 we're being back to this or a show on ThinkPick Hawaii, a more human, humane built environment that's what we're addressing here. This is the 303rd show and you are the accumulated viewer that you see number wise down there. And we're back to the three bald guys from the burning gas station with UMET after having been in Italy and you've been in Germany and you have been in New York and now you're back in your Boston, Danish booster box office there. And thank you for seeing a fan, a ceiling fan up there. Welcome back, Matt. Thank you. And it's you to Soto and me, Martin, you in almost and I am at the foothills of our Liahi Diamondhead volcano. Yes, we are here. And you are in your lush, exotic, tropical, Asipov designed home. So you have the most desirable location there with your doggy back there in the birds that we see who are cheerleading us here and Matt and me for different reasons for more indoors. I have a fan here running too and you have one up there. So let's get the first slide up because we're reflecting on Lahaina again. We're picking up from where we were and a couple of additions to the last slide that we see show quoted at the top left here. By the way, to get our memory back to Soto, the guy who did the steel tube furniture, his name was Walter Lamb. Walter Lamb, that's right. I looked up the show. His place is on the way to Hawaii Kai and almost at the end of the highway going there on the Makai side. Easy to recognize because the fish pond people who are just behind it painted the wall kind of bluish and fish pondy with fish somewhere. So when you drive by, that's where the place is. And in both cases, you know, it's... And I was looking up the Hardoi chair ironically or telepathically or intuitively. I got an email from the equivalent to your gift shop, the Soto and Your Bishop Museum, what the Dessau Bauhaus Museum has a gift shop. And what they had as their item of the week was guess what, the Hardoi chair and the ones on sale were like a thousand bucks. So I think we can say this is where the Bauhaus, I mean, I don't, I fill this out, tragically failed in trying to do something for the people that's affordable and has a decent approach and it ended up being exclusive. And now out of the reach for the masses. And this is certainly something, here comes the metaphor. This is what you want for Lahaina because we're still hitting even the national news here at the New York Times after the Maui fire locals fear being shut out of recovery. And the other thing I wanna say is about credibility because you guys might think by now, well, who are these three kind of howly looking guys talking about us in Lahaina? Well, I'm speaking on, you know, maybe myself, I started out first, I used to live on 1200 plus square feet owned but for a while not anymore, I downsized as I call it to 200 plus, rented here in the Waikiki Grand and over the summer, which I yet have to report I downsized to a quarter of that of a little more than half of a hundred, like 60 something on two wheels. So, and you know, the 200 square feet we even tested out as you just had your family with you met a little while ago and you just sort of hosted them in the Bishop Museum. We even tried the four of us on 200 square feet and rightly so it taught me a lot mainly about the adolescent, you know, adult craving, you know, scenario or challenge which also has to do with our Western mindset of thinking we have to kind of own things and we have to have bedrooms and rooms for ourselves. And we have seen your, met your in-laws house in Kailua which unfortunately now through gentrification it is likely a million dollar home but it wasn't like that to begin with. There was a very humble kind of American dream, you know, everyone deserves a house, a simple house that is also fairly down to earth then you just sort of if I may and you jump in if I go the wrong angle but as we hear your family and especially your father was very commercially successful and you decided to not go into his footsteps and decided to stay on a cultural side and basically, you know, don't try to, you know be more famous as far as affluent but, you know, dedicate yourself to your culture versus the commercial part of it, right? And I want to also include now here the show quote at the top right in the show quote at the top left is our friend, Ron Lindgren. I'm so happy he has responded to us via email because we were worried because we have to heard from him for too long. Thanks Ron for giving us that notice of that you're still with us and hanging in there. And Ron, you also, I just came from my morning Hali Kholani and I looked at the Flux magazine article that says the art of the first encounterment or something like that. So it's about the valet people and we had the discussion that Ron was also you have to be profitable man as an office to keep doing what you do. But I would say you guys do it not for profit primarily and the Killingsworth office and they didn't even set up shop here or they didn't get seduced to own a piece of your rock, the Soto. They came here, blessed us with the best what they could and they went away again if they were wanted again, they came and he lives very humbly and is, you know, half a million dollar home which is rather cheap in California. And he is quote on you Ron, you're a house rich but money poor and hopefully you can change that and, you know, your neighbor buys it and allows you to, you know, stay living there for the rest of your life but you can also visit us again. So I think, you know, everything that being said where we come from literally figuratively, you know gravitates around that beast of greediness and of capitalism because that's where the fear is basically circle around, right, the Soto and we had responded to what I was finding in the news that some people most absurd are still burdened with mortgage rates for their houses that aren't anymore. I mean, how absurd, what an absurd beast is that, you know, a principle of capitalism that yes, we haven't found a better one yet at least not in practice, but it is really absurd. So all that being said, you guys chip in but I wanted to, it made me all think about it came to my mind. I was thinking about, is there any example that I remember of something that was created not with greediness in mind but with collectiveness in mind? And that brought back Arco Santi by Paulo Solari from the 70s. So what are your thoughts and memories of that in regards to Lahaina? I wanna open this discussion. No, it's an interesting corollary to make simply because it was a, in a sense, a kind of collective or kind of almost commune kind of environment where people came there out of a desire to sort of cohabitate and kind of work together making things, building things, creating art also. And it's a very almost innocent kind of notion of community that I think they established there. It's actually almost ironic that you put this up because just a couple of weeks ago, my wife and I bought one of the bells that they still produce, which are very nice and still in production at Arco Santi and you can order them and we have one hanging on our roof deck in Boston right now, but quite an interesting experiment in a different way of living than any of us have attempted. Yeah, and myself, I had to refresh my memories because the small little show fort in the center there, I only saw it once, some 40 years ago almost when I was in my making my childhood land yacht and dream come true in my 70 duke in the fury for 600 bucks. I drove there and I had to see Solari walking across the courtyard with his swim trunks on and going to the pool. And yes, the brass bell past production is the only sort of business they do, but it was almost supplementary, right? They came there all together and they actually did workshops over the years, over the decades where they was interested. I mean, it was basically designed for 5,000 people but I think only a fraction like 50 actually live there but whoever wanted to come, they gave them sort of a briefing and an introduction and a training for basically self, continue to self-build and do it from scratch, from dirt in this case, this is in the desert. And so they basically did that and their kind of wind chimes was not really, they didn't rely on doing that, but it was more like, okay, this is a little thing on the side because as here from Wikipedia or actually from their website, not from Wikipedia, it's urban laboratory focused on innovative design, community and environmental accountability. So how does that sound? It just came back to my mind that I thought this is actually something interesting that a community comes together and says we do something for us and we do it ourselves and if then people come and wanna join, they're welcome but we don't rely existentially on them. I have to also add about the hospitality while again, thanks Ron having designed the Holly Kalani in a way that one of the valet people goes to see his daughter which is a bittersweet thing because she lives on the ninth island in Vegas because she can't afford to be here anymore but her dad can't afford to still be here because he gets decently paid in the Holly Kalani. My wife Kiki Grant isn't so grand because the Filipino people I said Ray are Ray of all trades, you know I see him having some time off but the sweet maids, the ladies here to make the hotel baths, they always have a smile on their face and they're the sweetest but when I asked them how they are beyond their smile I see them being totally exhausted and I asked them do you ever have off and they said no, we work seven days a week and then they say we're happy to have a job, we're happy to have the money but what kind of life is that? That's kind of plantation slavery, right? In a different way. And so if you can create a community that is not based on the slavery of capitalism but on some kind of and yes it was a sort of silly naive romantic commune idea but in some sense it has worked out and architecturally also something in many ways you can actually say we said this before but reiterated again it seems like while the desert in Arizona is climatically a desert but architecturally it seems an Oasis while we sometimes and that we say this for the next slide so keep it with that that also has to do with evolution because over there it was Frank Lloyd Wright who set shop there with his Telesin West and so Larry was actually with him and then split off and when we had this is the show court at the very bottom there when we had Will Bruder here Will was part of so Larry and then started to be on his own and then the next well there's a new generation now but Rick Joy, Wendell Burnett and all the other ones came out of wills so there is this evolution of tradition and here the sort of we bring in you and we bring in you in again it seems like when statehood that you embrace that positively but it seems that for the Hawaii architectural generation it was almost overwhelming and we didn't give them any time to catch up from the from the fetch pot to the multi-story high rise and the other guys stepped in as your architect Asipov being genetically Russian grew up in Japan you had the Holly's Pete Wimberley or Edwin Bauer you had Alfred Price from Austria and you had Takashi Anbi from Japan they stepped in and rightly so they basically said oh well it was mid-century so where we do the best but we do it better here because this is a more beautiful place that was basically the the attitude which again next slide maybe jump to the next slide in some way it almost seems while we're climatically paradise but architecturally we seem to be a desert because that tradition of these pioneers of these heyday pioneers as we see depicted here fairly well when I was on the way to the health center last week because I picked up COVID again I saw this one here and I thought the combination of the Halem Moana Moana, Manoa by I.M. Pei and your previous car the VW Bug is a perfect depiction of the exotic you know you're getting an architect who is Chinese American and cars from Germany you adopted them well because they were embracing pretty much your culture while unfortunately the image to the left of it is what we have right now where we have these invasive hermetic high-rises alluding to the mobile and the immobilia which is the French German way of calling real estate you basically have this situation that you hermeticize stachlinize as Kurt calls it because behind that is basically stacked floors that keep you cool keep you dry primarily but you throw this movie over and from our you know you see the end of the windshield of the open easy brazy P.I. mobile but the cars in front you see is a Mustang primarily convertible and you see a Jeep Wrangler primarily the car that we need you Ron to come back when we reconvene the cars and the architecture show and you share with us your crazy story of you having been flying in what the Wrangler used to be which was the Willie's Jeep right the all open Jeep so this is absurd now these two cars the Mustang convertible is the epitome of freedom right cruising through with a convertible open and that this is the open Willie's Jeep and all of a sudden they have basically morphed into these convenient to modified and closed convertibles so you get pretty much the metaphor and even more ironically what this building here replaced is one of our favorites of similar to Arco Santi I think thinking about it again just so that don't you think that word warehouse by our dear Steve Owl was like the Arco Santi of Kakaako and of Hawaii? Yeah and it's from the same time period so what we were just discussing about sort of a communal type of living is very much something that was going on in the 1960s and 70s and I apologize there is a loud machine going in the background so talk loud there was this feeling of the changing going on in society at that time and people were trying to break away from capitalist accumulative lifestyle that was very so much a tough part of the United States as well as many of the places and so they were experimenting with this we won't have private property we will try to live more communal well the word warehouse was not literally a commune but it was from that same time period and it did aesthetically try to embrace some of the same concepts of natural surfaces so it was wood and bare metal and the wood was unpeated and they didn't try to cover up all of the machinery they made it right out there in front so that they were being honest about it they weren't trying to gloss it over cover it up and it was a more I'd say it was more true to what the materials were that it was made from and again the lack of ornamentation and the lack of pretension and the lack of covering up or decorating but just to make it more honest and that is an advantage economically when you're building it and designing it as well as making a statement that was trendy at the time and of course many of the many of the original tenants tended to be more artistic they tended to be more creative they tended to be places where people were selling creatively handmade things so I'd say that yes there was a parallel there how does that go along with what we're looking towards the future of Lahina obviously it's going to be something that people in Lahina have to come up with not only what they want to do but what they're willing to do and what they can afford to do and again we have to be aware that in Lahina we are dealing with many pieces of privately owned property we're not going to be able to start from scratch with a commune because everybody already has his or her little piece of land and they have to consider not only what they want but can there be a greed upon standards that everybody will rebuild to which will take care of things like not only the need to have places to sell things and the places to live in but also to not have the burn down again so that what they're built of is not as flammable and also hopefully to be less carbon intensive so that people aren't using as much air conditioning and how can we avoid that by building better and smarter and also what's affordable when people are all going to be dealing with independently trying to get money from their insurance companies and this is going back to what you just said Martin of the lenders of people's homes and properties still demanding their mortgage payments for buildings that no longer exist which is insane how much money is going to go to the mortgage holder and how much is going to be left to the homeowner to rebuild with so it has to be there has to be there has to be creative thought going into this and hopefully again people will break away a little bit from what they expect and what they already had to be taken into consideration living smarter living less expensively living non-flammably and being someplace that also economically works where if tourism is the lifeblood of the community how do you deal with all the tourists who want to come there who are going to pay you money to be able for you to live and get a wage so all of those things are going on and there are lots and lots of other questions as well so I'm kind of diverging here but again the whole point is to think creatively and think differently in as this project goes forward being aware of how many people have suffered emotionally have been put into the trauma too that we have to be thoughtful about how they feel those most directly impacted as this project goes forward as the whole situation Yeah and expanding on that get to the next slide please here again warehouse is a you know good example because it is a full profit project right it was a strip ball I mean that's like the you know it was a row of shops but as you said it so it was shops for local businesses the mom and pop owner operated and it was you know buying you know things for little money versus all the malls we have Alamona we always had but also international marketplace morphed into that you did a great show about what it was and now we all know what it is right now so what warehouse was that where little people could buy little things from little people so where is that and this year is interesting because you know Steve is not with us anymore you know but he lives on and what where how great he lives on not just through here we see Sammy here basically with Sella they wanted to go to Patagonia and Patagonia basically had reclaimed what you see in the back are logs from Warth Warehouse and our dear friend Bundit says he's gonna get us pictures from where someone he knows got some logs and he makes picky you know structures out of it there are somewhere for you you got us updated on your reason you picky bar in Boston and you know there's one I think in Michigan somewhere where basically Bundit said that's where they have their afterlife and this is because they're a solid timber and you met and we as the Spain architect and have both been building solid timber buildings that passed you know pretty strict fire code you know requirements and it's possible because solid timber is different than live timber that live frame timber so we wanna basically look into this so I think that we gotta ask the new generation of here basically you know Sammy being one and a half decades young and then we have Joey being three decades young and he currently is with Ikea and Ikea and Patagonia yes they have to make a profit to keep their business running but they're not stock market obsessed and registered in fact both their owners decided not to do that intentionally so there's maybe not an altruist attitude there but certainly some kind of philanthropist idea that drives it so we also wanna encourage that because when you hear about insurance companies and banks it's all about the greediness so why can't there be something like this along these lines and we only have two minutes left so we wanna tell you what's gonna be next very spontaneously talking credibility you the audience might also say hey guys do you know what you're talking about because have you been there yes now we have thanks to you DeSoto you went last week to see an eye witness what's going on there so we decided spontaneously with you Jay and you DeSoto doing that next week together and giving footage giving us an impression with you Matt and I stepping back and then we stepped back in basically the week after that I will then throw in a because there's currently this in limbo okay what do we do right we don't have time and we don't wanna think about rebuilding so soon and so fast and everything is confused because it's so complex from these different angles on the other side we get news about people get kicked out of the hotels people are afraid can they even stay do they have to go on the 9th Island and do what our belay friends daughter has to do so for that we wanna we talked about we had Martin the other Martin he's from Columbia the country of Columbia a fellow tropical climate and he stepped in and did a very sort of quick proposal for what if could be as a suggestive proposition so we wanna share these two things so selecting a couple of the images that captured us our attention the most from what you will share next week DeSoto and then also from Martin so that being said we have a minute left you guys any remaining thoughts maybe Matt we didn't let you talk too much but now we put you on the spot I know I mean I think probably we just wanna end you know continuing to express our concern and thoughts with the people of LaHina and that's always at the forefront of our discussions here despite the fact that they might meander off into our professional and personal obsessions about things at the end of the day it really is about the people there and what's best for the community so maybe that's the way to end you know thank you that is and with us getting personal is just saying we care and we want you the audience where do you come from where is your heart and how can you versus jumping on sort of often to serve facial solutions having basically substantial suggestions and that's what we encourage us all to do okay that is it DeSoto much looking forward on your impressions from having gone there for us and for all of us next week thanks for that looking forward to bye bye