 Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. I am this program's co-host. I'm DeSoto Brown of Bishop Museum here in Honolulu. And joining us from Germany, 12 hours difference between Honolulu and Germany is the program's host, Martin Despang. And Martin, can we have you up here on screen magically right here? There he is. He's in a box, speaking to us from Germany. And Martin is gonna be telling me a story about his son Joey and his son Joey's architectural, shall we say, forays in different ways. And what do we see in the background, Martin? What's behind me and you in this picture? Well, that's not to help people yet too early. Let's move on to the first slide here, please. So this looks familiar to you location-wise, right? It is. It's the Diamond Head Lookout. We are looking down from Diamond Head Road over the ocean at Diamond Head and sitting on the right is Martin and sitting on the left is his older son Joey. And was this Joey's first visit to Hawaii when he came to see you? It actually was. That was a few years ago. That's when you visited the first time. Yeah. Correct. And he found this visit quite- And let's check out what he did prior to that. He found this visit pretty inspirational. Did he not? He did, he did. And we will see in what way further along in the show. Let's move on and see what he did prior to that. And I'll take you the lead a little bit today because I was keeping you updated about what's going on here, me on the other side of the world. Sort of this, and you found this sort of cross-pollinating, cross-cultural aspect really interesting. So I let you sort of reflect on what you heard about what was going on. So Joey has received a master's certificate as an engineer in engineering. And the thing that I found interesting was in this picture, this is Joey and his girlfriend. And to the right of them is Joey's graduation certificate if you will. And I found it fascinating that it's in English even though he graduated in Germany. And of course English is the language that he will be using and is already using it as international travels and as international jobs that he's gonna be dealing with. So this shows you what the state of Europe is right now. And Joey, you told me specifically did not choose to become an architect as others in your family have because your father was and you are and your sister is. And he chose instead to go into engineering. That's right, he's in another level. Right. And so he, his specialty right after his graduation was that he went into the automotive world. And let's go to the next picture. And there he is. And what was he involved with? Part of his bachelor, and yes, you're right. The idea of us Europeans adopting the American system of Bachelor and Master is it's sort of global compatibility. As part of his bachelor, which you can see on the left, he was interning with one of the companies in the automotive sector that you associate with high end and being German precision and German quality, Deutsche Wettarbeit, how we call that and which company is that? It's Audi, which stands for Auto Union. And it was originally four different companies that got together. And that's why there are four circles in their logo, which you see on the front of the building that Joey is standing in front of. But that wasn't enough for him, right? Now you talked about our cars, now we go to your guys' cars, right? That's right. So he went from a German car company to an American car company and he worked for Tesla. And you see him in the other photograph with the, I believe the Model 3 Tesla. And I think you said that Joey decided he didn't want to be in an office job, he didn't want to be stuck with these things and he wanted to go in a different direction. Is that where we want to talk about this right now? I think that's fair enough to say and we want to do a little bit of traveling in Europe and take you guys along here. We're referring to a previous show with Tim Upicella when he did this great show about transportation and we were out west in Germany and this is where he was working with and for Tesla out in Düsseldorf. Audi however is as Bavarian as you can get it and that gets us to the next slide. Ah yes, yes that's right. What was that at the show though? Well, what Joey decided to do was to go into business for himself and that would require him to have a trailer hitch attached to the back of his car. So you see that's what's going on in the big picture at the bottom so that he can, this particular car can tow a trailer and what's happening in the upper pictures? You see, well actually in the upper picture you can see the car towing a trailer but what's happening in the family gathered around the table there? That's his aunt, my dear sister and business partner. I said the hosting them Clara and Joey here and again he went back. They started with like from zero from scratch and so all the cars you see involved are really, really low budget cars. We're talking a few thousand euros here. So let's go to the next step, what happened next? And family, you know, Cynthia was hosting them and allowed her to work on the whole thing in front of her properties. The previous one was the most current one and this one here is the previous one where you can see in the background a wooden building, a wooden chalet that's next to her previous home and that's sort of inspired by what we see on the top left which we dedicated a show to or we referenced to that in our crime, crime time show here. This is the Forest Home by Cynthia's business partner Isabel. So let's go to the next slide and see where the journey took them. Where is that? Well, this is the beginning of the construction of, let's say this is Joey's foray into architecture because sitting on that trailer, which is the trailer that they purchased is the beginnings of a structure that is going to become Joey's business that's actually mobile. So he just went and bought various materials and started this construction not necessarily following all the architectural rules but to create something that we're gonna be seeing very soon and may I point out that this license plate on the trailer is a personalized license plate and you can see it says HI 808 that's for Hawaiian Islands 808 obviously being our area code and that's relevant for the business we're gonna be seeing very shortly coming into existence. You the license plate geek had to see that, I knew that, I knew that and that's at the top right location wise they moved back to the east which is former East Germany the GDR has been freed for a while so it's part of a bigger form of Germany and this is where also the office of our father is and this is in Radeboil and Dresden and this is down the road from where Karl Mayer resided who is someone who portrayed America in a fantasy way and world to Germans when they didn't have the chance to go to America as much as they can do now and especially in East Germany not. At the top left we referenced the two previous shows about similar entrepreneur actions with rich Richardson's and Wyatt's sort of tiny homes this year however is not necessarily and primarily a dwelling although Clara looks pretty comfy and cozy in there so let's move on what happens next and I think we're getting close to your license plates continued. Yeah that's right, there we go. Well what we're gonna see now is the relevance of the rainbow. Rainbows are very common here in the Hawaiian Islands because of our normal weather pattern as well as our topography of having mountains where rain falls and drifts further towards the leeward and because that we see rainbows very frequently and we see rainbows so frequently that they are on our license plates which they have been since 1991 and in the two photographs on this page you see a very distinct double rainbow which is not that common but it's one that I saw when I was driving home on the freeway one day last year or the year before had to photograph it out the window just because it was a lot of traffic and I could drive more slowly. These two particular license plates are sort of relevant too because we just saw the Tesla car which is an electric car and that's something we're always very conscious of on human humane architecture but we also see the UH logo on the lower one and that's relevant because that is where Martin's is employed and why don't we go to our next picture and there are more rainbows you don't just see them in certain areas you see them all over the place but they're particularly prevalent in Manoa which is the original location of the University of Hawaii campus and that's why the football team is called the Rainbow Warriors in reference to the rainbows and we also see Suzanne the tropical tourism expert in the lower left corner but we see rainbows in other parts of Honolulu as well. Next picture and what did this inspire? Tell us. You can see here that the finished box basically got rainbow coated and colored at his grandparents which you can see up there in the middle and which you can see at the bottom left is Clara's father and mother who were supporting in their field of helping to get the signs printed and the signs is everything in the project it's everything is self made from scratch and so is the sign and you can see that there is sort of this double meaning of the logo which is referring to the rainbow with the colors but it's also referring to another very Hawaiian associated phenomenon which is the volcano and on the top right this was me from my Waikiki Grand Lanai taking a picture looking at you residing up there at the foothills and there's a rainbow too. That's right. So, one and see where the journey took the next. Right, next picture and there is the finished or partly finished structure and that's the Aloha Shea vise trailer and there it is being towed on the Autobahn but Martin pointed out to me that all while the Autobahn in some cases does not have speed limits if you're pulling a trailer you are confined to a lower speed limit so you don't go crazy and cause a crash while you're towing your rainbow trailer and next picture there's again, what's going on here Martin? Well the previous picture was taken from Joey's brother Lenny's car and we see it's the one with the fancy green rims here and he's unloading into another car that we're going to talk about which he learned driving with in Joey. In a previous show actually the Hawaii 5.0 show we continue to make the references and compare automobiles and architecture and we're saying that the French automakers are the most innovative because they're resisting to be retro and sentimental and romantic they're very evolutionary in the ways of developing their cars. This place here is their former home where they grew up and it's very inspired by it's a mid-century 50s, 60s building that's inspired by what we see at the bottom which is an Arna Jacobs and Roe Hall's development from mid-century back in Stockholm and we move to the next slide which shows us the actual home here there in front of it and their mother was allowing them to basically continue to build the thing in the front yard and we see this other car introduced this is our little frog as they call it and you know Suzanne's kids continue to call it that way this car is family tradition it's a compact micro-compact car that's nearing to be almost a quarter of a century young or old and it's the mule that never gives up as you can see and does all the work and so let's move on to the next image here. So here we go this is the it's actually under construction and it's starting to be a real thing and tell us about it yes pardon me for interrupting you. Well there's no no there's there's another similarity to Hawaii because we love single wall construction and this is what this shows it's a very sort of stripped down construction with simple posts and beams very sort of fragile if you want to say so and on the top right you can see the builders team which is the couple and the brother Lenny here and on the on the bottom right we see a glimpse of what happened next and that gets us to the next page and tell us what happened to so well. Well what I thought was particularly striking about this construction is this exterior covering of the vertical members and while that is very striking and it does kind of tone down the brightness of the rainbow colors as you pointed out to me this also serves a structural function in that it strengthens that single wall construction that we saw from the inside. So a very simple way to do this in an elegant and attractive way and striking because it's different is what you did is what Joey did by putting these vertical strips on the outside of the framework of the trailer. That's fine so that's very much in the modernist tradition that you do a few things that serve multiple purposes here versus today where we're sort of decorate things which are redundant and so this is pretty much the engineering thinking of just doing the right thing and not doing more than you need and that's something that indigenous cultures including Hawaiian culture has been doing right. Right absolutely. This is not a literal interpretation of the Halapele Hut but it's an evolutionary one you know an interpretive one here and now in the 21st century. Correct right. So next picture. Well they had to get another car. This is part of the problem when they were towing their when they were towing their trailer they discovered as you said that the automatic transmission or the transmission didn't really like to have to deal with that so they gave up the previous car and bought this car and what is this car Martin? So we're walking you through the range of French cars we had the little twingo which is Renault as the maker. This is a Citroen here. Again this is a few thousand euros car that they bought and in the back you can see where his brother Lenny lives at the top right. We did a couple of shows from his Lenny Stark studio here where we're assessing the Hawaii five all the entire set that I bought and I promise to go through all of them so that's what we did and the architecture shows you how the European model is three to four to five story buildings which is a pretty robust urban strategy that might be interesting for Honolulu if we think about transit or under developments and we also propose to stack containers in such a way which ended up being the Strasville and Igrove project. So let's move along with them here on their trip. Next slide. And so now is this when they were this is when they actually first took up their first residence if you will in the parking lot of a small shopping mall correctly and during summer it's hot. It gets hot in Germany so people would be enjoying a nice cool shave ice and so you see customers enjoying their first taste of the from the Aloha shave ice shave ice wagon. And again as I mentioned earlier it's fascinating to me that a German company for German customers can use a title, a name that is entirely in English and people will still understand it read it and be able to understand what it is. There you go. That's true very very cosmopolitan approach. Next slide please. And on the inside they obviously this is a utilitarian vehicle it's got to hold the bottles of the shave ice flavoring and you can see there's a built in rack for that. You see the shave ice machine in the upper corner I believe and Martin told me fascinatingly that in order to buy shave ice machines you have to even in Europe they have to go through suppliers here in Hawaii which is the home of shave ice as we now know it and there's a special little orange sink there because that's also a requirement along of course with the freezer that you see in the right hand side Martin tell us about this special little orange sink. Well that has to do with my best German friend Stefan who we continuously walk into his tiki bar basement and he was a big supporter and is a big coach of Joey. He gave him the book by Richard Branson which is called The Virgin Way which basically Branson says I don't want the ordinary average guys who have just straight A's and are just following a beaten path. He says I want people who try new things and I want people who take a risk and I want people who even fail. So that was sort of a great encouragement to not be shy and not to be afraid of anything and they weren't. This little sink is we got that way back when we're students from sort of a promotional event from one of the most vintage sink makers Alapa and he had that with him I didn't really know what to use it for so he gave it to Joey and the background of the wall the black is basically chalk more color which we used and again as he indicated the Department of Health anywhere in developed countries give you a hard time so they got a taste of that not always a sweet sometimes a bitter taste. Let's move on to the next slide. And there we are. Okay this is at the shopping mall that this is where they were last summer and they got a little Facebook shout out from the shopping mall saying come down and have some Hawaiian shave ice and that's what you see in these pictures. Exactly. And next picture. Well okay this the cool thing for me was this is this is where the shave ice machine or the shave ice trailer lived during the winter when it was not in use but the crucial thing to me is next to the shave ice trailer is a 1960 Plymouth Fury. Now why that is sitting in Germany I don't know that is the exact same car as my family owned when I was six years old and so in the upper right upper left of the screen here you see me as a little kid in New Hampshire because we lived in Boston for one school year and we had that car and we drove it up to New Hampshire so I was astonished to see this show up in Germany of all places and Martin tell us where this particular place was where the Germans had Plymouth. There that's right and that took them to the very north so all the way back from the very south in the area to the very north where the family of Clara is from and you can see and this is another sort of similarity between you and her and them because this it shows her and her grandmother and her grandmother is a very healthy and happy woman and the young age and that reminds us of you and an event you had yesterday in your family right. Well actually it's still today it's here right this minute now. Oh it's still today wow. It's still today and my mother is turning 99 years old and so as soon as I leave this program I'm going directly to my mother's 99th birthday party. Wow. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. How exciting. Okay. Let's move on. Next picture. We should deliver. Yeah move on. So again that second car didn't like having to pull the trailer and so they had to get a third car and so there's the third car pulling the trailer and this is when they were on route to their next destination is that correct when they were on their way to Malta? Is that right? That's right and this car is we had the Renaults and they had a Renault and they had a Citroen. This is a Peugeot now so we got all French car makers now which as we said in the 70s I think they brought them to America but ever since not anymore. Correct. We'll put that back on the road along with the trucks. Next slide please. And where are we now? We're back to Munich. This is the office home by my sister and a business partner Isabel here our local Southern branch. We're back there. They did a little pit stop here. You can see sort of a tribute of Joey to the architectural work of as you said of his relatives and at the top you can see Suzanne's children and Cynthia good-buying and giving them farewell on their way to as you already said Malta next page picture which you already indicated in one of the previous shows. They did another stop here in Zurich with Suzanne friends here. Thank you guys and then they're out. At the very top you see his grandparents on the mother's side who were also cheerleading them and wishing them all the best so everyone in the family was really excited. And here they are just in front of the ferry that bring Malta online in shipping themselves and their car and their trailer to the island of Malta. Next picture. And the crazy thing is that Malta used to be a British colony and they drive on the left and that means automobiles have their steering wheels on the right. And so to fit in in Malta they bought a used car in England shipped it over and then shipped it down to Malta to drive around there. But because Malta is the most southern part of Germany I'm not Germany the most southern part of Europe closest to the continent of Africa it's also the warmest part so it was considered acceptable normal and smart to have a convertible there. So here is their convertible car from England in Malta with palm trees in the background pulling the Aloha Shave Ice Machine. Next picture. And there we are. Lenny again coming and joining them and helping out exactly. Right. And there's Malta and Malta is somewhat similar. There are similarities but there are differences and one of the differences is that Malta is much drier it's smaller and it also has a particular type of architecture which we're going to see that uses the native or indigenous stone which is a light-colored stone. So everything there tends to be kind of a beige color and the Shave Ice Truck is very brilliantly colored to stand out nicely against a beige and blue background. Is that correct? And now that's perfectly illustrated in the next picture. Perfect second wing into that. There we go. There we go. And as you were saying it's kind of too bad that our buildings here in Hawaii tend to be all beige and light colors as well where we live in a very vibrant, tropical and colorful community but nonetheless there's the Shave Ice Truck and it really does stand out and we hope that people are intrigued to want to come and see it on this promenade in a prominent location. You said this is one of the first places they tried because they were trying to figure out where good business places would be. Yeah, this is all testing out. This is all venturing out and making experiences. Next picture here. Oh, there we go and there's the Shave Ice. Yeah, we're almost at the end of the show. We don't want to forget to mention our previous guest, Bandit Kanistakhan who is, which we still have to do a show about. He's a master in the culinary, crazy, cool architecture. And he was giving heads up and saying, guys, you're doing the right thing. This is a cool thing to do. So thanks Bandit for the heads up and the compliment to these guys. Next picture. So there we go and there's the Shave Ice truck again in the beige Malta environment. And this is an interesting situation of trying to convince people or to influence people or to try to show people that this, such a thing as Shave Ice exists in a place where it's not that common. And Suzanne was saying, Malta is already sort of an exotic type of destination or location for Europeans anyway. And is Shave Ice really something that's exotic enough to fit in there or is it too similar to what's already there for people to really pay much attention to it? And I think that's something that's still being discussed. Yeah, that's illustrated by the next slide here. Right. So there's a tropical background. So you see Suzanne in her show at the, exactly, and you see Suzanne up there referencing in her show and she was contemplating exactly what you were just saying. But we wanna point out that whatever happens next, that was a really interesting experience cross culinary, cross cultural, cosmopolitan experience and the time we have been there and visiting we had nothing but warm welcoming. This is a guy who after they had to look for a place to put it because they couldn't put it on the road. This is just a neighbor where they sort of desperately put in a note in his mailbox and he was immediately calling back and saying, hey, put it in my courtyard. And that is great, friendly, welcoming experiences all over the place on all levels. So that's really great. Let's go to the last picture here because we're at the end of the show and got a second to last picture here. Again, when they're moving on they're making some different experiences now going back maybe more to their sort of core discipline of their degrees and of their experiences but the trailer is gonna be taken care of here by some other very friendly people on this board yard here and sitting along with these yachts. And I make a reference and I already made some humorous comments about you and that you might be potentially interested in the trailer as well. For what reasons could that be? Maybe we're gonna get all the way out here to the Hawaiian islands and show it to people here because well, we already know that we like shave ice. We already know what it is and maybe there's a customer for, there maybe there are lots of customers for it here but it does show that the international aspects of Hawaiian culture are, they're all over the place and unexpectedly so. And suggest you have more evidence of that. Yeah, and let's go to the last slide here. We continuously talk about the evolution of culture, right? This is some screenshots from an early episode of Hawaii 5.0 in which there was a contrast of over development and there was an environmental activist involved. And what was going on in this picture is you just, it looks like a boy running along wearing a regular Aloha shirt, Hawaiian shirt. If you look closely, you can see that on his shirt is a pattern of a Volkswagen Beetle, which is crazy. So we see this connection of Hawaii and Germany yet again and this brings us to what we're gonna be talking about our next show two weeks from today. We're gonna be looking at the air-cooled Volkswagen and the various mutations and forms of that, how popular it was here in Hawaii, where it was the exotic thing as opposed to the Hawaiian culture being exotic in Germany. And I think that we're gonna, because of our technical situation, we're gonna end right here. Thank you all very much for being with us and I'll be seeing you next week. Martin will be back two weeks from today. Thank you again for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii and till next time, Aloha.