 Great to have you all back for another episode of think-tank-for-wise human-humane architecture. Me, your host Martin Despang, is broadcasting life from the city of Worksburg, which is the most northern part of the most southern state here in Germany of Bavaria. It's about 10 p.m. here. You can hear the bell tower ringing over there. It should be done soon. So last show we concluded saying we're either going to do our European Hawaiian Madeira again, or are we going to do another of our automobile architecture episodes? And the ones discussing that within doing these are the Soto Baun, Bishop Museums, Historian, and Archivist, who got called by the museum and therefore can't be with us today. And our other third one from the filling station architect Ronald Lindgren is still dealing with his flooding, his internal flooding in his Keelingsworth-inspired house, who was his business partner and friend. So I'm on my own today, but I talked to this with them before, so I will also squeeze in things on behalf of them. So we're going to start out not with either or, but as well as in the first slide up, please, is going to be cars. So we're back on Madeira, although the top row there is actually from Spain. I just got back from our cross-cultural culinary connoisseurs, Joey and Clara, who has moved to Barcelona in Spain, Catalonia to be specific as the Catalonians like to hear it. And so the top one here is a car that's very common in Madeira, but we forgot to snap a really good one. So I made up for that and got this one here is the Renault Catre, which means four, number four. And that's a car that's very much sort of like the sibling, the brother or sister of the Citroen de Chavaux that we've been talking about a lot in the past in the automobile show. Lenny, my son, is coming to visit me with his Citroen DS3 on Monday. I'm looking forward to that. And the DS3 is our investigating mobile when I'm back in my Hanover hometown and where we checked out a 70s courtyard house and we saw one of these very rare Renault fours, which you hardly ever see in Germany anymore. But they're around quite a lot, not too much, but still you see them. The one at the very top right is looking at Renault four as a brother because their front grille looks very similar. This is a new car. This is the Honda E prototype that Honda launched back in Japan and in Europe. It's a fully electric car and they say it's inspired by actually the first Honda Civic. However, that front grille looked a little different, had sort of this meandering kind of notching there. So I thought when I saw it, hey, this reminds me of the Renault four a lot. So the four bottom cars are actually from Malta. And there are some new cars out there as our Renault Megane that you see us at the filling station there at the middle right. But the car next to it in front of it is a very legendary car that's a Lancia designed by the legendary and most versatile and most inclusive as I like to add. And I forget to say that so I can say it now. Relative to Ron, what Ron told us that Ed was really one of his favorite project was basically for Latin American working class people and to give them housing and decency and dignity, which he wasn't able to accomplish, unfortunately, because they were very successful in resort design and rightly so. Jujara kind of reminds me of Jujara because Jujara did what impressed you, Ron, basically a lot, basically he designed many things, many hot cars as for example the the M1 BMW and the DeLorean from back to the future. But he did very simple cars as this sort of your first golf and the Fiat Panda. And he's designed this one here. Rally fans are very fond of this one because it's a very legendary car that also drove in rallies. This is our 200 happens to be our 250th show and 205 is also the name of the model of the Peugeot, which is the one to the left in the middle at the left row. This is a car that's been very popular and there are few around here in Germany, but Portugal doesn't have an own car brand. But it's a place for car manufacturing for other car manufacturers quite a bit. So, you know, this is the Mediterranean area. So like the fellow Mediterranean car manufacturers of the French are around quite a bit. But also the bottom row that is to the very bottom left is the Mercedes 190. The nickname is the baby bends because it was the smallest Mercedes that they did at that time. And they still it's not a C class. That's one that's a very legendary car. They were built to last and they're still around even in Germany. Joey was once looking into one back then. And they're they're in pretty good shape over there. It's an island again. There's a lot of sea salt. But they're around. They take care of their cars. And the one at the very bottom right this little and I talked a lot because I said, you're probably not familiar with that one. He said, no, no, no, I know them very well. This is a Ford Capri and talking islands. This is obviously named after an Italian island. And this has been manufactured by the German branch of the Ford American motor company, and then sort of got exported or from the point of view of Americans get imported. So, so it's been it's been known over there too. So, again, why are we talking about cars? What's the relationship of cars and architecture? Here again, it's like it's not that there aren't any at all fancy cars. And there's certainly every now and then you see a larger, you know, limousine. But there's a lot of small cars for the future. There's an oddity we read. We're still puzzled about it as a projection that there might not be small cars in the future anymore. Because due to higher emission standards, the profit margin basically supposedly, you know, is smaller in smaller cars. And it's a larger effort to bump it up to the energy efficiency standards. So they're saying that way the small cars might not be profitable anymore. So the car manufacturers might stop doing them. We hope this is not true because it's sort of an irony, right? I mean, like, you know, the small car is the tiny house equivalent in architecture. And to say a tiny house is not, you know, cost efficiently to do is kind of absurd. So hopefully that that is not true. And again, you see the Honda e prototype up there that obviously tries to make that work. So let's go to the next slide. Because talking old cars in Madeira is being part of Portugal, here we see an old house in Madeira. Madeira is politically part of Portugal. Portugal has been in an has been an authoritarian dictatorship or, you know, until the mid 70s. And only 10 years later, a decade later, it became part of the European Union. And even then it took them a while to basically, you know, get funding and support from the other European countries. So you still see, like you see old cars, you see old houses there. And that's a good thing. And the European Union is, by the way, the President Ozilá Fondar Láin has just announced a few days ago that she sets the goal of 2035, when the fossil combustion engine should be off the table in the European Union. So only electric cars or other, you know, systems should be allowed. And the the very sort of polluting combustion engine should be then the past. So we will see how that works. Honda, by the way, announced along these lines, they're aiming for even a decade earlier 2025, which is which is very soon. So we we look forward to that one. And why is that important for architecture, as well as for automobiles? We've been talking that the Keschverklanker program, which came from Germany, the Aprafe, was pretty much a sales pitch by the car industry. Because until you produce a car entirely with fossil fuel, which we're far away from, it's more ecological to drive your old vehicle as long as you can. And especially if you have small cars with smaller engine, that's even more the case. And that is true for architecture as well. That's one of the other agendas that the European Union puts out. There is an increased awareness of that we should take care of the existing building stock and put that up to pace to current standards, as well as energy efficiency standards, because the carbon footprint that had been put into a building, you need to get that out of it. Or in best case, they've been built so many hundred years ago that they were basically pre fossil because they want to power tools in place. So there's here's an old house in we've been sitting in the central pedestrian street last show and had some nice dinner. This is only a few houses away from that one. You can see, when you look very close at the very top middle image, you can see the louvres and you can see something shining through it. There is no light on there. I tell you, it's where you actually hollow. And you see, there was an artist movement of an initiative to have everyone painted store in certain different ways and just attempts to make the buildings look prettier than there are. And again, this is still the aftermath of that totalitarian regime that they have and takes a long time. Reminds me of our east side of Germany, which is still catching up from their totalitarian regime. And there's some remote areas where buildings look like that a lot. And from the solo, I said, I reminded him and we're still finding connections. And we said we almost could have met around Elvis back in the early 90s, which was my year in college in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I did a trip up to Graceland and in Tennessee. And he did too. So we could have met there. And he found some houses in that area and some rather poor neighborhoods where they basically had kept the facades as big fronts. And basically not want to reveal that it was basically hollow and basically slum behind. So next slide. Next slide. We thought this is really very characteristic and typical for that shift of Portugal, of still the older generation. There's this gentleman there to the left, all the gentlemen bending over still with a brush and a broom, basically cleaning the streets. And then you see on the right side, a fancy restaurant where we wanted to have a drink, but the waiting line was too long. And that fancy electric, you know, I free beamer there stands for the next generation. The first city I ever got in touch with on the mainland of Portugal was Coimbra, which is in lands, it's not on the on the ocean. And you could see very well that the older generations, some of them are still living in these very sort of medieval cities with very in a very primitive way. Without many of the humanities that, you know, you run a suffering from now running water and electricity and stuff like that. And you see the new generation who have been lucky or not depending on how look at it to sort of become successful in capitalism and, you know, drive fancy cars and things like that. So you see these clashing into each other or having this sort of kind of weird coexistence as you can see on on this slide here. Our exotic escapism experts, Suzanne knows that very well, because at her tweets 16 age, when she left home and wanted to get a taste of Portugal, she lived in Porto, which is further north from Coimbra, northwest on the coast. She, you know, even lived that I just visited, but she lived in families and new families who where this was all happening. So speaking of Suzanne next slide. This is on our honeymoon hopping here. We, you know, had had some good time. And I quizzed the soda and I said, you know, where's that. And he said, well, that certainly looks like, you know, you had a good time in a nice resort. And it truly looks like that. But in fact, the point we want to make about this one here, this is public. This is public space. This is in some small town on the coast. There's a restaurant, but the pools down there are public pools. In fact, local people were just repainting the pool. And, you know, to me, the paint didn't look dry yet, but they already, you know, filled it up with water again. And the kids were going there and having fun. So that's something that we said we would like to see, you know, in Honolulu more, or in Hawaii more, reminds us of Laurence Halpern's great Califountain in Portland, where our trumpet here, number one, David Rockwood is from, right? Public space is for the little people. We're not talking resorts. We're not talking egalitarian, you know, circles. We're talking egalitarian circles for all the people. And that's basically happening here. So that's something we want to throw out for consideration for us, for us back in Hawaii. Next slide is talking architecture. So what's the best architecture, you know, here, back in Germany, it's wall architecture. It's summer right now, but it's going to be winter at some point sooner than any wish here, and you need walls. In Hawaii and in Madeira, in Europe, to Hawaii, we basically need roof architecture. And this is one of the best pieces of architecture that crossed my path here, which is just a tent. And that reminds us of our guest, Larry Medland, who's been doing many shows, who's been doing just that with his collaborator and partner in crime, Friado. And he has been doing, you know, tents that were just like the one here in Madeira that were opaque. And, you know, they let this or translucent, but they weren't transparent. They let the light through, but they keep the sun out. That's what you want. While in Germany, back at the very top left is our wilderness wedding, where we got these transparent umbrellas to, you know, protect us from that. At that time, really, really chilly rain. And I went back with this umbrella to Friado's 72 Munich Olympics, which reminds me a lot of the acrylic plates. He basically used to cover it up because, again, there isn't so much the need here to shade it because there's only a few months where we have the sun being so intense. But, you know, in wintertime, the sun is more than welcome. And it can keep you warm. So let's go to the next slide. Again, doesn't this look like back in Hawaii? Very much so. So we said the geology and the scenery, you know, the landscape is very much the same. This is high up in the mountains. And you see these sort of paths there. It looks like roads, but they're actually water lines and they're called levadas. And something is really the same. There is actually a windward side and a leeward side. And the windward side is the wet side as well, where there's a lot of rain. And the other side, the southern part is just like our southern part in Waikiki. You know, I sometimes, you know, don't have any rain for weeks or for months. And that's the same here. They were basically then building some pretty massive infrastructure of these sort of water ways that they were like cutting through the jungle. And they have these, you know, they have these little rivers that basically help to bring the water that's necessary for life, both for farming, for irrigation and for drinking. And they basically bring this through that drier southern side. The very top images are a choke vault from top left is the river of Isar that runs through Munich. Talking water and flooding, you probably are wondering if we got hit by some of the terrible floodings with many hundreds being killed in Germany here. You have the same in China. We're safe. But again, many people are not. And so we pray for them and wish them all the best. And, you know, more importantly and as importantly, we should do anything and everything we can do in the future. So to prevent these things, nature is getting angry. That's rightly so, because we've not been treating her as well as we should have been. So we got to stop doing that and do better. The Isar was not quite as, you know, overflowing as other rivers and so, but pretty high too. So water is, you know, it's not just indoor flooding for Ron, but it's outdoor flooding currently really, really a lot. So let's go to the next slide. Very high up in the mountains then at the top of the mountains is something that we've been referring to in a show back then about a volcanic veneer and ventilation where we pointed out the island of El Hierro, and that's part of the Canary Islands. And that's actually not that far away from Madera. It's the next kind of part of that geographical area of the Micronesia, as it's called. And it's just south of Madera. And it's a volcanic nature as well. And we've been, you know, talking about that there was this very brave engineer who over, you know, decades has been relentless to basically put the island off the grid by using hydroelectric power. And they've been building these big reservoirs up in the mountains and then let the water run down and, you know, harvest energy that way. And you can see the same thing here at the top of the mountains in Madera here where there's this big water reservoir, and then there's the la Veda coming out of it. Bottom left, you see also there's water running on the sides of the streets and in front of the houses there, which is something very scenic. It reminds me of Paris where you have constantly water running, you know, on the side of the street and the walkways, you know, makes some beautiful noise. And, you know, it's so clear and crisp that I'm pretty sure you can, you might even be able to drink that. Next slide, where does the water come from? Basically from the mountains. This is where the clouds run into the higher elevations and they weep and become rain. And you drive through this rainforest, which is the Laurel forest that we talked about last time and it's really sort of beautiful. You can't, this is a little different, right? And there's a lot of hiking in Hawaii where you can sort of hike through the high elevations, but not so much drive through that, which is probably good. But here there is actually roads. So these are the old roads before they were doing a sort of massive tunnel infrastructure they've been looking into last time. And next slide is when you get out of the jungle down in the lower elevations, you see how severely mankind has been interacting and interfering, you have to say, you know, with the forest, with the rainforest and see how many, you know, buildings you see there. This reminds us a lot of Oahu and Honolulu, which makes you wonder. There was an old magazine from the 60s that had a title story that was saying paradise and pearl. And that was back in the 60s and obviously things haven't really improved since then. The opposite. Next slide. So this is what happens then. This is really sad to see. This is the smell, like really eucalyptus seeds. I'm sure the one on the left might be eucalyptus tree and they're clearing the forest and you're wondering for what, and it's probably for inhabitation. And again, as we said last time, the name Madeira is basically Portuguese for wood. And so if they keep going like that, they got to rename their island or this, you know, because there might not be enough wood left for its left to basically justify that name. Next slide. Obviously as an architect, you know, I'm sort of have a conflict of interest because that's our discipline and profession. So, you know, we've been spotting, you know, these pieces of modern architecture, you know, the one at the top right and the bottom one, surely nice pieces. You know, this is nice. You know, the kind of the Honda E was sort of like a retro. You know, this is purely not retro. This is modernism that sort of self-invents itself. You see they're using a lot of the vernacular themes of courtyards and open spaces and roof architecture. They're honest in their materiality, but they're all coastal, right? So architecturally, you know, yes, but typologically, single-family residences, you can call them McMansions. They're, you know, they're just not right there, right? They're just basically sort of a territorialization in a way and just taking away from the character of the island that should be left more natural and not be sort of getting these measles, even though these are nice ones. But again, if you do too many of these, you just ruin the character. Talking character, again, next slide. Climatically, we've been talking about the one at the bottom is a one just next door, just under construction to the one from the last slide at the bottom. We have this sort of weird obsession with saying, oh, we want to stop there and we basically want to inhabit the ruins because, I mean, that's basically what you need and you can then have your sort of more softer infill or enclosure being sort of separated. The ones at the top, you hardly see in Hawaii because the cost of, you know, land and the islands being so precious and so whenever there's lands, you know, people are going to either not build on it and mostly keep speculating until it gets more expensive and they can make a bigger buck or they build and then immediately move in or they rent it out or whatever they do. But these are sort of incomplete buildings. These are like ruins and I thought these are really kind of nice sort of mesian or purvey pavilions that I would love to have them, you know, been moved in and having, you know, suburban nomads, you know, throw up their tents in them because again, they provide already what you need, just like same in Hawaii, similarity. Most time of the year, shelter just from the sun and the rain, like you don't need any walls and they don't, they don't have that. Next slide is pretty much us looking for where we wanted to honeymoon and so we went, you know, online and shop for places and this was one that appealed to us, had very good reviews called the Sat Charom, I don't know how to pronounce that correctly. And, you know, it reminded us, these are the show quotes in the top right of the Makaha or the Ihilani back then by Ron's partner, a business partner, Larry Stricker, which is a nice project, location-wise rather remote. So this one here is also, you know, way out West, same thing. And they, you know, the consideration was just like at the Makaha apartments, did not have this being an eyesore being on top of the hill or the mountain, but basically been at the foothills of it and almost being tucked into it. So that's something, you know, honorable, we thought, kind of camouflaging the mass and you can see this is rather a lot. There's a lot of rooms in there. But we decided to not do it. It was also, you know, seemed a little bit too hip, didn't feel right for us. And, but still, you know, architecturally and from kind of the strategy of, you know, trying to nest it into the landscape. But again, we thought, you know, if you do this too much, if you do this a lot, you're still going to, you know, do too much more than the island sort of could handle. So we decided not to stay there. And where we then decided to stay, we're going to tell you next week or next time, hopefully our two others from the filling station, the soda and Ron are going to be back. And we're going to decide if we're going to do another one of our auto architecture or if you're going to continue and then let you know at which place we stayed, which we very much want to share with you and that we can learn a lot from that back for Hawaii. So with that, thank you and see you all next week and stay, you know, try to adopt the Madarin mindset a little bit more because there's a lot to learn from. Bye-bye.