 episode, actually the 218th of Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. We're broadcasting live again from three different locations in the world, from Long Beach, California, with Ron Lindgren, hi Ron. Hello. And back in Honolulu, Hawaii with DeSoto Brown. Hi DeSoto. Hello everybody. Hello everybody. So we're back as the three from the filling station in our series about whenever we get stuck in sort of the mud of mediocrity in architecture, which unfortunately in Hawaii very sadly recently happens a lot, we try to get the wheels free and spinning again by looking outside of architecture and the realm of automobiles into architecture and get sort of the fresh angle. So let's dive right back in and bring up the first slide. And we've been just because of very specific circumstances that we'll touch on here and there later on. It's about movies and you are, you know, Ron, you're watching what, sign yourself one movie at least per day, right? So you're one of the biggest movie nuts. Yes. Right. And this is one, this is one I watched on the way back to Hawaii. And this is called Ford versus Ferrari. And last time we were talking about the exotic, right? And DeSoto had shared these advertisements for Kalakawa Motors, who were, you know, marketing this sort of more, you know, decently sized German Ford version, the Fort Taunus. And then they were trying to bring the sexiness of Italian scooters, the Vespas with incredible, I think they said 100 miles per gallon gas mileage. Right. Right. So this movie is really greatly depicting that this is a, is a watching recommendation here about these two worlds. And there is the young Li Aya Kaka there. We were just talking about, well, let's not get into it now, but we will talk about it later about how do you portray history here? It's actors playing real people in history. This is Li Aya Kaka, the young Li Aya Kaka, who was basically going up in front of the CEOs of the sort of encrusted and Mr. Ford, I think the second it was, you know, it's greatly depicted there, this sort of grumpy guy. And he's trying to make the case, which you just sort of been pointing out that, you know, the screenshot I did in the, in the airplane at the top left is like when he said, well, you know, we try to get, provide Americans with everything that the American dream has to provide a house, right, on their own and a car. But the cars were pretty much like we were talking about in the last show, right? They were like the ostentatious and extravagant Finn American stars and collides us. And at some point, you know, they couldn't satisfy the young and upcoming hungry generation, because something was missing. And he was then portraying that at the bottom right with Sophia Loren, you know, the sexiness. He said people want to see besides safety and security, they want sexiness. And that's what truly the American automakers present and demonstrate. And that's what Ferrari is about, right? And he tried to basically then talk them into basically doing, you know, doing that. And yeah, so then the rest is you watch the movie, right? But it's along the same line. So it's a great movie to kind of watch. And we want to, you know, this is about architecture too. So I mean, they really portray like the mid-century modern international style sort of, you know, office building that you see up there, which obviously run in your area, you know, the image number three at the top right, Michael, if you could go there. You know, less than ever, this is appropriate, right? Because you have the heat right now, you have that crazy cyclone there, the bomb cyclone. So, you know, they have the wildfires. So the architecture of international style, you know, was already problematic to begin with, but is increasingly being sort of inappropriate for the climate of your home and equally the climate of your home disorder, right? So let's go to the next slide. And this is your stage now, because we're talking cars as status symbols and as expression of extra vaganza run, right? And that gets you going. Yeah, the picture at the upper left just happens to be one of Craig Elwood's very famous houses. He was such a great self promoter of his office, of his particular style of Southern California mid-century modernism. And for him, an automobile really was a status symbol. That was probably the most important thing. That's not to say that he probably didn't enjoy driving the cars that he did, but he expressed his self-image of being successful and talented in all sorts of ways. But one way was to always be seen driving the most luxurious, the newest, the most sought after car you can imagine. And in this particular picture, that's not necessarily his car, but Martin, you're seeing that as one of the very famous Jaguar models. Yeah, that's the E-type that positioned in front of this house. And again, this is the show quote. If you want to know more about it and you perfectly portrayed him in the show that we call Cultivated Classics. And then his name wasn't even Craig Elwood. His name was Burke. What was his first name again? Help me out. I think Johnny Burke. Yeah, Johnny Burke, exactly. And the pick on the right that we, as an exception to the rule, pulled from the web here, is showing one of his buildings and this Lamborghini Espada from the late 60s to 70s, which is this really extravagant car that, again, is in compliance with his very extravagant architecture. Not to say that they weren't both, what we're interested in, also very performative. I mean, these were fast cars. And his buildings were very performative, especially in the days of climate change. You see these sort of grills there. We did a show to sort of gentle grills and goons. So there's certainly an aspect of environmental performance there. So it's not just showing off on the surface. They're substantial. And the Hawaii equivalent of that one, Ron, is you guys having been the heroes and the legends of hospitality design. And who was your companion, or one could also say, another CU competitor in that field? Which Hawaii architect or architect operating from Hawaii was that who we see at the very bottom right in his building? All right. It was always the firm of Wimberley, who were also beginning to build around the world at about the same time we were. And so a very large firm versus our medium to small firm. It was always an interesting competition between us. Yeah. And we at the bottom right, the show quote, I have this from a Doko Momo talk story that Pete Wimberley's late partner, Don Gu, was giving as you had given one round for us about your office's work. And you see him here basically together with Steve McQueen and basically racing in Le Mans. And he was racing this yellow Lotus there. So again, they probably, again, for the reason depicted in the movie we showed on the first slide, Ford versus Ferrari, they weren't driving even what the alternative was in the movie is basically the Cobra. The Cobra car was the answer that Ford basically had to compete with Ferrari and be equally sexy. But these guys, both Craig Elwood and Pete Wimberley weren't falling for that. They wanted the exotic and the exotic was Italian, the exotic was Lamborghini and Lotus. And we see at the bottom left one of Pete's legacy buildings. And which one is that? And explain a little bit more about the sort of the historic connotation and even the contemporary disorder. Well, this is the Bank of Hawaii building located on Kalakawa Avenue in Waikiki and was built in 1965-66. And it's basically just a rectangular high rise office building, but it's got this very sort of interesting scallop swooping exterior structure around it that encases it that makes it really dramatic looking. And at the time, there was a lot of speculation as to what those forms were supposed to suggest or be inspired by. And the thing that most people said, well, it's supposed to look like the top of a pineapple because of course, the pineapple industry was very important in Hawaii at that time. Wimberley said, no, it isn't supposed to look like anything. It's just something to look exotic and interesting in a resort area. And mind you, this is Waikiki in the 60s when it was growing very dramatically because of the increase of tourists because of the jet age, because of jet airplanes coming here. So this is kind of a nod to Waikiki as an exotic destination and turning an office building, which was otherwise very prosaic into something artistic and interesting and eye catching, which a lot of tourists took note of as part of their Waikiki vacation of the time. And they still do are exotic escapism experts. Zana identifies that as still her favorite building in the hood of Waikiki. And a lot of stuff has come after and it is this generic pastiche cheesecake factory stuff that's replaceable. And you find it with this look anywhere in the world. While this one here is really distinct. And again, like you were pointing out the Soto, it isn't looking, it depends on what you want to see it represents. And of course, the structural engineer would see arches in it. The pigeon would see that it's poop. It's basically not sitting on any horizontal parts and its sibling is Vladimir Asipov's IBM building. We're both had decided, okay, we are not doing the international style glass box that we saw depicted in on the first slide in the screenshots of the movie. But they were recognizing we're in the tropics, so we're giving it a screen. Now the question is to contemporary standards of absolutely high energy efficiency. If you would ecotech them, which is a software that the youngest generation is supposed to use, you can say in debate of how much percentage it is going to shade over the time of the day. But at least there's the gesture of that, right? And you could actually retrofit it and could use the arches as to mount exterior, you know, movable screen shading at the back of it. So it would hold that. So there's a potential there. And you could also and probably should bring back the plinth that we see was designed in a similar way. It isn't like that anymore. It's the same generic, you know, storefront that we have, unfortunately all over Calacaua Avenue. So. True. Dive more into the tropical exotic and metal always being shinier and gaudier on the other side gets us to the next slide. Is I think I've seen one to be honest. I was really surprised, but I didn't find the picture. But DeSoto, have you ever seen on the island more than that one where have you even seen that one, that car that we see at the bottom left, the Opel GT? I don't remember how many if any actually got here. This is one of the things that's interesting is how certain cars are chosen to be imported into the United States. And there are a lot of ramifications as to how that happens, safety equipment, etc. As to also do they think it will actually sell. So those are things that are unknown to most of us as to whether we see them or not. Exactly. And this is one of the most traditional car brands in Germany that don't belong to the the ones that you consider to be the fancy ones that for that reason never really made it that much into the US. So they stay very tropical. Sorry, they stay very exotic and not tropical. And this is Opel. So Adam Opel was just really early and as we see on the picture number one in having one of the co-proprietors next to Ford to having developed the automobile. And then next to that number two is a piece provided by our semi who was shooting that when his mother was driving on the out of bond. This is a you know, an old Opel from the 40s or the 50s that was somewhere in storage, you know, picked this mold up there and or algae sort of in this green. And so here are them. And the one the Opel GT down there was an answer to the Corvette. So it's like the German poor man's Corvette. It was smaller, but it has the same kind of features and the pop up headlights. And obviously this is an original advertisement that wants to promote it obviously as very sexy, right? And Opel is basically still around, but Opel struggled and Opel happens to be the main plant actually used to be in the city of Bochum, where we have designed the canopy for the subway. And when we won this competition soon after that, basically GM who bought Opel, by the way, struggled as we know. And so Opel struggled, so Bochum struggled. So Martin's firm and his father's firm struggled. And it actually took 10 years to get the project basically built and Opel is still around. You see at the bottom right, some of their kind of new ideas for new cars kind of fancy kind of cookie that you could like pull a segue out of the rear part of it. So they're still trying to be living up to their original sort of pioneering history. But there is a connection to Hawaii through your family. And that we see on picture seven and tell us more about it and actually six as well, six and seven. Well, the as we have discussed in the past in the late 1950s when American cars became immensely big and immensely gaudy and immensely strange looking, a number of American consumers turned to purchasing foreign cars. And General Motors, as you said, was the owner of Opel. So for a brief period, they imported Opels to the United States and sold them. And the pictures that you see are one, an Opel arriving in a ship here in Honolulu in 1957, which unfortunately had been badly damaged on route and was being unloaded just to go to the junkyard. But also in 1958, my grandmother bought an Opel Caravan station wagon. And that is the certificate ownership that my grandmother had here in Honolulu for her Opel that she owned for a few years. So she fell for the allure of the exotic small compact car, just as many other people did at that time. Yeah. And go to the next slide and run, I want to address you as for me amazingly for half of a century, the Killingsworth office has basically been staying true to itself. And was sort of resilient to the quasi expectations of changing zeitgeist all the way through from modernism to postmodernism, which we always say we believe we're still in and just dresses differently. And you guys were in a refreshingly and amazing stubborn way resisting that automotive industry, because of the way it is set up, having to cater to people in a way more direct way are not able to do that. And so from this kind of context, I would like to pick your brain run on the AMC pacer that we see in there. What are your memories and your thoughts about what happens in the moment of time when the AMC pacer came out? I'm a bit at a loss on this. I think that I've only seen maybe two or three pacers in my life. And I was going to say in response to what you were saying about our office, we sat there and worked and were just amazed at things like deconstructionism and postmodernism and whateverism were flashing by like a flash in the pan. And we just kept our heads down and kept busy. The pacer looks like a pretty serious car though. You'll have to tell me about it. Well, and again, the metal is always different on the other side. Yeah, I mean, it is, we had 73. 73 is this really serious year that you guys remember as we do here because it was the first oil crisis in history. There was a resource rooted, but basically politics. And it made people and architects, but you guys had been pretty much biochromatic to begin with. So you didn't really have to change much. You just continued to do buildings that were in balance with the natural environment and used natural ventilation and things. So there was actually no need for you to change. But as we pointed out in the last shows, particularly in the last one, America had to because they had these big straßenkreuzer, the big gas guzzlers. And there was no way for them to survive. They were like dinosaurs that got extinct abruptly through like the real dinosaurs got by volcanoes erupting, you know, and ice age and stuff like that for the straßenkreuzer dinosaurs. It was the oil crisis. So the AMC PESA was from my German point of view and you the solo now jump in and help was that desperate attempt of the American car industry to say, now we're going to do what these other Europeans have been doing for a while and actually do smaller cars. Is that fair to say? Yeah. And that had already happened once before. As I mentioned just earlier, the American car companies had to respond 1959 to 1960 to the sudden popularity of imported cars. And then those compact cars that they invented suddenly began to grow again. And then in the early 1970s, they had to do it all over again. And they invented the Ford Pinto and the Chevrolet Vega. And American motors at that time was a much smaller and ultimately failing car company. And they had the advantage of being small. So they were able to design more quirky and unusual vehicles for a niche market. And the Pacer was one of those vehicles. It's like a bubble. It's like a big rounded thing with a lot of glass. And it was a compact car to a degree, but it was actually still quite large inside. And it was always a peculiar and funny looking and interesting car. So they were trying to appeal not to everybody, but to a smaller percentage of the population. And I also might just say too, since this is about architecture, the Pacer is very architectural in the same way as like the international style structures were with not as much of a framework or not as much metal, but a lot of glass. And in a hot climate, that of course would make you more hot, which you don't necessarily want, but it is eye catching. And it did appeal to a certain group of people. Yeah. And the makers of the Pixar movies used the AMC Pacer as we see it here in the middle on the right as one of the bad guys. And the ones they selected were the cars that basically flopped. It didn't really make it. But that is all, for the same reason, it was sort of cute. And number five, there's this hilarious story of, again, that we Europeans might look at this way more nostalgic than you Americans do. All the Europeans I have been in touch had been one way or another really, really emotional about it. One of my colleagues from Hanover, you know, was getting into a fight with me because he hated them. And when I was looking at one that we were driving by, he kind of yelled at me. And I also have an American colleague who expressed the same feelings about it. And then it was ironic that we had this fellow European lady on number five, Winka Dumbledam. She's a Dutch architect who practices in New York. And we had invited her for a lecture in my prairie days, the University of Nebraska. And I was sitting next to my American colleague. It was right after that dispute we had about the Pacer. And she started her lecture in sharing what this is my beloved AMC Pacer. And I just kicked him in the side and got a kick out of it, right? So it's really interesting how people architects can get really, really emotional about cars, right? And that shows how much more personal with architecture, not so much, right? Architecture seems to be more detached and more for kind of the disciplinary circles to basically get really, you know, all over it and debate and argue, but not so much the general public. So we want to use the little remaining time to actually introduce another character from the cars movies that is very little known. And this is now in exchange while the Pacer that comes from you guys, you actually don't have so much to say about it. Now we turn this around next slide, because there's a car from my culture that you actually know way more about and you taught me about a soda. So go ahead. Dumbledam. This is a very short lived German car from 1957 to 58. And it's called the Janus in American pronunciation. And it was made by a company that actually just manufactured motorcycles in Germany. And then they branched out into making a mini car. This was really notable because the front and the back of the car were identical. And they both had a door that opened up at an angle. And inside the engine was in the center of the vehicle and the two seats were back to back. So the people in the front face the front and the people in the back face the back. And if you wanted to, you could open up the entire back of the car while the car was driving, which was demonstrated in a little advertising film that the Germans, the company made at the time that the car was for sale. Now supposedly only something like 20 or 25 of these Janus cars were imported into the United States, I have read. And if that's true, a number of them ended up right here in Honolulu because there was actually a Janus dealer on Kapiolani Boulevard that was part of a larger, another imported car dealer. And there's a picture of the Janus car in front of that dealership on Kapiolani Boulevard. Now this was not a long-lived car, as I just said. It ended up being too weird and too quirky and too little for even people in Germany and the rest of Europe to buy. But there is a hardcore group of collectors today who still treasure these cars. And you can look at videos on YouTube of them getting all together and driving around in caravans of these funny little Janus cars. And Janus, by the way, was a Roman god who had two faces. So they faced in different directions, opposite directions. Thus the Janus car mimics the Janus god from Roman culture. Yeah. But for the Pixar guys, and if we can get number five up and large here, that guy, the company, the brand was called Zündapp. And that's even hard. I always have the weekly German lesson for you. So that's spelling wise, kind of tough, right? You got the Z and then the U with the Omlauts with the dots. So Zündapp basically in the Pixar, in the Cars movie was taking the lead because Dr. Zündapp was the main bad guy. He was the leader of bad guy. Of all the other sort of silly, unfortunate kind of crew members as the AMC Pacers and the Pentos and the other one. So that's kind of a really interesting thing. And once again, we learned from each other from the different parts of the world. Thanks for teaching me part of my automotive history that I did not know. Hadn't we talked and hadn't you pointed out, because I never heard of any Janus dealership here anywhere in my hometown. So thanks for that. Okay, I think we're at the end of the show. So look forward to we might venture out and go back to the core of architecture with actually the three of us. There's a couple of events that happened to us personally and professionally that we thought are worth sharing. And so this show sequence will be called Everything Happens for Reasons, which we're probably going to start out with next week. But then again, we always will take a break from that and go back to the automotive. And we'll continue with something that's very familiar to you, Ron, and for us, because this is about our favorite Audi's that we drive. And especially the ones that are a couple of years old. So I'm going to introduce one that you guys at least officially had never seen because it was never exported to the US. And you guys will wonder why. So until then, thanks, guys, and everyone else and see you next week. And until then, stay increasingly mentally mobile as we bye bye.