the commercial part of La Hina, because that was the most famous part. That was the part that generated the income. So it's very important. But there's also 90, something like over 90% of the structures that were destroyed in La Hina were single-family homes as well as some apartment buildings too. And this is something that is connected to the people that you just discussed, the Filipinos, but there was also, to my surprise, a fairly large Spanish speaking population of people from Mexico and people even from Argentina. And I didn't realize that there were so many such people in the town of La Hina. Well, obviously, some of them also being immigrants were probably not legal immigrants. And so they are in a double bind of having lost their jobs and having lost the places to live, but also being scared of being found out and potentially deported. So this is a whole other human aspect to La Hina that until this disaster occurred, I was not aware of. So again, how do we find the places? How do we find the money? Where do, how do we deal with rehousing all of these people? Because again, if there, as you just said, if there isn't housing there that people can live in, then you don't have a workforce. And if you don't have a workforce, then you don't have the support for the hotels and the retail and all of the other things that we're bringing tourists to La Hina to spend money. So it is an incredibly complicated situation. Yeah, it is. And it's on top of what already was complicated to begin with on all islands that we will later on show a civil beat article, you know, quote that talked about homelessness on Maui. And so I also threw in in my notes here the name Ankeny. Ankeny used to be my neighbor, my urban nomad neighbor who at Duke's Beach, which is in front of Porto Rossi Park, I ran into every morning and we started to be friend each other and chatted, you know, and he was basically hanging out there on the beach and we talked. And he told me that all he had was reclaimed and repurposed, found objects, and that he said he just wants to live very minimally. So his footprint, by the way, was very low. And so and I was asking him if I could have the emerging generation come and talk to me. He said, yeah, very much so. When I returned, I didn't see him anymore. He's gone. And that happens, you know, and with all the drama and tragedy of 115 people killed, you know, at once, it's a little like when an airplane comes down, right? It's a shock because it, you know, so many people at the same time. But at the same time, we forget about the almost daily automotive fatalities out on the streets, which you see a note here or someone got killed and got killed, but they accumulate and they build up, right? So we have this massive problem that is intertwined. And so the solutions could and should be for all of these. So again, learning from from Ankeny is live a absolutely essentialized lifestyle of providing main shelter. And that's, you know, we talked about maybe it's more, you know, less of a western tectonic, heavy construction. Maybe it's more lightweight, which by the way, and we, you know, met and I had been invited by you to stop by work and look at the Holly, the oldest Holly you have in there, which is a pretty impermanent structure that also because of natural catastrophes, often there were, you know, strong winds and and hurricanes and they got blown away and they basically rebuilt them again. And so we talked about maybe out of fabrics and we got excited about out of this material, making that material here and other things. So now here, these images here is elevating that on top of what we said. And in Germany, these car roof tents are really becoming popular. Don't get us wrong. Don't even think we're, we're, we're as crazy to say, you know, we on the burned out cars, you put some of these pens is a lot of, you know, sensitivities about that. In fact, you know, one of the staff people of the Holly Colani, which Ron blessed us with the one of the most human and humane hospitality design projects, one of the valet people Mark basically said, don't build there at all, because all the bones are basically all the dust, all the debris, everything is basically bone powder. So don't even think that's just one, you know, informed citizens opinion there. But again, we're, we're talking maybe not literally and, and figuratively, but more metaphorically about how could we basically elevate yourselves literally and figuratively. And, you know, speaking about this is what if anything these shows are about, you know, encouraging people and lifting up their spirits and giving them hope. And so hopeless situations. I mean, my culture had multiple dark sides in the past, the worst obviously the Third Reich. And then the GDR, one of the sectors when you got us back on our feet, you know, you had to give to the allies of the Russians and they had one sector. And that didn't work out so well. And people in there basically then also try to keep the spirit up in this dictatorship. And they were actually the ones as I took this picture here, the predominant picture on the left of this slide here is from the equivalent of the Honolulu Museum of Art, which is the Neue Pinakotek in Munich that has this display here for you as the museum guy and the historian about camping culture in the GDR. Where, and, grantedly, not everyone was able to afford this goofy Trabant that we did, you know, point out in the automobile architecture show volume six, show quote up there in the middle top. But, you know, the ones who, you know, waited long enough and were saving money to buy one of these goofy ones, then they had they started this tradition of putting a putting a roof on top of it. And it reminded you of another episode, a pre-episode for the automobile architecture. That was the vintage VWs that you are a member of. And it reminded you of that. Why did it remind you of that? Well, the Volkswagen van was the first large boxy vehicle that was sold in the United States that was quite popular. And after it began to sell in the 1950s, the American companies, American car makers, started making large boxy vans themselves. But what the Volkswagen had that was also very notable for what we're talking about right now is something that the United States companies didn't make. And that was a pop pop in which there was an accessory built onto the top of the van that you could open up as a sort of a little tent-like structure. And that gave you a little more height. And it also gave you more air circulation if you were camping inside your van. And of course, a van is like a room on wheels. It's not curved like an automobile. It's more like a box. So people not only traveled in these and not only used them for commercial purposes, they ended up living in them sometimes, particularly when the hippie movement got started. Then that's when people were really making use of the Volkswagen vans with the pop pops. So how could this help? Again, we're thinking about the $500,000 home that this Filipino family was barely able to afford with five rooms. So now it seems like they would have to go back home. And maybe rather than not doing that, maybe this could be an interim solution to basically because we put out the price here of one of these roof tents. It's 1.5 to 2.5K. So that's something maybe that's reasonable for, again, the interim time. And our consultant, Lindy Robelo, who unfortunately I don't pay enough banking at my University of Hawaii Federal Credit Union. And now her rent in her public housing is threatened to be raised. And she said, well, they're going to make me go back to live in my car way she used to live with. So she knows what it means in a car to live. And in a car, it's hot. It's like a tin can. And that's why these pop up roofs and stuff like that try to aerate and ventilate it. So obviously the roof, the tent on the roof of something is cooler. And it's off the critters. So it has advantages over to be on the ground in a car. So you're just safer also from other threats of water and flooding and things like that. So that's why we wanted to throw this out is to maybe put your thoughts along the lines you might want to think along these lines even more. So a very small show quote at the bottom in the middle gets us to the next slide because this is what Bucky Fuller called tensegrity versus gravity based structure. So certainly it has to rest on something, but it's structure itself is very kind of lightweight. And another thing that sounds maybe totally like when when Matt was cautioning us rightly so and saying, well, it's not as easy. You throw up a tent and then it's going to be happy live quoting Matt, right? So it's also not easy and and you know would be silly to think, okay, we just put a hammer between two palm trees and life's going to be good or good again. It's not like that. But rather than again trying to say, okay, we built pretty heavy to expensive. And why don't we build lighter? And there is a tradition of hammocks everywhere in the tropics. And again, everything take it with a grain of salt. This article where we got the middle provocative picture front is title itself. Can a hammer a palm tree? So there's multiple levels to the literal part of that. But the point is what we're making again. Can you do architecture that's more along the lines of your ancestors, which is more impermanent than being permanent, which is also more easy breezy. We're seeing behind you the window open. We also see a Dyson fan to the left and we see your dog and we hear the bird. So along these lines, can we do something that is more airy? And another example of that is from other areas is the frame at the bottom left, almost there on the grass. This is a, this is a Shorj Haldoy Ferrari chair from 1938 that became very popular in mid-century modern architecture. When Ron listens to us as one of our most loyal audiences, it reminds him of having been in many of the case study homes that he designed. And it's a metaphor. It's an example for doing the most, create something you can sit on with the least material, with the most reduced tube frame steel. And there's also the guy I'm blanking on his name, but we covered in on shows who was using tube from the military, right, and made these outdoor furniture here on the island. Are you, I'm blanking on his name, or do you have? I am too. Now that you're asking me, but yes, that is something that was made after World War II here in the Hawaiian Islands. It's okay. Yeah, it's okay. And you know, what is the chair in the world? For me, it's metaphoric because I used to own that frame and the cloth with it. And then, you know, my son, Joey, and Lenny's mother, Svenja, when we, you know, split, decided to sell all that. And she did it for like a dollar. And it was actually initially mad and thinking, okay, why would she sell this so cheap? Now I think I have to say it was good thinking her because she was giving it away, hopefully to someone who was more in need of it. And so, you know, down there at the very bottom left is just as of yesterday. These are two shots from automobiles or vehicles for thought. And I was given our P.I. mobile by some neighbors here in the Diamondhead area, David, who told me it's likely former First Lady Jean Arioshi's car originally, but they gave it to me as a donation almost for a little money. And we now gave our C model to Roxy, who was our front desk lady here, who also, we don't pay enough. The hotel does not pay her enough. That is the problem actually of the underlying problem is our greediness, our thriftiness. And this gets us back to Ron again, to the chokeboard at the top right, because Ron was doing it right. His design was all-encompassing human humane because he created something that the company decided to pay its staff well. And Mark and Terrence and their third friend, they just came from a golfing trip that they do every year on the Big Island. The hotel pays them so well that they're able to have a happy and healthy life. They got houses. They can do vacation. And I think, you know, the more I do research on that, the more I talk to people. That's the underlying problem. First of all, we need to, you know, get people decently paid. And then they can basically then not spend on the money on something that maybe is not worth it, which is Western style architecture. So the two raise the pay, which the Hale Kalani is able to do. And it's high end, you know, and, you know, a lot of, you know, money for $900 per room. But come on, you know, you can't be cheap, literally. And figuratively speaking. So raise the wages and lower the cost. And it's only necessary. It's only possible if you lower your standards. But lowering the standards doesn't necessarily mean compromising on comfort if you take advantage of the unique climatic conditions that we have, right? And there's another, the other Martin I'm happy to have in my studio right now, talking Spanish, he's from Colombia and not the state, but the country of Colombia. And he was very enthusiastically telling me about his culture where they keep it small, the houses. And when the big families come, they all throw up hammocks. And everyone is a happy camper there. So rather than the Western bedrooms, and they're going to have so many bedrooms with so many beds in there that have a large club and footprint, right? Keep it lean and mean. And the very show quotes at the bottom right is my hammock experiences because my dad had in the 70s an indoor hammock with a wooden frame, sort of like this one. And don't get us wrong. We're not encouraging you to buy on Amazon. Amazon is a tricky beast. This is just an image, you know, taken from Amazon. But again, the price, something like that, is rather affordable. $200 like that. And I had my cousin stay in that once. And she recently, family affairs, not that it matters, but she got back to us and asked for her images to be deleted for my father's birthday anniversary. We did that, go figure. And she was already complaining back then, oh, she couldn't sleep in that hammock. Well, my buddy, Dan Kubrick, who is our mentor for our to be continued comparing Chicago to Honolulu when he came over around the time, as you see him there, back then in the show quote bottom second from right that long ago, he was more than a happy camper as they say, right? And take that saying literally, right? He said a hammock is just right. So what we're saying is simplify, essentialize, and that might open up opportunities for a new architecture that could free the people. So you're not going back to the before, but you're actually going towards something even better as you put it as the aspiration last time, right? Yeah. And I think this is again, what you mentioned earlier, the idea of, okay, this is an unprecedented situation in which all of the buildings and all of the contents have been destroyed. What do we go with now? We have an opportunity now that even though it came from a tragedy is still an opportunity. So the idea of using different techniques, the idea of building different types of things, the idea of using different types of materials are all things that can be explored now. And I'm going to bring this back to something you and I have talked about repeatedly aerated concrete as a type of building material that doesn't burn, that is insulated against heat, and Lahaina is well known for being very hot, and trying in various ways to either encourage or sometimes even perhaps mandate those types of materials in the rebuilding so that there's never again a disaster like this in which everything burns. So not only thinking about the comfort of people, not only thinking about reducing our footprint in the world, but also preventing yet another tragedy, all of these things are considerations for this rebuilding process, which now is in our future for the town of Lahaina. Yeah, and we want you, our dear audience, to also take a fresh look at things and be more conscious when you walk around or you drive around. So the picture I took yesterday at the very bottom left, you recognize that it's right down your road. And so there is a little RV standing there that's sort of illegal. And that's one way. And then next slide for the remaining two minutes, just kicking it off with us and then we would have to go back to that one. That is approaching your road from the other side coming from me. This is the high street. And this is something that was on the news, being very controversial as well as another person who came from another culture and tried to make a living here and had a food truck and basically got evicted from his place and didn't know any better as to take, oh, and his son got sick, as he says on air. So he basically, he said, rather than becoming homeless, I took immediate action and I built on top of my food truck, which was a big outcry. And I, do you remember from driving home, having been driving by it because I don't know, it must have been when I wasn't here on the island? Possibly, but yes, I remember very well. And there was a whole situation of that street having permanently parked things on it because it was a private street. And that's what this structure was, the vehicle and the structure. So here again, why this might not be taken or it might not be a good idea necessarily to say this is a good wrong model to imitate or to duplicate, right? But this as a provocative proposition to think about elevating things and tree houses, the other pictures are wrong. We want you the audience then for the coming week that you have, because we have to call it good now for today, but please give a thought about tree houses. Give that a thought and what kind of potential could there be within tree houses. We will walk you through the ones that we arranged around the main picture here, which is our experiences and findings and dealings with tree houses, both where we are from and what we have found as tree houses. You pointed out there's a Lahaina tradition of trees there and there is actually the oldest Banyan tree on all the islands of Hawaii is in Lahaina and we have one here in Waikiki next to us that used to have a tree house and there's more here to then continue along the lines. And you please do your homework as well, make us think about what potential for getting our spirits and not just that, but the situation back up in Lahaina and elsewhere here in Hawaii, in other tropical climates in the world with similar situations. So we see you for that. And Matt, back and until then, please stay altruistically attractive. Attractedly altruistic. Bye-bye.