 to have you all back for another episode of ThinkPick Hawaii's human humane architecture. We're broadcasting live from, again, two as far apart locations as possible. DeSoto Brown back in his Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii, hi DeSoto. Hello everyone. And me near Munich, Germany. So we've been talking about, we're picking up where we had left last week DeSoto and let's bring up the first slide for that one already. We're talking about everything tries to go back to normal, right, in Hawaii. And that makes us sort of think about, again, the past and the present and the future. And somehow we were talking before the show that back then some indigenous cultures, their radius of reaching out was rather limited, right? Like Native Americans and other people all over the world. And others were really out and about. And you guys were one of them, right? Hawaiian very early. I mean, I will, you know, when you did a presentation for the German American Chamber of Commerce once and we were in the Yolani Palace, you know, and you see all the pictures from all the crowning ceremonies, the Hawaiian royalty was part of, they were really, really out and about there. You also said, you know, people were, although we're so remote, maybe because when people wanted to go other places, they needed to have a stopover, even like back then, right? So there was always cultural exchange. But, you know, with all respect, we think way back when it was way more eager to learn from each other, which went both ways. And one was looking for the best of all these worlds. Well, we see this in decline too, you know, and that's still saying that very respectfully, we could be more drastic these days where you have a lot of influx, you know, basically, and it seems almost like you have, well, you have millions coming to Hawaii and, you know, people go and some people have to go for good because they can't make a living anymore. These are all these issues, but if we look at this slide here, this gets us back to not even one-and-a-half centuries ago, this ship there, with this strange sounding Scandinavian name, basically sailed from Madeira, which we're visiting to compare and see some things that we can maybe, you know, be inspired from there. That was in 1879. And supposedly, you know, a guy who was on that ship brought something to Hawaii that most people in the world think is as Hawaiian as you can get it. And what is that? That is the ukulele. And the ukulele, which we can see in a picture on the far right in this slide, is something that's totally associated with Hawaiian music. And throughout the world, people think that, as you just said, it's not an indigenous instrument. It is a reworking of a native instrument from Portugal. And the ukulele is a smaller version of that Portuguese instrument brought by Portuguese immigrants to the Hawaiian Islands. And some of them then became builders, constructors of the ukulele, popularized it, and Hawaiians took to it and thought it was wonderful. And the original people who were manufacturing them in the Hawaiian Islands were Portuguese immigrants. And then eventually it became something that spread all over the world. So that's something that we have the Portuguese immigrants to thank for. And then we also see in the same slide at the very top, we see the Portuguese sweet bread. At the bottom, we see the Portuguese sausage. And on the left-hand side, we see the reason that all of Portuguese people came here was the sugar cane industry. And it was necessary for the sugar growers starting in the middle to late 1800s after 1876 to import workers because there weren't enough people here for this growing industry. And it is from Portugal that some of those people came, they also came from China, they also came from Japan, from Korea, the Philippines, et cetera. But all of those people melded together here into what we now think of as local culture because of sugar. And the Portuguese were part of that. And talking sugar and yummy and delicious, not to forget about that centerpiece, the molestadas, which we know from our hood, a front yard, the Lenards ride on Calacaua Avenue. Everyone is thinking of that. Capa Hulu Avenue. Oh, Capa Hulu, sorry, I better get used to it again. You better get re-acclimated here. You've been away too long. I might get lost then on the road. I hope not. So again, that bakery, everyone, the tourists are coming and thinking, oh, this is a great Hawaiian invention. And it's basically been adopted. Yeah, and the sugar cane, as you said, with all respect, but you guys thought that the other sort of cultures weren't quite as efficient and effective with cash-cropping what that basically was, right? King Calacaua started to basically see a way to make profit and grow that. And just the Portuguese have been doing this for hundreds of years. So they were very, very used to that. So in that year, when that ship came, I think on Wikipedia, we read, there were like 438 Portuguese people on the Hawaiian islands. A few years later, a few decades later in 1911, there was already 16,000 people, right? So quite the influx of that. So that was then, and now is now. So let's go to the next slide. Something very familiar to us, ever since the cash-cropping thing has led to forgetting about how to feed yourself, right? On both islands, we don't use it. Yes, unfortunately. So we ship everything in. And here is the cradle for that, the shipping container. And we notice from when they come on to Sand Island, and then they get trucked on Nimitz and Alamoana Boulevard to wherever you need the stuff they have on board. At the bottom picture, at the bottom right there is, we talked about the different geology of the Madeira Island is that, unlike on Oahu, you have some flat land where you can drive easily. And here, basically the mountains are going straight to the shore, to the ocean. So they basically had to do some tremendous tunnel work there that you can basically drive without going up and down the hills around the islands. And that is something that, again, is a massive effort. And then makes you then, if you have these growling and hauling trucks next to you, again, you're thinking, is this really still paradise? And we have that experience we talked about even when you come in with a plane and you drive on or even worse under Nimitz, the question is, what did modern civilization do to this paradise, right? Right, right. And we've been at the top right, show quotes are thoughts we shared from the past how you can basically provide for housing using cargo steel. You just told me that you heard that catching up from COVID with production and this huge demand, basically they're out, we're out of shipping containers globally. So they might not be readily available, building material as we used to think of that, right? Correct. And that's something that we've talked about before on the show of the reuse of shipping containers for housing and for other types of building. For the moment, that is not going to be something that's going to be readily available because there are not as many empty unused containers at the moment. So let's go to the next slide and things we share. This is basically development at the top left is a construction site of a new, as we read here, apartment building, Bayview and it's for sale. And it's basically gentrification, at least the gentrification. The problem that causes you see at the bottom because this is a picture that, one of these pictures that you have to look up close and then you see something that you didn't see at the first glimpse or a site. What do we see here that reminds us a lot of the issue we have a similar issue on Oahu particularly. Well, you pointed out to me, which I did not initially notice, is that there is a homeless person living in the doorway or the open one part of this building. So that is again, a very unfortunately familiar site to us here in Honolulu and on Oahu, people without a place to permanent place to live who then have to find some place to live in some whatever way they're able to do. This building however, in addition to that does have some very interesting elements and there's a very strong connection to where I am right now at Bishop Museum. If we want to go to the next slide yet, you wanna do that? Okay, so go to the next slide and in that slide you'll see the detail of this building. And it's very interesting because it's made of these cut stone blocks with this very rough texture on the exterior with, as you said, an extruded mortar around each one of those blocks. It almost looks like a frame for the blocks. Well, to me, this looks very much like the historic building at Bishop Museum, the Hawaiian Hall complex that was built in the 1890s. And in fact, those rough stone blocks that are used to make our building were in fact made by Portuguese craftsmen who had immigrated here to the Hawaiian Islands. So I see a direct correlation between the building you photographed in Madeira as the building that I is right next to where I'm sitting right now at Bishop Museum. And that was a particular style that was popular in the 1890s, which is called Richard Sony and Romanesque, early 1900s as well. And it's long since gone out of favor and just in terms of being fashionable, but we also would consider, as you said, this is a tremendous amount of handwork that couldn't be duplicated today because it's so expensive. So not only is it not fashionable anymore, it's also way too time consuming and pricey. Absolutely. And let's go to the next slide and zoom out and look at the building in its entirety here. And while the new project they're proposing, there's nothing wrong about it, right? It's modern, it's straightforward. It looks like it has lanais. Wow, big times we get so excited when we see a building that has lanai. Why? Because in Honolulu, there are too many buildings who don't have any, I mean, new buildings under construction. But it still looks rather generic and almost could be anywhere. Looks like prefabricated or standardized. Well, this one here is a really interesting blend of perdition and modernism. It's truly modern building, but it uses building elements as these Venetian blind shutters. And then we've been ranting a lot of our glass guard rails in Hawaii that we don't like to see because they're just wrong. In Madeira, there's lots of glass guard rails on modern buildings. And the climate is a little bit more windy and a little bit more cooler on the cooler side. So maybe they're a little more okay here, but here, this traditional building had this sort of wooden lattice guard rail that's now falling apart and it needs to be obviously restored. On that construction picture in the top right corner, I was seeing that building still in there. So I'm hopeful that they're gonna restore this back and give it a new use. Unfortunately, probably this homeless guy would still not be able to move in or back in, right? So this is all sort of discussion on a privilege kind of level. Let's go to the next slide and look at when you drive around the island, there's something intriguing that we've been talking a lot before the show in preparation. These are these civic buildings here, the one at the bottom right, and then the other three are the same building. And this is amazing. This is out in a very small town, very picturesque small town. There is this really heroic, powerful building that's basically just an open space, as we like to call it, roofy texture. And it just provides you with the essentials of shelter from the main things you need to protect yourself from, which is similar as in Hawaii, just rain and the sun and not so much the cold as here in Germany. So that's really interesting. So we were wondering, we couldn't find out the date of these buildings. And we're wondering if they're even predating the sort of democratic recent era of Portugal if they're maybe under the regime before that, right? We're wondering about that. And yeah, and this brings up a really a much bigger question or a much bigger concern or subject that's very worth, I think, looking into is how different governments either support or suppress architectural innovation. And we just were talking about a repressive government sometimes celebrates modern architecture or innovative architecture, whereas other repressive governments try to suppress it and destroy it. So it isn't across the board all the same. Now, and obviously examples for that is Mussolini, you know, who was just as bad as Hitler, but architecturally and if one can even separate that that's questionable, but let's try it for this moment. He did the Giuseppe Tarani built the Casa del Facio, which is the palace for the fascist government. And it's a marvelously beautifully modern building. While all that Hitler had was all that spare and the neoclassicism that Trump, you know wanted to reactivate and luckily, you know, he's not there anymore as other things. So we're happy about that one, of course we are. So this is interesting. Again, if you're driving around the island and see this very heroic, fried, powerful public buildings. Next slide, because now we're going back to the indigenous, so to speak. And this is something that looks familiar to many cultures in the world. This is the utmost archetype of building of shelter, which where you're just building a roof and basically that's it, you know, not building any walls. And you know, the most common American term is obviously A-frame for that one. And down there, there was in a souvenir shop where they're dwelling on these and trying to sell these cute little ones. And the one at the bottom left tells you that the town that's mostly wanting to be identified with that and we don't think Carlos Santana is from that town, he's not from Madeira at all. No, he's from that town. But that town with that same last name basically has the one at the top right, which is on every kind of tourist brochure and prospect and you basically want to go there. We found out before we went there that these are basically, I was about to say the equivalent of you guys at the Bishop Museum, but we found out from, and let's go to the next slide from this guy here, whose name is Manuel Costa, that these public ones are basically replicas. They're, you know, from the 70s or something or 80s or something and just to show the tourists how was hand-built. This guy was waving in front of his house. That is actually original. And from, you know, more than a hundred years old and it's his family house. And he, this is showcasing, demonstrating Portuguese hospitality. He was the first thing he offered us his self-made schnub, which is probably from sugar cane. There we go again. And basically then told us that his family basically was living in, was moving away to Venezuela and, you know, recently basically came back and he toured us his house. And let's go to the next slide. These are rather small and he was basically born on that bed that we see at the top middle picture there. And he had many brothers and sisters, many siblings. So it's like unimaginable how you can live on such a small square of footage with so many people. This one here has a basement, which is something we don't have in Hawaii, to my knowledge at all. I mean, there is the plinth, basalt plinth, but here they were making a basalt basement. And then at the bottom right, let's share what he shared with us about the thatch, the soto. Well, thatching is a very ancient type of roofing material and it's used in many different cultures. He's showing it there on Madera. And of course it was the foundation of how Hawaiian structures were covered up to prevent the weather from getting in. But thatching, just like any other roofing material has got to be replaced every so often. And you said that he has, this has to be done about every 35 years. Formerly they, 15, excuse me, 13 to 15 years, that makes more sense. That makes more sense. The roofing material used to be grown there on the island of Madera. Now it's no longer available. So it has to be shipped in from Portugal, the mainland, their Portugal mainland. And you said, however, that the cost to do this re-thatching would only be about 3,500 euros, just comparable roughly to $3,500. And to us, that seems astonishingly cheap for the amount of work that has to be done because every one of those, all of that thatching has to be put together in bundles and then each bundle has to be attached to the framework of the A-frame roof or side of the building. So it also, there's also a concern of being fireproofed because of course that's very flammable. But in the ancient days, nobody thought about that. Today, of course, these are concerns that were not concerns hundreds of years ago. Yeah. And Manuel, by the way, wants to make this into a museum and looks for partners in order to do that. Something that reminds me of you at some point with your family home, right? Yeah. At Ostipov. So he basically explained this to us and for all these reasons, you just reiterated, right, DeSoto, this is not the way one is building these days anymore, but let's go to the next slide. His father who just recently passed away in an upper age, basically that was his preferred space. And we've been using polemically the term cabana for some of our creations that we proposed to really indulge in the outdoor living and the easy breezy. And he was basically doing that. So that sort of, you know, made, my question was, was maybe the Pelle Hero, by the way, that's my learned lesson of a Portuguese word. That's how they are called. These A-frame houses, basically, if they weren't a little bit too hermetic, like just the one in your Bishop Museum, that's the all-in-clothes, we've been talking about that one. And obviously here, the climate is as nice that you can be more outdoors for most of the day. So let's share our problems. Yeah, and Hawaiians, and it's appropriate to say, Hawaiians in fact didn't spend a lot of time inside in their Hale. They were outside more and they only slept inside at night. So true. So let's check out how one builds these days. And now as a project, next slide, it is only a stone throw away. Oh, no, not yet. Sorry. Here, once again, we're looking at the Hales one last time that are, again, not been used as dwellings anymore, as buildings to live in, only as sheds or shacks. And you were talking about that the one at the top right, the large one from the Kona Resort Hotel, right, basically was in the 50s one, in mid-century one was rediscovering them and sort of interpreting them in sort of a funny and a humorous way. And we were saying the show quotes at the very top right are basically from when we were sharing Nick Civitano, who was an emerging talent graduate of some years ago. Hi, Nick, wondering how are you doing? And let us know wherever you are. And he was actually investigating in sort of a reinterpretation of that type. That was rather interesting. So I think both in Madera and in Hawaii, at least on an academic level, it's probably interesting to basically maybe think about rejuvenating this type and not nostalgically or the way one was building them, but basically looking how with modern building technologies as Nick was proposing there. So now we've got a couple of minutes left. Let's go to the next slide and see how one builds these days. And this is a building that you found very cool, right? Yes. And you said that this is another one of the civic or government buildings on Madera. If you approach it from the top, you look down on this concrete sort of X shaped structure. I think that's an X or maybe it's a T and it has a green roof. So there are plants growing on the roof. And when you get down to the lower level, you see what it looks like. It's sort of elevated a little bit. It's like it's kind of floating on a lower level. And then inside, it's got this wonderful free form center section that's kind of an atrium or looking up to a mezzanine level in all. I thought that this was really very eye catching and very appealing. Yeah, this is again, this is only a few feet away from Manuel's historic A-frame home and that cement truck happened to drive by and this reminds us a lot of out West in Campbell Industrial Park with Gray-specific Rocky Mountain Precast. In both cases, basically our contemporary, most indigenous building material is concrete because three of the four ingredients are local. Only the cement currently in the process of being replaced by fly ash, which still we don't have on the island. We still need to ship that in, but it's origin is a little less environmentally problematic. So yeah, this is great that that tradition, if we're assuming that, what's my permanent background here, these buildings from the mid-century, they're carrying on that tradition of, and maybe we close with a quote of the great Kenneth Frimpton who said, and this is sorry for us Americans and Germans. He said, if there's a future for architecture, it's not within our developed cultures as Americans and Germans is within these smaller ones that many of them escaped, going back to what we talked about, totalitarian regimes, and then we're so hungry to basically catch up and explore and do really, really cool things and experiment, right? So that's, I think on that note, we're pretty much at the end of the show and we will pick up from there next time and see what else these very similar in many ways, islands have to offer as far as similarities and differences to learn something from. So, with that, see you all back next week for that. We look forward to it. Aloha. Bye-bye.