 It happens to be in the range of our 180th I think take Hawaii human-humane architecture show. This show is looking at how climates, so the natural environment informs cultures, so the built environment as its manifestation. And we're doing this in a continued post-context scenario here in Hawaii, looking at other places in the world to learn from. So today we're going to look across the pond to Germany, which is my native country. And we have a guest with us who is very knowledgeable about that culture as well as his native culture, the United States of America. And that's educator and practicator Larry Midland. Hi, Larry. Hi, Martin. How are you today? Nice to be on your program. I'm good. Thanks for being with us, Larry. And let's bring up the first slide and look, share with the audience a little bit how we got to know each other. So me coming from that tempered German climate. And in the early 90s, I had a chance to be a college student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And one and a half decades later, I was kindly asked to come back as a teacher. And after another half decade, I thought I might need to leave home away from home as nice as it was to move on and to grow up. So this is gives you an idea of the scenario about now almost another decade ago. And same weather conditions, climate conditions we're currently having here in Germany with a cold front up there you see the Celsius temperatures and down at the Fahrenheit. Anyway, it's freezing cold and I was living in the Century House apartment where I had two options to live on the south side, which I would have had to have the curtains pulled close and AC on in the summertime or on the north facade where it was fine in the, in the summertime In the wintertime, as you can see at the bottom right I had this sort of thermally not disconnected and unbroken window frames that let them over eyes from the inside. So at the same time of the year must have been in March, about a decade ago on a Saturday morning I will never forget my phone rang. And you were on the phone Larry and why were you calling me. I'm calling to invite you to come visit us at the University of Arizona as a candidate to join our faculty you had sent us a very impressive resume and supporting letters and so forth. And we were hoping to have an opportunity for you to come to be as me as in Tucson and get to know about the university and us to get to know a little bit about you. I can thank you enough and let's get us to the next slide and take that as a chance to have you explain as you being an expert in many things as climate explained to us the very different climate in your hot arid desert of Arizona Larry. The main difference is that most areas of the country have diffuse sky. So you have indirect radiation and then limited amounts of direct sunshine. And so for that your temperature swings, or maybe five to 10 degrees at the most in most places throughout the year, and you have softer light. So there's very limited cloud cover. So what happens is you have a very large, what's called the dial temperature swing the swing between the highs and the lows is about 30 degrees plus or minus and fair height every day of the year. So what that means is that in the summer, it can get up to maybe 105 or so, and in a few exceptions even more than that. But then by the evening and actually the coolest is that the following sunrise at the nighttime, it'll get back down into the 70s. And then the same thing happens in the winter. It's just reverse. It gets up into the many of the 70s to 75 like it will be here today. And it'll get down to about 40 as it did here last 43 I think to be specific as it did last night. What that means is there's energies that you can deal with throughout the year and in the summer, you want to shade yourself and protect yourself from the hot summer sunshine but you can bring in the cooling night air breezes and in the lower temperatures. And that's where high thermal mass has been used to aid you in that purpose at both times of the year. And the winter, the sun shines directly in hits the thermal mass gets absorbed and tied you over for the later part of the day. And all of that itself continues on having a good insulation you'll blow around the exterior of that in most cases. So that that's that's the basic just it's a very exciting for a designer to think about these opportunities and how the climate responses can relate to your lifetime and activities. Absolutely. And the images illustrating what you just said is my Lincoln from Lincoln that I brought with me, and that one, your son Anton thankfully nicely took care of because that one was just like the space shuttle that is losing his heat shields. While entering the atmosphere again that car was basically losing parts of his front lights and the, the window gasket was just basically dilapidating away and that just illustrates how hard it can get and the picture at the very top is almost exactly the 105 it says 102 and I took this picture when you picked me up from the airport and drove me around. And so the situation we see on the left is what a couple days when you send me a picture from your house, there was the rare situation of some snow on the mountains, which we currently also have as I remember back in Hawaii only on the highest summits of Mauna Kea and and on Maui on the mountains, and we have it a lot we drove up to Mount lemon but that's another story maybe we save this for later. We had a very significant snowfall we had up in the village of Mount lemon there was almost two feet of snow there's actually there's ironically with a southern most ski slope in the United States. The ski slope was open for a week or two, because of the snowfall up there, and you can look out from the valley below and you know it got down to the foothills level but not right down into the lowest level of the city itself. It was a beautiful view to look at that day. I know well it maybe then say it now because it's interesting because I were still in covert days and you luckily and thankfully got your first shot already Larry we're happy to hear that. And so, hopefully you guys have cases under control. So you might be able to do what we are not because we're the origination of October fest is of course here in Munich and that one basically got shut down. And so, the closest in authenticity to October fest I ever experienced was actually up on Mount 11 where we went you have a little October. That's right. That's right. That's up on Mount lemon it was great. Take it as authentic as you can be you got the ski lift there you got the ski slopes you got the durnal waitresses you got it all you got. All right, before we get to taking away by that let's go to the next slide, which is basically what you already talked about this is showing you in the desert museum and the outdoor museum, demonstrating to me what's essential in the desert and you were wearing a hat and carrying the water bottle and you taught me you said if you come here, you'll have to have both, especially since I lost my natural throne shading on my head, different than you. I got to wear a hat, and I got to have a water bottle. And, you know, you, you showed me this interesting what's up there, talk about the rental snake and the thermometer in relation to that, Larry. They, they sense that heat they they always go back in. If you're about one meter below the surface level of temperatures constant. So they don't always burrow into the land and find a place I think you may have a picture of a snake on a shelf somewhere where they go and stay in the daytime and then they crawl back out at night when it's more comfortable. Absolutely. Yes. So then, let's go into your hideaway place that protects you from the elements which is your home so gets let's go to the next slide. And amongst the many treasures in your house that hopefully if we can get zoom the work and in the next couple volumes that we're going to be together. So, be on camera you can show a couple of your beautiful treasures but so far let's look at this magic memory wall here that you have. And in particular, let's zoom into one particular image there and let's bring up the next slide that shows it. And who are all these people we're looking at. So that was the Institute for lightweight structures at the University of Stuttgart. And they had a grant to explore lightweight wide span buildings is a federal research grant that was given to the University of Stuttgart and instead of sprinkling money throughout the country what the University does they identify a special research topic number fear and section number 64 was lightweight wide span structures, and those run for five years. And then they bring in international scholars and people working in the field and it's an interdisciplinary process there at the university itself and so all the participants are also there. And they come together and have it's a one week meeting and everybody makes a presentation about their work and you talk and all these are documented and I'm sorry we don't have the video today because I could hold up in front of you and show you some of the books that document these things. And that's the purpose but the incredible thing about that is that you meet these people that you otherwise might not have the chance to meet. If you look at that the picture on the first row of the person sort of sitting on the steps and looking straight ahead that's fry auto. The, that's Sammy on glory from Sawyer Arabia who later was a collaborate on some of the projects that fry auto get there. And then right next to him is my dear friend and who became a lifetime mentor to me. That's Conrad voxman. He was an architect that was original member of the bow house. He was good friends with Walter Gropius, and he was a very good friend with Albert Einstein, and actually went out but Einstein won the prize for his work with the Adam and energy. He was awarded a house to be built for him in his honor and pots them and fry auto became the architect of that. And so from that they became very good friends, and then I'm sitting right next to a voxman there. And then next to him is another German who lives in Ireland I think now he moves around so I'm not sure where he is now called Wolf Hilbritz. And he's worked with seawater accretion structures which is a very interesting field. And if you go right behind his head if you look straight up to see a gentleman in a light colored shirt with a looks like a black tie or sharp scarf going around his neck. That's Herman Kindle. He was the principal of a fry of growth good growth offices I was the principal and fry auto's office when we worked on the German pavilion. Let's go to the next slide, Larry, and that's going to show once again fry to the very left and you onto the very right. And then we see in the middle. What connected you right what you guys were working on and where you were working on that right can you explain that a little more to us. Yeah, that's actually if you look up that's actually in. The inside of the Institute for lightweight structures which is now a historic landmark in Germany. And the main structural element which was a theme of all of these is how to use pencil elements, instead of big massive things like columns and, you know, tapered columns and beams and so forth to support pencil structures we found it by working with so films. You could do it with pencil members which allow the structures to become even even more important. So what we're looking up is we're looking up and we're seeing the roof. In what was the test structure for the German for me and at expo 67 and Montreal. It was on the adjacent area of the off campus side of the University of Stuttgart, but it was four and a piece of land for there was a future roadway to come through so it was what was found that there was be a possibility to develop to a permanent building. It was picked up it was about 8000 square feet and move to a site about a half a mile away, which is now where it is re erected. And in that site. Going up there, one of the things that supports is there's a two rich cables to parallel cables that go. And in this case one of them opens up with what we refer to as an eye loop. So that allows sunlight to come in and use way, and it gives you sort of a greenhouse space which is, you know, very useful and that's, that's the spot where everybody would get twice a day for coffee or tea in the mornings in the afternoons. And then the stair beyond that is is the library out there up in the upper part of the deck. And then there was an enclosed space for dark room and other things. So that that pictures if like, if we instead of just looking straight across where we work to speakers on the same level we were, if we looked up that's essentially the view that we would see. And that's where you see, because the fabric can span great distances in the time of Montreal about 200 feet. We use the cable network with a fabric roof suspended below it. So we wanted to be a permanent building. We developed that wood decking system with insulation in a single system on the exterior that we could. It was a single that was square with one rounded corner so it worked like a fish scale so we could adapt it to the curves of the overall form. So we will see that a little later but take that little time to explain why that sort of tongue and groove wouldn't, you know, layer over the cables was different than in the in the future in the other projects following. Well, it was because you could you can spend fabric and then, and then also like in the Munich Olympic complex, it used a panel system of plexiglass panels with a flexible joint in between them it used about. I don't remember the exact size probably about four by four meter panels bigger, bigger panels. But that was if you look at there's a network of cables. And I know it's very difficult to see in that photograph but if you imagine there's a top layer in the bottom layer and laying in between on the bottom layer in between the two top layers exactly in the middle point is a one by three structural member that if you pick it up in the middle as 20 feet long it'll great. Two feet on each end. So it's flexible so you just lay it on and let it make the curve that way, and then by, rather than pushing the tongue and groove in, you slightly turn the tongue and groove. So it follows the curvatures of the form in the other direction. So you're able to make that would look very elegant up there. So it's like a wood deck that actually is using its nature to adapt to the forms of the steel cable network. Impressive. And let's you've been using the term soap film and let's go the next slide that we picked from the web representative for made by yourself models and explain to the audience a little bit what what that is and these models that you made Larry. Well, the one model that you're looking at is a model actually basically the form of the Institute for lightweight structures with a soap film and the thing about so film so film. If you take a flat piece of the soap film and you put a thread, the double thread in there, and then you burst the area between a rubble thread, the equal tension if it's a flat film will pull that to occur to complete the perfect circle because it's pulling it will equal tension in every direction. But if you take one point on that curve and start to lift it up. You begin to lift up the form and go upward so you get the anti classic curvature or the double curvature of the film which in a structural purpose will allow you to pull it together with counteracting tensions to support compressive and and suction and all kinds of loads to make it stable. And so that was, and if you take a, if you keep pulling a circle up eventually you'll pull it out. But if you had, as you see in that photograph of rich coming down below it, or behind it as a continuous rich, you can lift it even higher and create a larger volume. And that that opening in a cell film is what we just saw and the actual real structure looking it up from the underneath side inside. And share with us that moment where you had to make a smaller model in a very short amount of time very quick and fast share that situation there. Well, the German Pavilion was the first of the Barcelona Pavilion was a major work that Germany did, you know, before the world wars. And, and it was very famous. And so everybody was very nervous that Germany didn't want to build something new on the stage unless it was really was an outstanding building that has to live up to the same standards that's a Barcelona Pavilion. So it wasn't just an ordinary project there was an invited competition. Six architects were invited by the German, the, at that time the West German government to some do submissions. We fly auto and real good voters a team. I mentioned Herman kindle and myself collaborating as leaders of those teams work together and we won one that competition. But when we won the competition, they said, Well, we're not just going to design something and carry it over to Montreal and build it and have it not work. You've got to build a test building to show that it works. So, the, Mr. Glandy had come down from the bond at that time, which was the seat of the government to stood guard for a big important meeting to decide after we have won the competition, if we're really going to take this seriously and go further. Again, that meeting was scheduled, I guess at about eight o'clock in the morning we were there in the office. Actually, you're working on further development ideas for the design and the prevain itself. But Friday auto came up to me and said Larry, I think they're going to want us to build a test structure for this. And Kenny, and we talked about it. Well, let's build a piece like what you actually saw in that cell phone, a piece that demonstrated a sky loop with a ridge and I wanted to do the ridge and all the edge conditions, and, and try to make it become elegant proportions and form and shape. So it would be a reasonable building so that we might find a uses for it later. So, I don't know how I did it, you know, when I look back, but I was younger and had more nimble fingers and stuff. We had a model built in about two and a half hours and in about 15 minutes later fry auto showed up with it and looked, looked at that model. And the irony of that that that that shape and that form was tweaked and moved with all kinds of computer problems and stress analysis but it, it didn't move by more than three or four inches in either direction that was pretty. It was one of those lucky sort of things you just try to use your best thing and, you know, get it together and do what you can do and it worked out very fortunately for us on that occasion. Priceless Larry, and let's go to the next slide and look at the next stage model which I think we can call this steel model because there's a steel frame below. And that's going to look into the next sort of elaborate stage of prototyping which is very much is right. The next stage is the, that's actually the, the steel cable network that we built for the German for then it was fabricated in Strollmire factory in Constance. And it was actually the cable network was a half meter by half meter and half inch cables. And the reason for that was that you could walk through it. And work and crawl all over it and, and building it and stuff. And plus, it was flexible enough so that you could make it into literally 10 meter sections that were like a giant piece of carpet that was 10 meter by however length they were with an arching edge on both edges and, and then splice joints to connect to the next panel. And those were rolled up and shipped over to the side in Montreal and then laid out on the ground and then all connected together. And then it was like putting the strip patterns of a sale together on the ground and then raising it up the mass later to erect the structure. I know, and this is something interesting for us in Hawaii where we tried to and we were talking you were talking about building less basically ethereal heavy elephant like and more ethereal, more like a bird and so in Hawaii where we ship in lots of things. If you're shipping in things you want to ship in as little as possible. If you're shipping in cable. And it also allows you to take it to remote sites and remote conditions. Yeah, and Hawaii is pretty remote right. Yes, yes. I actually and I'm not one of these parts, but another project with working with medical doctors at the University of Arizona, a public health college. A portable prevain for nighttime blindness. And it was a double layered fabric tent that was about, let's say, 20 feet by 15 feet, where people could be tested for nighttime blindness. But to do that testing, which was provided on a deficiency, it was made in parts that you could literally, in most cases you put it in the back of a pickup truck and took it into the local villages where they're going to doing the testing. But if you had to, you could take it including the big structural art supports which broke down into pieces. You could make it in the backpack so surplus could carry it up to the most remote sites in the world. And it was used in Nepal. So it did get to some of those kind of sites. Well, that's great. So to do the most with the least, which was, you know, fries agenda. Well, you know, another point, Martin, about that is that it is this and particularly as you advance through your project to looking at space net structures is how it meets the ground. Most buildings, you know, build huge foundations and they destroy the local ecological system and so forth. And you have to often distort completely the contours and the runoff and the impact upon that. But with lightweight structures, you literally can sort of almost hover them above the ground so you can discreetly decide where you're going to put your points of contact with the ground and let natural things move through and around it. So that creates a really interesting problem across possibilities and applying these in space nets in the future projects. Absolutely. And speaking of barely scratching the surface. That's what we did in our almost 28 minutes. And so let's get to the end of the show and bring up the next and the last picture, which is an exterior photograph of that test building you were talking about. And by that point, maybe phasing out and maybe we go, we switch to German because people might wonder, you know how you've been communicating and you're pretty fluent in my native language. So maybe from now on, you see this in that one just to refresh it. You're doing good in that. Don't don't worry about it. If you say it's just then, you know, it's not which we have. It's a very good leg and height in Tucson. Also, when it's get to the Wuster Museum and Deutsche Besuchers in Deutsche Her and Albert. It's much more, it's a winner canoe, but it dowered on this side, but you know, it comes. This isn't a good leg and height. This is a good opportunity to refresh your German, which is, it's still pretty good. Believe me, trust me. And again, we're at the end of our first 28 minutes and we're looking forward to many more shows which is going to be many more volumes and continue to tell that exciting story of your life and work Larry, both professionally and academically with the great fry auto with Bucky Fuller, in addition, who you got to know your friend Conor Erexman, and many more and you work at the University of Washington and the University of Arizona so I can't wait for next week to reconnect. And until then, we say tschüss und auf Wiedersehen and stay all happy and healthy there and stay warm in the evenings Larry. Yes, thank you very much and I wish the students all the luck in their project. It's a very exciting project and I'll look forward to opportunity for a couple more interactions with him so. Absolutely, your mentor and master so thank you.