 Good to see you back for what happens to be our 194th episode of Pink Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. And this is volume two of an investigation observation of mobile enclosures and clues we can learn from that for our immobile enclosures. So meaning we're looking at automobiles to potentially learn for our discipline of architecture. And for that we have our three from the filling station panelists back. And we're broadcasting live from three different parts of the world, climatically different, culturally different, and continentally sort of different as we said. And I'm here from near Munich, Germany, and you to Soto are back in Honolulu, Hawaii. And you, Ron, are back in your Long Beach, California. Good to have you back on the panel. Thank you. Good morning. And since the audience sees different backgrounds that don't necessarily indicate the places you are, which we just said, but please give us a clue about what your backgrounds are and where you're sitting currently in front of what. Well, I am sitting at Bishop Museum Archives in Honolulu where I work. So you can see behind me boxes of archival materials on a shelf. And I also am in my office. So I have to have my mask on. And I'm also in a air conditioned office because we have to take care of all the things that are here in our care, all the archival material. So even though it's uncomfortably cold for me, it's good for all of those things. So it's not easy breezy inside Bishop Museum Archives, we have to be hermetically sealed. Well, that's one of the rare occasions we allow that exception to the rule. And Ron, you are in Rome, right? Yes, I'm always broadcasting from my home study. And it just happens to be that behind me the entire wall is covered by a reproduction of a 15th century map of the city of Rome. Some cartographers say that it's the most beautiful map, most beautiful city map ever drawn. And it was commissioned by Pope Benedicto way back in the 15th century. All right. So much about our immobile enclosures. But let's jump to our topic of mobile enclosures and get the first slide up. And Utisoto, as we will see on the top right, is you've been doing a show, a great show that basically was about the impact of the automobile on the island. So we urge you, the audience to watch that for sure. But we're jumping into other presentations of yours. And the one that we see on slide four, picture four, is one of my if not your favorite presentation, which is the evolution of island's tradition of innovations and grow a little bit more on that, how that relates to the mobile. Well, what I think is extremely interesting is that the Hawaiian islands are a small place that are very far away from every place else in the world. And you would think that this is a small isolated community that wouldn't be in touch with the rest of the world. But in fact, there has been a tradition of innovation here in the Hawaiian islands. And one of the leaders of that was King Kalakaui. You see him in the upper left corner. He was a man, he was king from 1874 to his death until 1891. He was a man who loved modern technology of the time. He kept track of what was being invented, what new machines were in use, particularly steam powered machinery. And he therefore installed the modern technologies of electricity and telephone and indoor plumbing in Iolani Palace in Honolulu. And Iolani Palace had electricity before the White House did in New York City, in Washington DC, which is kind of amazing. And there have been another number of other innovations that you can see in the photographs that are at the upper right. But also, Kalakaui himself loved to invent things. So the picture in the lower left is a little drawing that he did of a torpedo that was going to be shaped like a fish. So it could sort of swim over to an unsuspecting ship and potentially blow it up because the people on the ship wouldn't realize, look, that's a fish. No, no, no, it's a deadly torpedo that's going to blow you up. That is the type of thing that's been happening here in the Hawaiian islands. And I can also just say, as an indendum right here, we got our first automobiles here in 1899. We got two automobiles the first time that two cars came here. And interestingly, they were electric cars. They were not gasoline powered cars. That's another whole story that we won't get into right now. But Ron, I know you want to talk about this torpedo shaped vehicle that we see in the lower right corner, which attained an astonishingly fast speed for time, that is. Yeah, in that lower right corner here, a rotary electric engine powered what was an 1899 Genazi special torpedo. It was really interesting for several reasons. First, it was one of the earliest racing vehicles to have a fully aerodynamic body. In fact, looking at that picture, you can't tell, well, it probably looks like it goes fast backwards as it went forward. And notice the detail that it didn't have a steering wheel. It had a steering lever, which is very typical of the earliest car. But this was the very first land vehicle to break 100 kilometers per hour. Now, for Americans like me who are still struggling with the metric system, that's about 62 miles per hour. Now, today, that might not seem like that's particularly fast. But I want you to consider what Americans in the 19th century, what speeds they were traveling before the automobiles were introduced in the 1890s. For example, those pioneers who were crossing the country in their covered wagons were trudging alongside their horse driven or their ox driven vehicles at about two to three miles per hour. Passing them on the right would be the Polish express riders who could maintain a sort of sustained speed on their very sturdy western horses of about seven to 10 miles per hour. Now, a lone rider could whip his horse up to a top speed of about 34 miles per hour, but only for a very short gallon. Now, a little higher speeds were realized by people who lived on the East Coast. Those American interurban train passengers could sometimes experience a speed of a little over 40 miles per hour in the very late 19th century. But the fact is, this was only for very short periods of their express runs between the city. Now, inferior track design and the lack of decent maintenance in the West meant that trainings west of the Mississippi could hardly get up to 25 miles per hour and were often slower. That meant that cowboys on their horses could always be the train. So what I'm talking about here is the fact that access to automobiles provided individuals all over the world for that matter with their very first experience of the sheer exhilaration of what were previously unimaginable sustained high speed. And I guess we'll run to the next slide. No, and stay there for a second because the telling name them for that strange torpedo on wheels is in French, la jamais content. That means they're never satisfied. So that gives us credit to why they call it like that. So are there any traces of this sort of heydays of automotive engineering left in Hawaii and that gets us to the next slide? Well, what I think this really illustrates is these are first pictures of a car that you Martin photographed not that long ago in Waikiki. And in the upper right corner, there's a 1920s photograph of a Model T Ford. What is going on here is the opposite of what we just saw in terms of speed. These vehicles are built with absolutely vertical perpendicular surfaces on the front of them. And the engine has constantly guy has to try to push through the resistance of the air with these very, very flat surfaces which don't help it go the vehicle go any faster. So the torpedo that we just saw was cut down as much as possible to eliminate all of that extraneous detail on the outside that would make make it difficult to go fast. Whereas these early automobiles for passengers, they didn't give a thought to streamlining. It didn't cross anybody's mind. It was just build the vehicle and it's just composed of all these disparate elements that are not integrated. That's something that we're going to see as time goes by the integration of all of those elements into a very smooth package. But instead, I gave thought to something that we insist on saying is very important for our islands and that's the breeze, the trade winds. And that's sort of not intentional but actually accidental because we said the early automobiles were like that and we will see in the next slide anywhere, even where you guys kindly said it might have been invented with Daimler and Benz, cars just look like that. But in these days, I especially am proud of the picture at the bottom right number four because that the bus was driving by and you see this perfect sort of collaging of in the background, the hermetic, the steel, the bus. The reason actually why people in Honolulu have to and I let you continue with that, Ron, because that made you chuckle what I'm about to say. Yeah, Martin surprised me with the fact that here's easy, very crazy driving in a car, very old car, beautiful Ford. Behind it is this hermetic bus and Martin was saying that the only reason people in Hawaii have to have winter clothes is that if they have to ride the bus to work or whatever they're doing, it's so cold inside that they have to dress for this situation. Or they are disordered having to work in the archive of the Bishop. And you see everybody, this is why I'm wearing a coat and this is why I'm wearing a hat on my bald head because it's always cold in my office for the preservation of archival material. Yeah. And we also want to point out that little picture in the very top on picture too, which is actually the same road. I took the pictures off, which is Palakau Avenue heading towards the Gold Coast where we see it pretty much still a grove. And you see actually, if you would look really close, you see an electric speed car, which we get to as well. That's right. Let's go to the next slide. And again, the audience, please try to make relationships between architecture and automobiles. And here we try to because the building where that Ford Model T in the previous picture was parked in front is called the new Otani. It's a hotel from the mid-century period. And we see that on the right side. And these are pictures we pulled from the web, which we do only in sort of exceptional circumstances because we proud ourselves to everything we share is in best case self-experience or self-documented. And there are sections to the rule because of COVID. So these are pictures from the hotel announcing their recent remodeling here. And so a recent remodeling of another kind and maybe you guys want to reflect on that. So it gives me more sort of peer review what we see on the top left and the two pictures on the left at the top. Well, you know, I first can just point out that before we get into the discussion of the building, there's a photograph of a very ancient car from 1894 passing by a similar building. That's a modern picture, of course. And this is a half timber style. If I correctly, if I'm describing it correctly, it is a European style of wooden beams that are make up the framework of the house. And then they are infilled with plaster or some other substance to build them up. And Martin, how old a technique is that? How far back does that go? Do you know? This is several. So this is the talking vernacular of building construction types, not that unsimilar to Hawaii actually, where unlike, you know, in the Pacific Northwest or in the very area here where there's an abundance of forest and trees, where you have the log construction and the heavy timber construction in both in Hawaii and in Northern Germany, where I'm from, there isn't that much wood. So you use the wood more sparsely as for the hollies, where you're having a member every now and then spaced apart and so that is. So this traces back to, you know, several hundred years ago and still was this project here, which is a, which used to be a farmhouse and they're not farming anymore and the newest generation it was given to the youngest daughter, it was marrying a doctor and they having a child and they got the house donated from their, from the ancestors. And they in fact wanted to tear it down and basically said, no, this is, this is old, it's damp and dark. So we want a new modern house. And we at this point in our, you know, awareness as practitioners said, okay, no, wait a minute, the most sustainable, responsible building you can possibly build is the one you don't build, which doesn't help our profession with its clients, right? But the second most responsible one is the one that already exists. And especially if, as in these cases and in these indigenous cases, when they have been created without a carbon footprint because power tools and stuff and machines weren't there, right? So this is a zero carbon footprint building that you better keep in the life cycle. But then again, there was this conflict between the client and we basically said, give us a week to try to figure out if we can fulfill all your dreams and desires within the old. And that's what we did. So you can call this sort of a critical remodeling and obviously, you know, historic preservationists, people hate me for that, because we were transforming it, but we, and you're just totally, you know, are kind of, you know, with your, with your two sort of minds in between, obviously, as an archivist, you know, you're within keeping everything original, but then as a progressive post contact citizen, you like and you recognize that cultures need to transform and evolve. Right. And so I think that the comparison I want to make is through the new Otani, because what we see here, and maybe you guys want to dwell a little bit more, Ron, and Distotto on how that remodeling, you know, what, what they did and what they didn't do in the remodeling. Yeah, I would jump in and say that, especially when you see the sort of pseudo tropical interior, which many people could enjoy, but frankly, a hotel in Cleveland, Ohio could do the same thing. What's important, what all hoteliers and hotel designers need to, need to work for is that people who come to Hawaii should feel the sun on their face. They should feel the cooling trade winds. They should hear the waves lapping. They should have the Hawaiian experience. And that means an easy, breezy architecture that needn't be as hermetic as I'm afraid the Kamina here is. There could have been solutions where some sort of shutters could be used, letting some air in and not have to necessarily close the glass all the time. So, yeah, this is a situation where I would rather go to this hotel in Hawaii and clean than Ohio. Well, and Ron, you and I just before we got on the air talked about remodeling of the German house and you pointed out something really interesting. So, when you look at the German house, how it was redone, the bottom floor, they took out the infill between those beams and they left it open. And then looking out from the inside, now you've got an open porch where you're just looking through the wooden beams without anything else in the way to see the view outside. And then you've got the sliding doors on the inside to keep the cold out because of course in Germany, not warm all the time. But Ron, what you pointed out is that this is a very Japanese technique. And unknowingly, perhaps, Martin, I don't know if you even thought about that when you did this redesign, you've got an indoor, outdoor situation, very much like traditional Japanese architecture in which you've got sliding doors. Of course, Japanese houses are very cold in the winter because they just, they didn't have a lot of insulation. And that's just the way they live. But you've got sort of a half indoor, half outdoor space, which is a living space during the time that it's warm and pleasant and green outside. And then if necessary, you can close yourself inside and keep yourself warm. And it harkens to another culture entirely. And it's a solution that people came up with on the other side of the globe. But you put it into use in Germany. And I must say that when I saw that photograph of the interior looking out, I really thought that I was looking at what the Japanese call an engawa, which as this order was saying, was sort of an indoor outdoor veranda that was protected by some overhanging heat. And this was, and also, of course, that photograph is furnished very fairly, which is sort of Japanese. This, when I first looked at it, could have fooled me as not being a Japanese ski home way back from the feudal age. Well, this just confirms, you know, how much the 60% of the people not in the tropics, in the temperate climates out there, just dream of the tropical exotic and even built that in Germany, right? Well, on the few months we have where this is similar, I could have provided a picture you guys are right with, you know, Snowdrift out there and the triple pain glazing being closed, right? Going back to Hawaii, that being said, if I can do Hawaii style, I mean, I'm not talking surfacially, but substantially performatively, we should be even more in Hawaii, right? And the new Otani has a feature, this total that we were, you know, finding actually the three of us were finding where we're doing the shows about campuses, the one in Long Beach, yours, Ron, and the ones at U-Age. We thought a great typology prototype and an archetype as courtyards, and guess what? The new Otani has a central courtyard. So all the rooms are wrapped around an open exterior hallway. So too easy breezy, this is actually really, really easy, right? And all, as you said, Ron, and you know what you're talking about, because the Hull of Kalani is one of the finest examples of amongst many things that is by you. I think they should have commissioned you, you know, and do that and basically replaced the, still, you know, this is the sliding glass doors, but, you know, jealousies, reintroducing jealousies and other screens as property care Rockwood always does with the emerging generation, you know, would be great. So, you know, our messages to the future, basically, hotel owners, please consider these things more than you're currently doing it. And going back to the vehicle, the bends, as it says down there, the bends below from 1894, which supposedly was the world's first serious produced automobiles. And in major parts, as we can see, even the the wheels are still out of wood, right? And that was still the case for much longer, which gets us to the to the next slide. And if this is this is from my prairie days in Nebraska, my home away from home, there's a there's a museum in downtown that it has a car that I took this detailed picture of, which intrigued me because it basically symbolizes that even and this must be you guys help me out probably from the twenties or the thirties, the car is still a major part of the structural body of the car was still structural wood to then and don't get your hopes up too high because I'm the author of this article, but I'm not, you know, maybe there's some Asian in me as you guys wanted to point out and maybe some say death's pain, you know, but I wrote this for the for the Chinese version of the German detail magazine with a with a Chinese collaborator of mine, you how we're thinking we're encouraged to basically think about the tradition of of wood as a building material. And you know, the first two pictures from from that one, then slowly but surely down the drain, you can say from structurally substantially woods to a veneer like this Chrysler, the leperan from the 80s that we'll revisit later where it's basically the illusion of wood because it's the plastic foil that has the imprint of wood pride. And the same if you understand that it helps you to understand not like much more I still find this tragic and ironic happens in architecture where like the picture below sea ranch by Charles Mua is the epitome of structural woods and real timber. And basically today we find these tank homes built with vinyl siding that basically romantically has an imprint of wood. So, you know, go figure. I can just add that wood used structurally and automobiles in the United States lasted until 1952. The last vehicle that had structural wood was the 1952 Buick station wagon and no 1953, excuse me. And station wagons had been built of wood earlier like the car that's behind you, Martin. That's a wooden body that's been put onto a metal chassis. And that continued gradually would just became more and more a decorative element rather than a really needed one. But 1953 is the last time any wood was used as part of the car structure. And after that, even if wood appeared usually, as you said, it was fake. So by the 50s, they were putting fake wood on the side of cars just as a reference to how they had previously been made of wood. So it's this weird plastic imitation of wood that served no purpose whatsoever except a superficial decoration that gradually looked terrible as it got older and faded and peeled off. Yeah. And we want you to the audience to encourage you to, you know, cars we all love, right? And so we want you whenever we show you things we love about cars, we want you to, why would you worry about that? The the pedagogy is we want you to think about the cars you love. And that gets us out of our time because we have two and a half minutes left. And the next page is it's not enough time to get through the next page because this is what you love, Ron. But I want you to get started on that one to then continue next week. What I'd like to say is here we're looking at how automobiles and art were so intertwined. And next week, when we have the time to really look at all of the images on this slide, what we're looking at is the fact that when the Holly Kalani's Lewis house was being built in the early 1930s, the very finest and most luxurious cars were all adorned with incredible hood ornaments and the design of which became an art form in itself. And we'll get to that next week to look at some of my favorite examples. And I should also add because we talked about speed today, the current World Lamb Vehicle speed record is 760 miles per hour. But we have a little time left so you can get started on your passion about these figures here. Oh, excellent. On the right hand side is probably my favorite example. And it's one of my favorite cars. You see this beautifully sculptural and delicate archer. And that's it sat at the end of the hood of a 1933 pierced silver arrow. Now at the lower left is another extravagant hood. Here's a rampant elephant on a 1931 Bugatti Berlin de Voyage. And just above it is the picture of that particular Bugatti itself with its incredibly elongated hood. And what's really interesting about this car is this is a transitional auto design because it incorporates that sort of typical boxy frame. But all of a sudden we're seeing swooping and very aerodynamic wheel well. So the new looking cars is coming. Okay, that gets us to the end of the show. And next week we're going to start here and talk about how that relates to architecture, the Lewis House. That is very familiar to both of you because the Brown family had something to do with that ownership-wise and Euron had been transforming that once again in a critical reconstruction as we like to call it. Okay, with that, that's it for today and look forward to see you all next week to continue our who have you join the three of the filling stage of us. Hello. Until then, bye-bye.