 So excited to have you all back for our 217th episode of Think Tech Hawaii's Human Humane Architecture. And we are broadcasting, wouldn't you wish so, from three different exciting locations in the world. One is back in our Honolulu, Hawaii with Bishop Museum Historian and Archivist, Disoto Brown that we're especially happy to have him back as you can see because he is with us with his broken wrist and still hangs in there. So thanks for being with us, Disoto. Great. Thank you. Thank you. From Long Beach, California, we have our legacy leisure legend, Ron Lindgren. Hi Ron. Hello everyone. And me wouldn't you wish I would be back in good old Germany. So the three of us basically are gonna be back as the three from the filling station because we feel like we have done so much architecture that we're stuck as probably you the audience are. So we need to break out and look into something else only to make us maybe understand architecture even better from a different angle. And we're using automobiles as vehicles for thoughts to compare architecture and automobiles or the mobile and the immobile or immobilier as the French as the Germans call it. So with that, let's get us back to the first or let us get to the first slide, which is getting us back to where we had ended in our volume eights. And this is something which you guys are all excited about God because there's nothing more American than hot rods and low riders. So tell us more about it guys. What is that about in your culture? Well, Ron, you go ahead because this is something you experienced more than I did based on our agents. Yes, as an Angelina, I need to proudly present the artistic work and was very artistic, both of the low rider community and of the hot rod community. The low rider community was largely Mexican American in Los Angeles and began their reverence for cars back in the mid to late 1940s. And it still holds true now. People without that much expendable cash are putting tremendous amount of money into their cars and making them something to really stand out and to be seen. They're not so much interested in speed in terms of their cars. They're more low and slow. They're out cruising on the weekends, although their cars are jumping up and down on their fancy suspensions or riding only on the two side wheels or sometimes riding only on three wheels which is the oddest site. It's like a puppy sitting with one paw up in the air but their cars are very important to them. In fact, they become a fetish, an object of real reverence and the cars are often beautifully decorated and usually not the way the hot rodders do it because the hot rodders made pinstriping and incredible art but the low riders tend to have pictorial examples of art. It could be everything from something religious such as an image of our lady of Guadalupe. It could be a wife, could be children. It could be, believe it or not, even though it's an old Chevy that's been turned into the low rider, it's showing a mercury that they happen to love painted beautifully on their car. That's an example of amateur art and often taken to wonderful extremes where you really do stop and look at these cars. When you talk about hot rodders, you're talking more about people who are professional artists and are selling their cars for a really fine profit and they're reworking existing bodies and new body parts might be put on or maybe only a new grill in the front or whatever but these often have incredibly beautiful colors, candy colored flakes and things that didn't exist really before the hot rodders began their cars but they're interested in speed and in Los Angeles, probably the two most famous hot rod sellers and designers were George Barris and a guy named Ed Big Daddy Roth and they were both real characters. In the very center of the slide, you see George Barris and so and he's got a customized, I guess it's a 1929 Ford that he customized. It's hard to tell often what the original automobile was in some of the hot rods because their parts have been so discombobulated and put back together again but here's two wonderful cultures that grew up largely in Los Angeles, the hot rod culture, which is all over the world now and the low rider culture, which in a sense is all over the world now too, internationally. And this sounds very West Coastie, California and to me as you confirmed but that stuff made it over to Hawaii, right DeSoto? Yes, it certainly did and you can see in the picture on the right, there's a special Hawaii edition of Low Riders Magazine and as is always the situation, there's a car with a beautiful girl with wearing bikini and high heel shoes like you always see at the beach, never. And yeah, this cool 64 car was lived right in my neighborhood and so I used to see it all the time. Unfortunately, in spite of the amount of money that got spent on it, it rusted away and it's been junked but I have one of the license plates that used to be on this car in my collection. So that's what you see in the upper right corner. And you actually have them in your neighborhoods of Diamondhead quite a lot, right? Oh yeah, and also too, as a kid, one of the things I remember in the late fifties and early sixties was the hot rod guys are the men who, the young men who had modified their cars would come and park them at a park near my house every Saturday and Sunday. And they did it just to show off and to gather together and talk to each other. And so these gleaming hot rod or modified cars would be parked there and they'd gently and lovingly, clean them off and polish them and show them off and talk to each other to get together as comrades in car culture. Yeah, and as the picture is number two and four at the very top sort of left corner, portray, they are still around. This is when our exotic escapism expert, Zana, was with us back in Hawaii and we went for a stroll. And at the intersection of Kalakaua Avenue and Kohio roughly, there's a gas station and that's where they were at that moment. And they were again, very friendly and said, hey, look around and enjoy. And so that culture is still around. We were thinking about architecture. What does hot rodding and low riding have to do with architecture? And we were thinking, cars are sort of mass produced as often architecture is when developers do it especially. And but people have that desire for to make it their own. So they go in and another less elegant term of more recent times is pimping, pimping my ride. So you can also see people pimping their house and wanting to customize it and wanting to homify it with certain attributes of different doors and whatever attributes you can add to your house. So there's certainly sort of a similar kind of desire between that, but you might say, okay, guys get serious. We live in the days of, by the way, we still have COVID. There's climate crisis, there's social inequity. Do you guys have nothing better to do as this fetishism of low riding? So to make you not unhappy, let's go to the next slide and get a little bit more serious here because this is cars from the same area here. And this is a gentleman, an old rocker that us old foggies know and you youngsters who watch our shows hopefully ask your parents and grandparents. This is Neil Young from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And at the very bottom left is reminding us that Neil Young had some childhood times in Hawaii. And I think even recently, until recently he owned a house, I think on the big island, but he sold it a while ago. So Neil is the proud owner of what you see at the top right, a 59 Lincoln Continental. And so these Germans who were supposedly have things figured out came with this thing that I would probably be too rude to make it the weekly German lesson because it's one of the most tricky, long words and it's called Abwrachprämia. Aren't you guys happy and thankful that I didn't make you do that? Yeah, we could not do that, could not do that. Okay, so what's the English version of that? Cash for clunkers. Exactly, so that's something that you heard that we Germans did. And in Germany it was actually, we are run by the Car Mafias, the Beemers, the Mercedes, the VWs, the Porsches, the Opels. You name them all, right? So they run the country and some years ago, the economy wasn't doing so well. So the car industry basically went to the government and said, we need to do something. The government said, well, what about the other industries? The car industry said, well, they are not as powerful as we are. So if you don't help us, we run this economy to the ground. The government said, oh, well, then let's do something. But how do we sell this to the stupid people? And this is our first, Bundeskanzler, our first president, I don't know, I said the people are stupid. And this sort of confirmed it, unfortunately, because the government was able to sell it with a new thing that was called sustainability. And they said, let's say, you know, you dump your old gas guzzler and replace it with a fuel efficient car, then that's a good thing. And people bought into it, not looking into the bigger picture of cradle to cradle and full life cycle assessment. And as you, Ron, know very well from your ancestry and the Lindgrens, the Sandinavians are smarter than we Germans, didn't need to tell you that. And so they basically subsidize you if you drive the heck out of your old Volvo, only then they support you with buying a significantly more fuel efficient car. Neither the APAC Premier nor the Cash for Clunkers did that. And Neil Young was saying, no one is gonna cash for clunker, my beauty 59 Lincoln Continental, it's a piece of art. And they're gonna trash it. I'm gonna hire an international team of motor experts and they're gonna convert it into a hybrid. And this is called the Link Vault. And this sort of the counterpart in architecture is this, what you see at the top left is this several hundred year old farmhouse that our firm was converting in an equally significantly substantially reticle performative way in replacing a lot of these soft brick infill that was old and damp with a new thermal and spatial glass threshold. And also another sort of thing to make you jealous here, well, not the first part, but the second part is you're left wrong with very few architectural magazines in the US. We always had, we still have a lot of them and there's one of them just about glass and architecture. So this magazine reached out to us and wanted to publish it. And I had made this comparison between Neil Young's Link Vault and that building that got the editor so excited that he didn't edit it anymore and he wanted to publish it as it is. Although I said, I'm not the writer you are, but that's how it happened. And that's how you can find it. So, Lincoln's have actually never been officially imported to Germany, only as gray imports. And so has the big competitor and actually successor, as you just said before the show, the Soto. And which brand is that? Which gets us to the next slide. That is the Cadillac brand and Cadillac is made by General Motors and Lincoln is made by Ford. And those were the two major, the two biggest American car companies of the past who were competing in every price range. But this is at the top of the line for both of their ranges. And the Cadillac was the standard of excellence as it advertised itself in the US for a good many decades. And Cadillac styling got pretty extreme for a time. And we are looking at some pictures of that extremeness in which Cadillac went with these gigantic fins. Now, a lot of other American cars had fins at the same time period in the late 1950s, but the 59 Cadillac had the biggest, gaudiest and sharpest fins of any car made in the United States. And in the upper right, you see a 59 Cadillac ambulance parked at Waikiki. And while it probably was a wonderful way to go to the hospital, if you had to go to the hospital, I certainly would like to go to the hospital in a 59 Cadillac. It wasn't necessarily the most sensible car. And fins in general, people in the US began to criticize fins when they got really huge and said, why are you spending so much money on these fins, American car makers? And the car makers said, well, they add stability to the drive and they actually are a safety feature because they're aerodynamic. Well, in fact, those very sharp fins actually injured and killed people who had the misfortune to run into them or to be thrown onto them. So that was not true, but the picture that is on the left is kind of cool because that's a comparison of a Cadillac with fins parked in front of a building in Waikiki with fins. And there's a discussion as to whether the fins on the building and the fins on the vehicle are the same, but the building fins actually do perform a function. And Martin, you could tell us about that. Yeah, and they might actually be both from the same era. This is a 61, 67-serious Cadillac and the building is likely from the same era. So it's the finny era. And yes, our archie auto couple here, this is the couple. And while you already said, the fin on the car, it wasn't made for aerodynamics. Maybe there's a marginal side effect of that, but it was made for the looks. While the fins on the side of the building also are for the looks. But at least from midday until early afternoon, they actually shade the CMU wall behind and only at the very end of the day, which I meanly took the picture, number three in the middle on the right. You can see when the sun basically goes back in. And back to the ambulance, that's the Ghostbusters one, right? Yes, that's the Ghostbusters one. And I just watched a super interesting video about how they restored it recently. And it's a very highly customized 1959 Cadillac ambulance, but it needed a lot of restoration in the years since the film Ghostbusters was made. So it just underwent that recently. So now we can see it again, driving around busting ghosts. OK. So sometimes you make your students repeat things for the sake of learning effect, right? So this is one. Now you're going to get a quiz on the weekly German word of some weeks ago. So how did we call these cars in Germany that we see here? And that gets us to the next slide, but you have to say it before the audience sees it. Oh, now it's delayed. So now you can read it. I know how to say it. Straßenkreuzer. Exactly. So the Straßenkreuzer I'm obsessed with, because I played with the one at the very top right in my sandbox. This is Kojak's Buick. Then as a student in the US, I got myself a real one, real scale, the one below my 70th film, The Fury. And coming back to the US, I topped it with what I consider the last big boat, which is my Lincoln Continental, my 90s Lincoln Continental. And when in my youth, they were considered to be huge. But now here in our hood, and the picture from the previous slide, the left picture was taken in our Side Street Lemons Free, just the Side Street of Waikiki Grant. And here you see the courtyard of Waikiki Grant with a pool. And a little bit to the angle, I shot this picture, but it almost seems as this GMC Yukon, this white one, is almost as big as the pool. So everything is relative. That was Einstein's theory for relativity again here. We thought things are big, but things are getting bigger and bigger. That is true also in the mainstream of architecture. Square footage of American houses grow and grow and grow. Besides, and regardless, there is this anti-movement of tiny houses as sort of a little effect on the side. And at the bottom right is in front of my Lanai one. This is probably a Ford F-150. And never mind, there are the Tundras, and the Titans, and the Tacomas, and you name them all. And a little bit being analytic why they are is that little strip of images four and five there, which is actually the first peek to your Hale Kalani run when they're reopening. We're going to talk about that more in the next week and probably for the couple of weeks in a couple of volumes of shows. And it reveals that big sculpture by Mr. Watson, who had been portraying something that's unusual to share with tourists. It's actually not how Hula Happy Hawaiians have been. Well, that side, it gave that that was existing too, but there was a more violent, more warrior side. And that's what that sculpture is talking about. So we will have this discussion about maybe the pickup truck is the modern version of the warrior element in Hawaiian culture. That you just sort of said rightly so in all fairness, it's also a big part of American pioneering wagon wheel, conquering the Wild West mentality as well, but it certainly has been falling on fertile ground here where, again, as we said, there are sometimes not even utilitarian anymore. They just do it for the show off. And you said this is what actually that particular element of the Kings has been doing. That was more for showing and demonstrating power than actually doing it or performing it. So these pickup trucks sometimes probably never go into the dirt anymore. They're just there to show I'm a macho, I'm a leader, I'm a tribal leader, right? Am I right with that or am I too far off? Yeah, no, no, no. I think you're absolutely right. And it is true that Hawaiian culture did have a very war-like aspect to it. There were lots of wars. There were lots of battles. And that's a very common human thing, certainly in Europe as well, as we know for centuries. And in the German and the Germans were hitting themselves on the head. Yeah, that's what was, that's how all, anyway, we don't have to go into that. But the point is, yes, you're absolutely right that war was very much part of Hawaiian culture and showing off your strength, showing off your macho-ness, showing off your size. And your power is a continuation to today in which again, you select your vehicle and you sometimes change it and alter it to make it bigger, to make it faster, to make it louder. And that again is a showing off of your status as a male. Yeah, and we have to say in a while we will get to, you know, the engine is always better sounding on the other side. You know, there has been a lot of interest in cars from somewhere else, but the realm of pickup trucks until today is mainly dominated by American car manufacturing. And that is also what, you know, liking being annexed by Americans or not, but especially you to solo as a representative of your generation. You were excited about culture coming over and that's best portrayed, American culture coming over to your island. That's portrayed by the next slide, which is a compilation of images that you provided. So, yeah, and this is a comparison between architecture and car structure from the 1950s. In the 1950s, American car manufacturers pretty much went wild from 1959 up through the early 60s in how they designed and manufactured their vehicles. And they were made in the most bizarre color combinations with all kinds of strange convoluted sheet metal, with fins, with multiple tail lights, with multiple headlights. All of these pictures that you see here show what was going on with American cars. Well, at the same time, there was also an architectural component that was really comparable to that. That's what we call Googie architecture. Googie architecture originated in Southern California. It was particularly personified by the coffee shop type of a restaurant. And there was one particular firm in Los Angeles that was famous for doing these, which was Armay and Davis. Well, in Honolulu in 1956, a Googie style coffee shop was open called TOPS. And you can see not only a photograph of TOPS, but you see a family group pictured at the back of TOPS in the parking lot with those big 50s American cars. And the littlest member of that group is me at the age of five in 1959. And TOPS was my favorite and my sibling's favorite restaurant to go to in those years. So we went there in big American cars and we sat there in this big pointy environment that looked very remarkable. And we also can allude to Pete Wimberley, the architect. He was very active at that time period in the upper right corner. You see one of his iconic structures, the lobby of the Waikiki Inn Hotel. And again, although there's a Polynesian influence, this really pointy thrusting roofline was very typical of the time period in that we were reaching for space. We were shooting rockets into space. We had jet airplanes and those were pointy. And so we could allude to that pointiness and that sharpness in our buildings as well. And as many people may recall, the 1961 television cartoon series, The Jetsons. The Jetsons lived in a fantasy world of the future with the same type in which all this architecture and these vehicles were carried to an extreme, a fantasy extreme. And we will see that not everybody in the USA actually accepted this. And some people turned away from it because they thought it was too extreme and too unrealistic and unnecessary. And people wouldn't believe that was, grantedly, his sort of early Tiki phase, his Polynesian pop phase. And he moved on as we will move with him along and revisit him in a couple of slides. And things moving on gets go to the next slide. The more into the 60s, this is very close to me because I'm of the same year of build as this car here, that you and I just so to have been spotting on Alawai Boulevard for quite a while, but not anymore recently. And I've been seeing this lady, supposedly the owner and her very cute attempts to whenever there was rust eating it away, duct taping it and then she had a spray can with a turquoise color. And that might not have been the best rust protection to begin with. And then we also have here the tornado here and predominantly American cars had real wheel drive. And this one here tried to be European because front wheel drive was majorly the European thing. So there was this. And you can see just like as an evolution with like the oil stretch, that is not using the wings anymore to fly. Here, the cars are not using the most extravagant fins anymore, but the fins get less and less and less. And cars got less exuberant because probably as you said to Soto, some Americans got basically tired of it and sick. And they were then actually also looking somewhere else for that, right? And that gets us to the next slide. Yeah, so as I just said, all of those really extreme styles of American cars, a substantial portion of American buyers began to say, this is too much, these cars are too big, they're too gaudy, they're too bizarre looking, we want something more sensible. So starting in 1958, Americans began to substantially buy imported cars and imported cars from other countries were all much smaller because in other countries, it's much more expensive to buy gasoline and it's much more expensive to register your car. So they were always small and more fuel efficient. So in that period, all of a sudden, Americans began to buy Volkswagen's, they began to buy all, really you could bring in any little European car and Americans would buy it. This is a newspaper ad for the German brand of Ford and the Tonus was, if you look at it and you can recognize it, styled using American styling concept. So it looks like a little American Ford, but it's small, it's not too huge and it gets much better gas mileage. So this ad from a local car dealership in Honolulu and as Martin pointed out, it also is selling Italian Vespa, what we would say pretty much now is like a moped. Again, those were small. They didn't use as much gasoline as an American full-size motorcycle did. So all of those exuberant cars became unpopular with a number of people. And this is when for the first time, Americans began to buy imported cars. And today, bizarrely enough, when you think about it, in comparison to the old days, Toyota is the best selling car in the world and Volkswagen is also right there with it. So Toyota and Volkswagen now are the biggest selling, biggest car companies in the world, far surpassing what used to be the unbelievably powerful and large general motors. Yeah, and believe it or not, we're at the end of another exciting 28 minutes. So let's pick up from here next time. Let's pick up, you open up the can between the sexy Italian and the, you know, the big automotive dinosaur, American dinosaur of, you know, Ford, for example, and that's how we will connect and recontinue next week. So see you all then. And until then, you please stay all marvelously mentally mobile. Bye-bye. Bye.