 Good to have you all back to another episode of ThinkPick the Wise Human Humane Architecture, and we're broadcasting again from our intercultural intercontinental triangle from Honolulu, Hawaii with you, Disoto. Hi. Hello, everyone. You, Ron, back in your Long Beach, California, on the mainland. Hi, Ron. Yeah, hello, everyone. And me on the other end of the world near Munich, Germany. So this happens to be our 201st show, and we're going to dedicate it to the number 101 Disoto, right? That is my mother. She will be 101 years old on Friday, two days from now. Well, you can't congratulate in advance, right? So we're going to say happy birthday again next week. Yeah. Great. So can we bring up the first slide because we're going to make this a life ticker here as far as what's going on in the world as far as weather and, supposedly, climate being out of control. And we have three columns here. And, Ron, you want to report on the very left one, please? And that's the temperatures of Tucson, and you see some bakery there of a different kind. Yeah, actually, I've more experienced with hearing from acquaintances in Phoenix, where they broke an all-time record last week of having six days straight where their high afternoon temperatures reached at least 115 degrees, if not more. And that certainly is the kind of temperature where, stereotypically, you can fry eggs on a sidewalk or, in the case of that picture in the upper left, it looks like frying omelets on a tray set on a car hood. Is that right? That's right. And I allow myself, yes, to put Tucson in here because that was my desert day town. And I always used to say it's not much difference if you have 120 or 106, what it says there, it's a little higher elevation, but pretty much probably unfair to the people in Phoenix. But still, it's all hotter than hell. Then the other pictures here on the right of that one is basically half around the world here, where you would say, are you guys still in winter? No, we are not. We're actually in summer. And as we were reporting last week, we had a heat wave through and when this warm air hits cold air, this is what you get. And were you excited by that, guys? Well, I don't think it was exciting for me to look at and interesting for me to see it from a distance. We don't usually have hail storms here in the Hawaiian Islands, although very occasionally we have very small hail but not big hail. But hail does a tremendous amount of damage to cars. It not only dents their bodies if they're outdoors, but it also can break their windows, particularly the back windows can get broken out completely. And the dashboard, I mean not the dashboard, the windshield usually doesn't get completely destroyed, but it gets badly damaged. So there's a tremendous amount of car damage that happens in hail storms, not to mention damage to buildings, broken windows, broken siding, damaged roofs, etc. Yeah, I don't even want to imagine what happens when a baseball-sized hailstone, as we see in that center picture, falls thousands of feet and hits someone. And I know what's happened. It's probably happened a lot. It's probably more likely to be hit by hailstones than by lightning. Yeah, and since the methodology of this series here is that we want you, the audience, to venture out and experience things on your own. So we pride ourselves to either only show material that we have seen or experienced ourselves predominantly. Only the Friday X picture here and you see the link so we're not getting copyright sued. And the golf ball size hail ball are taken from the web. Everything else are pictures we took. And this is where the death bank family got hit. My sister just got herself in front of the office home that we've compared to automobiles. She got herself a Skoda, an electric Skoda, some days ago. That one is totally hail damage now, as is her little Fiat Cinquecento 500. And that very sort of scenic, concentric ring-scored damage on a windshield is my father's car down there. And this is what just happened to us. But we want to say again, this show is called Human Humane Architecture. Let's not try to be these picky Germans who, as I just experienced sadly recently here in the community, that some people care more for their cars than people or kids in that case. Let's care for people and just say how basically, as we said, dangerous cars can be. And DeSoto, you just before the show added something that you wanted to point out. Well, there are two things that we were discussing. Cars can obviously be a source of shelter. If you were in a hailstorm, you'd want to get into a car rather than be outdoors. But cars can kill when they get too hot. And people regularly are killed by being locked in hot cars, usually children, but pets. And Ron, you were just saying that there was a case where a 90-year-old woman was shot in a car and was killed by heat. Conversely, you also can be killed in a car in extreme cold. If you drive off the road during a blizzard and get caught in the snow, you can freeze to death or you can die from carbon monoxide poisoning. So we know about the dangers of cars in terms of collisions and crashes. But we don't normally think about what these other interactions are that can also kill you through nature interacting with cars. Yeah. So they're kind of both. And with the nature being more than ever angry at us, obviously cars can potentially be refuge places. But only if you're privileged. If you're back in the hotter than hell Arizona, only if you afford a car and if you can afford the AC in it, if you can, if you're a homeless out on the street, that heat can clean. I just read an article that basically says can kill dogs as well. So he gets very excited about that perspective. And so, and you were saying if that hay ball basically hits your skull, Ron, you said ice to the half. Right. So I mean, it's kind of scary again how we human beings now need to sort of shelter us from the environment that and here comes a point that we have caused because why is nature getting angry? Because we're producing all these things, right? I mean, there is a there is a there's a large carbon footprint in making cars. And we're not anywhere close to make them from renewable energy. And it's the same with buildings. Again, the best building is the one you don't build. The second best one is the one that's already built. Same applies to cars. So with all these sort of sales pitches of new cars and new cars, you know, it's kind of a vicious circle. That's kind of the point we want to make with a sort of news ticker here from current extremes that we're experiencing. Let's go to the next slide. Go to other extremes, which is political extremes. And that's the slide we ended on last time wanted to pick up on again. We're here now in former Eastern Germany again, and the GDR and the former GDR. And we're seeing that, you know, there only that there are two cars they had, because only Americans and Germans are pretty much the car manufacturing cultures that have different companies and different brands and different models of various kinds and types. But the majority of the countries and cultures in the world don't have that. Some actually don't make any car like the Swiss, for example, except some small entrepreneurial, you know, little enterprises, no offense. But the GDR had only two. And the lower one was the Trabi, the Trabant. That was the one for that, you know, if you waited a long time, years and years and years and played and paid quite some money, you were able to afford one. And also the picture 10, the architectural equivalent for that is basically the mass housing that you can see there that we call the Platte Bauer. If we can zoom on to picture our image. And that was what we call the Platte Bauer, while the GDR created this myth that they wanted to provide everyone a car and everyone an apartment in there. The reality besides or in contrast to some GDR nostalgia that's coming up somewhere left and right. These days is not true. They try to catch up with the demand, but they weren't able to fulfill it. And that's something that sounds familiar to us these days. The other car on the very top one there is the Vartborg. You know, only if you're very high up in the ranking, which wasn't supposed to be because everyone was supposed to be equal. But you know, that wasn't the case, as we know. And so you could have had a Vartborg. And the Vartborg was actually in the city of Eisenach. And at the top of the hill there is the castle that's called Vartborg. And in the show in the old urban transcendence days with the former director of the GDR, he was saying if you guys would have distributed the sectors chopped up Germany different and you Americans would have gotten the East. While Disney most likely wouldn't have made the fake Neuschwanstein castle. By that time, Gropius already built the Fagosburg. So that was more an Excalibur Las Vegas kind of thing. He would have made basically modeled his logo after a real castle, for example, the Vartborg. And so we paired this here with this number six, the picture number six is a structure by the architect engineer Mütter Ulrich Mütter, who did this very sort of sexy, very thin, straight concrete shells. But again, that was the avant-garde of the GDR. That was not the main screen. So once again. And we were also my father's offenders of his Touareg that he has didn't get dinged by the hail. And we knocked on it and found out it was actually some kind of fiberglass. It wasn't metal. And so we here we also talked about the materiality of the car, which was basically out of hemp or soybeans. We already said Ford had a similar thing going on. And the trouble at the very bottom right is from that gentleman that you see on slide number eight, Matthias Ava, my dear friend, who's my supporter from the Germany modified timber days, which we also want to promote as new Hawaii would and having made that school building that you see there left of him, the largest application of that in the world, an experimental way. And so the GDR was experimental because they but out of scarcity, they didn't have any metal of significance to make cars equivalent to in the West. So they needed to come up with something. One little last note is funny. When Matthias took me on a ride through the former GDR many years ago, he always had the right to go even at a red traffic light or a stoplight that wanted him to stop. He didn't need to because there's this unwritten rule that trabys can only go. And that's that we were talking about there is we put in a number nine dispute Google was launching that when there was the anniversary of the reunification, they put the bug and the trouble next to each other. And while, you know, when that regime that basically gave birth to the bug, the third Reich, thanks to you guys was luckily over, the bug just started to become and basically for years and years and years and decades lived on not so much with a Trubby. The year after the wall came down, the Trubby was gone. And now we read there's like 20,000 left or something and they're kind of treasured and sort of tributed to, you know, in daily life. So let's go to the next slide and see what else we all have. So this is dedicated to you guys. Think about your second car and also maybe your first new car you ever had and to sort of tell us what yours was. My second new car was a 1978 rabbit. And that's a Volkswagen everywhere else in the world. It was called a Golf. And you can see a picture of me with my rabbit in the lower right corner. There I am at my blue rabbit. And there's another one next to it. You took a picture of looks just like mine. Well, the point of this page is that all of these diverse cars that you see around the edge, including that's the first generation rabbit, it got redesigned over the years. All of these cars were designed by this one Italian man. And we were talking beforehand about how diverse his output was. It was remarkable. He did low car. I mean, inexpensive cars. He did expensive cars. He did playing looking ones. He did fancy looking ones. And this also, I was saying, points out the international entwinement and connections that exist now in the car industry throughout the world. Because all these all these manufacturers, which used to be in one particular country, are now connected economically. People have companies have bought other companies out. They have joined each other. They're city areas of each other. And so it's a world very different than what existed in the 20th century. Yeah. And the fact this automobile stylist also did the DeLorean just amazes me. I had no idea that this Italian very famous stylist, whose name I can't even pronounce, is responsible for that unusual experiment in automobile design. Yeah, we want to invite you guys join this sort of, you know, three from the gas station club and share stories about cars and architecture. And we just found out the solo that we both share that both are second first car and new car was designed by the same designer. And I give it a try, is the guy's name and Italian guy. And mine was the one at the very bottom. And this is from another culture that had only one car brand or automotive maker that was set. And set was pretty much the sort of the sibling of Fiat over there and had the same reputation of fix it again, Tony. And why would I buy something? And I have to thank my parents who were generous enough to buy me that, to spy me with that one. Why would you buy something with bad reputation? Because there was hope on the horizon because VW was about to buy that one. And by the way, Skoda, the company which is from the Czech Republic that my sister just got her car from is also a subsidiary of VW. They were basically eating up all these brands. And the picture above the number 10 is I just took at the airport where we came back from Madeira that we will talk about in the next show, the next couple shows. That's a Cupra. And I looked it up and it's always used to be the sports division of Fiat. And now they're branding it basically separately as a very kind of a sexy car. So again, all the cars obviously have it. By the way, the Revit 2 and the Revit 4 on the pictures 6 and 7 were not by Giugiaro, but they were owned. We had a Revit 2 back then that I basically then ran into out of control cab that wanted to drive its passenger too fast to the fairgrounds and it hit me. And that's why we got the Twingo out of it. Because this had collateral damage. And then Suzanne had won the Revit 4 that she also wrecked it, not she, but a bus ran into her. But we're all still alive just like the bar that kept you alive. So good cars, good German engineering. So Ron, your stage because we're still within our first car. So we're very, very curious what was your first car. And for that we go to the next slide. Yeah, I came very late to my first car. I didn't own a car until I was in an undergraduate in college. And it was a wonderful choice. And I'm glad I waited so long because I was driving an MG series model TD. In picture 5, you see an MG series model TF, which was affectionately called the Midget. My car was a lot like that. It was gloriously open air, top down, and it was the same bright, resting red color. The sad thing is that I didn't have it very long. The problem was that when I was, my architectural curriculum proved to be so time consuming and so difficult for me just to keep up. I literally couldn't find the time to enjoy driving it around. And then I realized I didn't have the money to garage it sufficiently in the winter in Illinois. So it went back home. I'm happy to say my father drove around more than I did from his home to his ice cream store. And I have to say it true as I'm here, Martin. When I picture my father driving that, I believe that having a father who owns and operates an ice cream store is at least as good, if not better than having an architect for a father. I agree with that. At least more yummy. And you've got to talk about an Elvis related MG on the other side of the slide. Yes, the Soto. Yes, in the 1961 film Blue Hawaii, Elvis takes, which takes place here, most of it was filmed here. Elvis supposedly is playing a guy who's just gotten out of the army, which he had in real life, has come home from Germany, which he had in real life. He didn't really live here, though, but supposedly lived in Honolulu. And his girlfriend had this red MG that you see in the pictures on the right side. And you can buy a little model that is just like the one that she drove. And the interesting thing to me is that not only did they film her in the MG here in Honolulu, they actually shipped the MG back to Los Angeles and used it in Hollywood when they were shooting on the sound stages to do other scenes for the film. So Martin and I have a soft spot for the film Blue Hawaii, particularly because you can see some of the architecture in the background of the time in which it was filmed in 1961. And in the picture on the top right, Elvis and his girlfriend go to Tantalus and in the red MG, they have a picnic. And looking down on Honolulu, you can see the Alamoana building. There it is, lower right corner. So that's one of our favorite buildings. So that's why we like this scene. We also like the red MG that she drives around and he drives around as well. There's one disappointment with MG that as a kid, a young kid, I thought maybe the initials MG meant something like Mighty Grand Turismo. And then I found out to my chagrin that it was just Morris garage. Pretty ordinary. Profane, yeah. But not profane, not profane was the sort of the nimbus of them and the excitement, both the Alamoana building and that MG, they were very sexy, right? They were very sort of cutting edge for its time. You just sort of said America didn't have such sexy sports cars. So they imported them. And since you just told and taught us that the British also had to make up for what they had done before that, doing the war, that was sort of a reparational deal that they basically sold a lot to America to basically make up for that, right? Yeah, they owed so much money to the United States after World War II because of how much money the US had spent on defending Britain that the British had to export as much as possible of their industrial output to earn money. So people at home in Britain wanted to buy new cars and they couldn't because cars were being exported, including a lot of these sporty cars to the United States, where that became a niche market that the American car companies were not fulfilling. And in 1953, 54, 55, the Corvette and the Thunderbird were created to try to fill that market. They did not, in fact, do so because there was nothing quite comparable to the European sports cars, which were popular among a certain set of Americans, including our Iran. And another similarity here between the architecture and the automobile, the Alamoana building and the MG is they're both easy breezy. The Alamoana building had the retractable sun retractable louvers to keep the building cool and the MG is a convertible. And again, Hollywood movies, we see Marilyn Monroe and Harry Grand, I guess it is, right, at the very bottom right. And we see you were on the very top left on the first picture there, refreshing your memories, right? Yeah, let me say that I had the opportunity to have my pleasure in easy breezy driving top down. It came about because you were so kind to take me from place to place during the Doku Amomo National Symposium in late September of 2019. And driving your open air Mercedes was beyond pleasure. And I thank you again for having given me such a happy experience of when I was about 60 years younger. Well, the pleasure was on my side, because that picture I took in front of your masterpiece of easy breezyness and tropical exotic, your Hale Kalani and the bottle you're holding in your hand is the is the hotel bottle. And the hotel, by the way, is about to reopen again soon, they use the pandemic, and we keep our hopes up high that they were keeping it to the original. As unfortunately, it's not been the case with some of the other, you were just sharing some Manalani, you know, more impressions. And then we've been already very candid and open with Larry, who is your your colleague and designer on it. And so again, again, our platelier, our pitches, whoever owns the killings worth, that's a keeper in its original condition. And, you know, and if you want to remodel and if it has been remodeled before, you want to remodel it back to the original condition, because if you would own an MG from that time, you would do that, right? Because only then it's going to be worth as much as these are basically running if you look them up, right? If they're in original condition, if they've been messed with, you get less for it, right? It's not the original paint. So again, both these automobiles and these architectures, you basically want to keep or bring back to the original condition. So I think there's probably not enough time, but we can still bring up the next slide as sort of the closing picture, just to basically get the audience excited about as an appetizer. We want to talk about next, but we got two minutes left. So we can't get started on that one guy. Yeah, let me say that what where we again, pick up on an automobile program in the next few weeks, we'll be picking up on the building that we're all acquainted with, gas stations. And the fact is that before we know it much more quickly than we might realize, we're going to find gas stations as a thing of the past. And we'll be discussing that most. But we've got just enough time for that picture in the upper left hand corner to show how the architect Richard Neutra pictured and drew some of his thoughts on designs for modern gas stations. And that rather ungainly one at the bottom turns out in my research to be an interesting combination. It was a gas station and a three story motel. I'm not sure I've seen that sort of hybrid animal before in architecture. And the other photographs of very interesting modern gas stations were provided by Martin and DeSoto. Yeah, there were prime pieces for architects to train and show their skills. The bottom one number eight is by Arna Jacobson, the Danish designer. And the one in between their number five is Amis van der Rohe gas station that is not that known that he designed one. And the very up there at the very top right is the one in Palm Springs, not that far away from from you, Ron, that you could drive over if it wouldn't be so damn hot. And again, and both this is now the visitor center of Palm Springs. I drove by there on my Bonnie and Clyde trip during spring breaks, some and during my desert days that we're talking about. So yeah, and good point, right? They're not, you know, they're not in demand anymore, at least not in that particular way. You can retrofit them for electric cars to charge in there, but that's a whole different infrastructure, right? And we're going to get to that. Welcome back soon to talk about why we're going to find gas stations in our rear of rear mirrors. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And tell us again to sort of the one and on the Lule at the bottom left, which location was that? That was a little known smaller oil company called Armour Oil. And the man who owned Armour Oil was from California, but he had a house here. And so he had several Armour Oil gas stations. And a lot of gas stations were part of major national oil company chains. And they had to follow the standard route or the standard appearance that all the companies gas stations had to have. Armour Oil being independent was able to have this much more dramatic and much larger station that occupied an entire block. It's gone now. You can't go look for it. It's now a self storage facility, but it was built in the 1960s and was very eye catching, as you can see, right up on Lule. And as we can see also in the distance, we see what our favorite Alamwana building as it used to be with the louvers on. With that, we're out of time. Thank you guys. Another exciting show. We're going to spice, shake things up and we're going to go back to architecture more directly and look at Europe's Hawaii next week, as we just decided before the show, and then return to the automobiles after that. So I look forward to see you for that one. And until then, stay mentally mobile as we keep staying. Bye-bye guys.