#( connection. / && ada sullivan. )

[tatatechnologies]

Journey through time: A comprehensive look at connected vehicles

This article is authored by Nitin Kamble, head CoE, digital technologies, Tata Technologies.

The term “connected vehicles” refers to software, services, and technological developments that connect a vehicle to its surroundings. Now that connected vehicles have become the industry norm, we should expect them to keep getting better. To put it simply, a connected vehicle is one that has wireless networks on board that can communicate with nearby electronic devices. A connected vehicle is frequently described as a highly advanced Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

The technology of today is a marvelous feat of engineering. The concept of connected automobiles has seen tremendous transformation over the past few decades, particularly in recent years. The connected vehicle technology of the past was quite rudimentary in comparison to what we have now. It was first proposed to connect autos to external networks and systems in the 20th century. Early systems focused on basic telemetry and tracking, which were widely used for fleet management. These gadgets conveyed fundamental data via radio or cellular connectivity, such as position and speed.

A turning point in the development of connected car technology was reached when General Motors unveiled their connected vehicle technology platform, “OnStar”. In the early 2000s, telematics systems for cars started to evolve. Telematics combined telecommunications and informatics to enable two-way communication between auto and external systems. These systems offered remote diagnostics, GPS navigation, roadside assistance, and automobile tracking for stolen vehicles.

In-car networking and infotainment capabilities saw a significant change in the 2010s. Manufacturers began adding smartphones, advanced multimedia systems, and touchscreens. It became feasible to use programs while driving, make hands-free calls, and stream media. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) enables cars to communicate with one another and share information like position, speed, and direction to improve safety and traffic flow. V2I communication requires cars to interact with infrastructure, such as traffic lights and road sensors, in order to improve traffic management. In the second half of the 2010s, connected automobiles began to incorporate advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as adaptive cruise control, lane departure warnings, and automatic emergency braking.

There have been numerous advancements in connected vehicle technology since then. Connected vehicles now include advanced ADAS technologies that go beyond standard alerts and warnings. Advanced collision avoidance systems, automatic parking, adaptive cruise control, and lane-keeping assistance are examples of such systems. Manufacturers’ related services include remote vehicle monitoring, diagnostics, and maintenance notifications. These services allow owners to monitor the status of their vehicles and receive alerts when repairs are required.

Today, several automakers use over-the-air (OTA) updates to remotely update vehicles with software upgrades and bug fixes. This capability reduces the number of times customers must visit dealerships for routine maintenance and allows automakers to constantly improve car features and performance.

Infotainment systems in modern cars smoothly interact with cellphones and other devices. Both drivers and passengers have access to a range of apps, music, navigation, and speech recognition services. The implementation of 5G networks will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of connected vehicles. With ultra-low latency and high data transfer rates, 5G will enable real-time communication between vehicles, infrastructure, and the cloud. By 2026, it’s estimated that 5G-enabled vehicles will account for 70% of total connected vehicles, according to Frost & Sullivan.

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication allows vehicles to exchange real-time data with other vehicles and infrastructure components such as traffic signals and road sensors. This communication increases safety by providing information about potential hazards and driving conditions. Even though completely driverless vehicles are not yet common, connected vehicle technology is essential for making autonomous driving possible. In autonomous or semi-autonomous modes, vehicles communicate with one another and the local infrastructure to improve navigation and safety. The significance of cybersecurity has expanded with increased connectivity. To safeguard connected vehicles from hacking and illegal access, automakers are putting a lot of effort into putting strong cybersecurity safeguards in place.

According to a recent report by Draup, the global connected car market size was USD 73.16 Billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to USD 156.6 Billion by 2027 with a CAGR of 16.44% from 2022 to 2027. Communication from V2X will spread more widely. This includes communication between vehicles, including V2V, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P), and other forms. By enabling vehicles to exchange real-time data with each other and their surroundings, V2X will improve safety and traffic management. To reduce latency and enhance real-time decision-making, vehicles will process and analyse data more and more locally (edge computing). For applications like autonomous driving and V2X communication that require safety, this is essential. Through real-time route, speed, and driving behavior optimisation, connected car technology will help make driving more energy-efficient. This may result in less fuel use and pollution.

The usage of completely driverless vehicles will probably increase as autonomous driving technology continues to progress. The autonomous vehicle market is projected to reach $556.67 billion by 2026. To securely navigate complex urban landscapes and highways, these vehicles will interact with one another and the supporting infrastructure. The connectivity between vehicles and the larger network will keep becoming better as 5G networks develop and go beyond. High-bandwidth applications like augmented reality navigation, in-car entertainment, and improved remote vehicle monitoring will be supported by this. Biometric sensors could be included in connected cars to track factors like driver distraction and weariness. Through their intervention when a driver’s attention begins to wander, these sensors may improve safety. Advanced predictive maintenance capabilities will be built into vehicles, using real-time data to identify and fix potential mechanical flaws before they become major difficulties. Passengers will enjoy immersive experiences thanks to reinvented interior design and infotainment systems. Displays for augmented reality, adaptable cabin settings, and entertainment choices all might become commonplace.

Subscription-based business models could overtake traditional car ownership as the preferred mode of transportation. Users had access to various vehicles based on their needs, all of which were connected to their individual accounts for a smooth experience. Smart city initiatives will be greatly aided by connected automobiles, which will provide data for dynamic traffic control, congestion reduction, and better urban design.

The protection of data privacy and cybersecurity will be of utmost importance as vehicles collect and transmit more data. To preserve personal information and stop cyberattacks, more stringent laws and improved security measures will certainly be put in place. By facilitating shared mobility services, enhancing traffic flow, and encouraging eco-friendly driving practices, connected car technology can help to lessen the environmental effect of transportation.

While these options reflect potential pathways for connected vehicle technology, it’s crucial to keep in mind that the precise course will rely on a number of variables, including technological advancements, governmental decisions, consumer preferences, and societal changes. These elements will likely combine to create a dynamic future for connected automobiles.

Original Source: https://www.tatatechnologies.com/media-center/journey-through-time-a-comprehensive-look-at-connected-vehicles/

Nitin Kamble, head CoE, digital technologies, Tata Technologies.

#tata technologies #automotive #connected vehicles

[thelostsullivans]

BASIC INFORMATION

Name:  Francis Joseph Sullivan Nickname / Alias: Frankie Born:  July 25th, 1989 Age:  34 Hometown:  New York City, NY, USA Current location:  New York City, NY Gender / Pronouns:  genderfluid, they/he Sexuality / Attraction:  heteroromantic heterosexual Occupation:  Co-owner and manager of The Blue Lounge / general shithead / future Senator Family: John (incarcerated) and Ada (deceased) Sullivan, Michael Sullivan (brother - deceased), Bullet Sullivan (cousin), Luke O'Doherty (cousin), Reggie Santos Costa (cousin), , Robert Sullivan (paternal grandfather), Lake Sullivan and Ollie Wolfe (children - verse dependent)

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

Face Claim:  Ni.co Tor.tor.ella Hair color:  Brown Eye color:  Blue Height:  5′11

PERSONALITY

Positive Traits:  Smart, born leader, funny, charming, charismatic Negative Traits:  Conniving, opportunistic, selfish, callous at times

BIO

Raised among a sea of crooked men including his father and uncle, the only shining lights in Frankie’s life were their younger brother Mikey and mother Ada – both of whom he was extremely protective. When they both passed away in a car accident, Frankie’s life turned upside down. He and his father John grew closer, if only due to loneliness, and the pair found a connection to John's criminal brother Kelly. Frankie suddenly found themself looking up to their uncle, a man they’d always been a bit afraid of, and connected deeper with him. After a while, John packed up his kid and moved him into a small apartment in Manhattan that his father Robert had loaned him. Soon, John's brother Kelly and his daughter Pearl, recent transplants from Santa Fe, New Mexico, joined them. The two older men then began a ‘business’ of crooked dealings, while Frankie and Bullet (as her father dubbed her) fended for themselves. Relying on what he knew of the life and using their cousin in every way he could manage, Frankie and Bullet struck up a bit of a gig themselves until their fathers got nabbed and thrown into prison. Left alone officially, the pair decided they'd continue to survive the way they had until their grandfather seized the opportunity to look good to his constituents and took them in. Life had improved, it seemed.

When the pair finally discovered just how awful their fathers were and what had gotten them thrown into prison, Frankie, lost and confused, decided to attempt to strike out on their own, leaving the crook in themself behind, determined to head off on the straight and narrow now that they had these new opportunities under their grandfather's care. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have a clue how to get through life without employing all the things that hindered him from keeping his nose clean, and soon he fell back on all of them.

#( frankie. / && bio. )

[rockislandadultreads]

New Title Tuesday: Fiction

Ada’s Room by Sharon Dodua Otoo

A woman in 15th century Ghana named Ada buries her child and confronts a Portuguese enslaver. A woman in Victorian England named Ada Lovelace, a mathematical genius based on the only child of Lord Byron, tries to hide her affair with Charles Dickens from her husband. A woman named Ada, imprisoned in a camp brothel at Buchenwald in 1945, will survive one more day. Connected by an unknown but sentient spirit, and a bracelet of fertility beads that each Ada encounters at a pivotal moment in her life, these women share a name and a fight.

As their interwoven narratives converge on a modern day Ada, a young Ghanian woman who finds herself pregnant, alone, in Berlin, searching for a home before her baby arrives, their shared spirit will find a way to help her break the vicious cycle of injustice.

This novel is a feat of imagination and breaks down simplistic notions of history as a straight line; one woman's experience matters to another's 400 years later, on a different continent. In this deeply moving, at times mordantly funny, ultimately hopeful book, there is a connection between all those fighting for love, for family, for justice, for a home.

River Spirit by Leila Aboulela

Leila Aboulela, hailed as “a versatile prose stylist” (New York Times) has also been praised by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, and Ben Okri, among others, for her rich and nuanced novels depicting Islamic spiritual and political life. Her new novel is an enchanting narrative of the years leading up to the British conquest of Sudan in 1898, and a deeply human look at the tensions between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized. In River Spirit, Aboulela gives us the unforgettable story of a people who—against the odds and for a brief time—gained independence from foreign rule through their willpower, subterfuge, and sacrifice.

When Akuany and her brother Bol are orphaned in a village raid in South Sudan, they’re taken in by a young merchant Yaseen who promises to care for them, a vow that tethers him to Akuany through their adulthood. As a revolutionary leader rises to power – the self-proclaimed Mahdi, prophesied redeemer of Islam – Sudan begins to slip from the grasp of Ottoman rule, and everyone must choose a side. A scholar of the Qur’an, Yaseen feels beholden to stand against this false Mahdi, even as his choice splinters his family. Meanwhile, Akuany moves through her young adulthood and across the country alone, sold and traded from house to house, with Yaseen as her inconsistent lifeline. Everything each of them is striving for – love, freedom, safety – is all on the line in the fight for Sudan.

Through the voices of seven men and women whose fates grow inextricably linked, Aboulela’s latest novel illuminates a fraught and bloody reckoning with the history of a people caught in the crosshairs of imperialism. River Spirit is a powerful tale of corruption, coming of age, and unshakeable devotion – to a cause, to one’s faith, and to the people who become family.

Wolf Trap by Connor Sullivan 

Under the direction of the Special Activities Center in the Operations Directorate of the CIA, over three hundred highly trained agents operate in the darkest shadows of the country’s covert wars. Plucked from the highest echelons of America’s special mission units, these individuals go through rigorous training by the Agency to perfect the arts of assassination, sabotage, infiltration, and guerrilla warfare.

According to the United States government, this Ground Branch of the CIA does not exist. But when diplomacy and military intervention fails, the President of the United States calls upon it to solve America’s most dangerous crises.

Brian Rhome, a former Ground Branch paramilitary officer, thought his time within this elite group was over. But now, he’s on a desperate race against time around the globe as he confronts the traumas of his past and unravels a deadly conspiracy that threatens the highest levels of American democracy.

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer

Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father’s violence and their mother’s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home.

But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to beings greater than themselves, and reckon with a family secret buried in the past. A tale told from the perspective of a mischievous narrator, featuring the Rolling Calf who haunts butchers, Mama Dglo who lives in the ocean, a vain tiger, and an outsmarted snake, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts is set in a world as alive and unpredictable as Helen Oyeyemi’s.

Telling of the love between sisters who don’t always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, what happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

#fiction #new books #new titles #new library books #Library Books #Book Recommendations #book recs #Reading Recs #reading recommendations #TBR pile #tbr #tbrpile #to read #Want To Read #Booklr #book tumblr #book blog #library blog

[lostsullivans]

connection / dynamic tags i forgot

#( ooc. / && tag drop. ) #( connection. / && riva darcy. ) #( connection. / && donny wilson. ) #( dynamic. / && bullet and donny wilson. ) #( dynamic. / && bullet and riva darcy. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and sara jacob. ) #( dynamic. / && bullet and florence sullivan. ) #( dynamic. / && bullet and kelly sullivan. ) #( dynamic. / && bullet and robert sullivan. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and ada sullivan. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and robert sullivan. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and john sullivan. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and brad lincoln. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and gavin scott. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and brad lincoln and gavin scott. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and nicky salvador. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and olivia wolfe. )

[shoogharashk]

1 March 3998

At sunrise this morning, we awoke to find Throckmorton and Hyla had done some investigating of their own during the night. They had gone down to the docks and asked the dockworkers about anything unusual happening lately, but hadn’t had much luck. The dockworkers had directed them to the Naval Guard to ask about any missing persons. They had also gone by Shylock’s shop and found it closed, but noticed there had been a great deal more foot traffic there since Throckmorton, Thea and I had gone during the day yesterday.

While stopping at the bar for coffee, I inquired of the gnomish bartender whether he knew the halfling woman who had come in with Sullivan last night. At the name Bettencourt, he called for his boss, the owner of the winery, who came down and revealed himself to be a full orc named Brogdon. He shared a look with Throckmorton (not too many full orcs out there that make their livings within the bounds of mainstream society) before moving on to our question. He knew Bettencourt (first name Ada) to be the guard captain’s assistant at the naval outpost. Between this and the dockworkers’ suggestion to see the Naval Guard with any questions about missing persons, that seemed to be our next direction. Perhaps we could inquire there about Maddock, using our status as Sullivan’s employees to persuade them to provide information on the fugitive’s last known location.

Hyla, however, insisted that she and Pallabar needed a “haircut” (I have learned that the hair on humanoids’ heads needs regular grooming with scissors, ugh, the thought is still unnerving to me) and would try to get some rumors from the barbershop. This is apparently a thing...trading casual gossip with someone who wields scissors inches from your head. Barbaric.

While they went for their “haircuts,” the remainder of our crew headed for the naval offices. We dropped Sullivan’s name to get in to meet Ms. Bettencourt, and our attempts to get some information on Maddock’s apartment ended a bit awkwardly, with Ada, the chief investigator Teri, and several of the guards accompanying us to search the apartment again. They had already done so last night, apparently, but conceded that perhaps we could find something they did not. They mentioned his roommate would not be happy.

His roommate, we soon learned, was none other than Shylock! Who was, indeed, not at all happy about this intrusion. If we need anything else from that shop later, we shall have to send Hyla and Pallabar; the three of us are, I believe, banned now. Maddock’s room was a bit dusty, but well adorned. The walls were covered with maps of various areas of Atron, including many of Greentide but also including trade routes that involve Emryn, Aralyn, and Arcanum. Both sea and land routes were well represented. The trick now would be finding what we needed without alerting the guards. A quick glance in his desk revealed little to Thea and I, but Throckmorton found and pocketed a few papers that he later revealed to us to be treasure maps. Adventures for another day!

I noticed a few scuff marks near a mirror and dresser/washbin, and sent a quick Message to Thea asking her to distract the guards if possible while I investigated. As she helped Teri search under some floorboards, I moved the mirror aside and grabbed a few papers in a hole in the wall behind it. I took only the swiftest glance at them to prevent the guards from seeing, but later found them to be a map of the River Dauntless (with a large X hopefully indicating the fountain?), some letters from Clever confirming their partnership and thanking Maddock for obtaining the dwarven pitcher, and a (cashed) note of credit in Clever’s name for 7,000 gold. There was also a receipt from a smith named Brightcopper, whose forgemark he signed with matched that from the pitcher, thanking Maddock for his business but expressing questions as to what this pitcher was for. After we apologized to the guards for wasting their time with a fruitless second search, we departed with these items concealed. This was the evidence we needed to start our search for the Fountain. Perhaps the smith in Brother Heights is a lead we can explore at another time as well.

We met again with Hyla and Pallabar, whose hair looked approximately the same as when we had separated, with the exception of Pallabar’s beard looking freshly combed. They said they had really only managed to learn that the forests were dangerous, and also that they were now banned from Beau Jangles’ barbershop. I did not inquire further. These practices are still so strange to me.

On our way out of town, we encountered a construction site for a temple around a mausoleum. This, at first, was of little interest, until we noticed live sea creatures (corals, barnacles, etc) growing on the mausoleum, well away from the ocean! We learned from the cleric there, Solea, that the mausoleum housed a recently deceased human man named Yandy, a great and well-esteemed sailor who had claimed to have power over the sea, and whom, they were realizing after his death, may have been right. The growth of the sea creatures on his tomb, Solea explained, is a divine sign that he did indeed have a godly connection to the ocean. She has since begun to worship him, and is building a temple on his gravesite and attempting to get permission from the city to construct a canal to connect the temple to the ocean. Thea had many questions for her, including about a mark on Yandy’s neck that he claimed helped him tame the wind and waves. A small dragon statue also interested me, and Solea said that he often left offerings to the coastal dragons (like the ones who warned us of the storm on our last day at sea). An intriguing little scene indeed, and Thea in particular seemed to leave deep in thought.

We are now making our way out towards the forest, so I will set down my pen and continue this later, perhaps tonight or tomorrow.

-NS

#episode 4

[aggresivelyfriendly]

Hi Babes! This chapter, well, she gave me trouble, but she’s written and we have progress! All my love to @dirtystyles and @bleedinglove4h! Long Live Tripod Writing!!

Chapter 5-Kekkou Desu

"No." 

Harry watched all of the color go out of Ada's face. His arm had been far from her realaxed shoulders. They were so high at the moment, he was nearly cupping one. But not in a good way, or with any comfort. Where a minute ago she had been open and easy, she had tightened up all over, gates slammed down, moats redug and walls reinforced. Everything was tense, the moment especially.

Harry had wandered into a trigger field, and his request had pressed a button he didn't know existed. Fuck, he felt like he'd just puked on her shoes again. This time without any of his usual clumsiness. She could sing, he'd heard her. Though that wasn't a requirement for this crowd, or the activity. Multiple people who had zero business had been up to sing, sometimes in a language they didn't know. Ada was clearly not going to sing, and it looked like she may walk right out on him and the rest of the night because he suggested she get on stage. The dance they had been doing was back to square one. He needed to say something, he usually cackled when he got this uncomfortable, or told a terrible joke, stunk up the air to clear the awkward fumes. Neither seemed the course of action here. "Ok," he cupped her risen shoulder lightly, ran his thumb over the knot he felt when she tightened and looked at her until she acknowledged him. It took several seconds, they felt biblical in length. Ada blew out a breath and lifted her wide eyes to him. He could still see tension at the corners, but she gave them to him. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to. Not with me. Just have fun. I, however, allowed myself to be browbeaten into singing, again. Will you be here when I finish?" Would she be?  There was a big part of her, huge, that wanted to fuck off to her hotel room and forget this night ever happened. She really had thought she was over the singing thing. It was a childhood and adolescent wound, deep, but she had therapy, talked it to death, til she thought her trauma had covered its ears and cowered. It was upsetting to find out how deep that bruise still lived.  She'd have to go see Dr. Shiny when she got home. Two months, would she even remember it had made her tense like that? Harry seemed like he remembered, though he was doing a good job of downplaying her freak out. Harry'd done nothing wrong, and his request wasn't that out of the ordinary considering the venue. Lots of the cast or crew had sang, Ayae was currently doing Material Girl. The band plodding behind her ah, ahs! She sounded so awful Ada was charmed. There was no reason to leave, this was a good time, and she was happy to be there, even post awkward over reaction, with him. Plus, She wanted to see him sing again. The last time had been a game changer. Ada was sure anything after Nirvana would be underwhelming.

The choice though, made her curious.

She wondered what he would chose next time. His album and band t shirts suggested good taste. She loved his mix, one day Bowie the next day Britney. She would stay. To satisfy her curiosity. Her head was nodding like a happy horse, she liked her decision, but imagined she should slow down the drinks that were basically straight vodka. Even if it would help her forget her. freak out "I'll be here. Sorry, I don't really want to.." She flashed her hands in a rolling motion hoping he would understand, she wanted to stay but not explain, She hoped he didn’t press.  Ada did not want to shot him down again. Especially since he had been so gracious. His grace shown again. "Don't, it's ok, you can tell me another time, if you feel up to it. Let me go see what Kunichi has cooked up for me . I have my own ideas, something simple." The last part he muttered to himself and she felt a little smile cross her lips at him walking off. His gait somehow like a baby giraffe before it gained confidence and became cocksure and hip full. Her head snapped to the side at that. Her eyes bugged at the next move. Harry was looking down at first, but then he swooped his hair off his forehead with a little shake and pushed it back, the long curls he’d kept on top. It was an innocuous move, but suddenly he took up more space in the room than before, than his physicality required. Though he was bigger than most people in the room, in the country. He caught her watching him when she made it to the stage. Her smile transformed into a very attractive attempt to catch flies once she watched Harry make a bemused face, say something to one of the other guys on stage that started conversation, then wink at her. Her anticipation ramped up a moment later when he looked at Kunichi like he might be a genius and kissed his forehead noisily then nodded with a 40 million pound smile. Whatever Kunichi had on the stove for him seemed to be amusing all of them, and she swore that his friend had looked at her, directly, which felt almost rude in Japan, since they were simply tangentially connected strangers.Very direct and she wasn’t on stage and nobody had caught Harry or Kunichi’s look, but she felt in the spotlight. Nerves all over. Ada was at a loss, but excited, all her hair was standing on end, and she was almost irritated she'd have to shave again so soon. Though why she had shaved when she wore jeans was curious, but she would ponder that when she was ready to consider implications, like in 3 years. A synapse fired and a memory started to materialize a moment later when a simple guitar cord was struck, and Harry swiveled his hips from one side to the other in a familiar but uncharacteristic manner. At once jerky and sinuous. Who did that remind her of? All her questions were answered when the old school train like riff entered and the drum was a dull thud instead of a crash. A few screams went up and Ada wondered if she was actually at the Ed Sullivan show. His hair was wrong, much to light, and he was a tad prettier, more feminine than the man he was channeling. But someone should tell that to his voice, and his hips, and her heart. Before Kurt in her heart, right next to James Brown was Elvis Presley. And her Babe Ruth was knocking a cover out of the park. This night was ridiculous, for a man who had fallen so short of her expectations for a month, he was blowing her mind tonight. Elvis, was he fucking kidding her?

And she'd always loved this song. Not her favorite, but a classic. She was all shook up too. The first time she had heard it, she was probably 8 and she'd told her dad the lyrics were stupid and simple. Her dad had scoffed but her mom had just worn a knowing smile. They were, until you felt those feelings, weak knees, and tied tongues. Music played in her house a lot and her mom got on kicks- it was during one of those dance it out phases, when she heard Elvis with new ears. Things had gone to hell at home, her dad had moved out ages ago, but it felt like a new ending that day. Her mom had been served papers, which meant dad had somebody he was his version of serious about. So her heart was tender, but she was pushing it down to buoy her mom’s fake cheer.. To top it all off, Peter Harris had made out with her and she was definitely all shook up. All mixed up. It was exactly how she felt her mom had been right. 13 year old Ada was not in love, though that was equally inexpressible, but definitely infatuated and her was body running amok. Her head thinking about Peter’s lips and her heart aching over her dad’s refreshed abandonment. It was confusing. The worst part about that feeling, those feelings were they didn't shut down when Pete told everybody that black girl's nipples were too dark and that she didn't know how to kiss. It was her third one, how was she supposed to know what to do? There wasn’t a class at the civic center on kissing.

But she always liked the song, even if she had weird memories to it. She had lots of memories to Elvis.

And tonight was a new one with Harry Presley. Her star was a sight. His clothes did not say Elvis. But his looks said performer in the throes. His hair was wild, it hadn’t been tidy, not scene ready, since she arrived by any stretch. The dishevelment now was on another level. Because he had one hair curling into his vision. It hung like a vine and she seriously wanted to George of the Jungle on it. Then she'd be in his vision, like he'd captured hers tonight. He had tried to blow it off after one set of Yeah Yas, and it had come right back over. He’d eyeballed it, and if looks couldn’t kill, they at least amused. Ada liked this frustrated look. It made her laugh. Theoretically, he should wear something like it while they were working, but this one was more bemused than defeated. He’d flip his head back like he was saying what’s up to somebody and the hair would give Harry a moment’s reprieve, before it was right back in his eye line. Eventually, when he couldn't make the hair wither with scorching looks, he left it. “Guess my hair has decided we need to look the part!” And there was some clapping, Jeff whistled. She sighed. It was perfect for the moment. The right thing to say in the moment. She nodded and he caught her eye and smirked before a body roll up on some mmm, mms.

Damn him. Her body was mirroring the lyrics, her heart beat a little faster. Her pulse throbbed appropriately. This was magic. It needed to make it into the movie. “Holy shit!” She was seriously wondering if she could add a scene with him dressed as Elvis. God, would he be willing to sing in a movie? Like a proper early superstar? He couldn't dance, so he wasn't a triple threat to anything but her cool.  He should sing in a movie. Their movie. She whipped out her phone and started planning. The schedule was packed. Ada wasn't even sure they had time.  She could make some, she knew.  It would be worth going over budget, especially if she could get him performing like he was tonight. This wasn't a performance, properly.  But it felt once in a lifetime. Jeff had once called him a clutch man. It was probably why he wanted to be more than just brother's from another mother with him. Harry loves to be praised. "When things start to fall apart, in an interview, or on stage, or if someone just says something that is awkward and off putting, you just have a way of changing subject, or charming the hell out of them." Harry figured Jeff found this to be a great asset for a client with ambitions like Harry. Maybe why he wanted to be more than brothers himself. Being able to roll with it, duck and dive, was useful in their business. Harry wasn't even aware of how big his ambitions were until someone handed him the moon and he suddenly wanted the stars. That first two years in the band were bewildering, but once he decided he wanted more, he started planning how. And being a good guy in a pinch had got him the manager. So, Harry was usually the clutch man. He came through. Not 100%. His batting average wasn't perfect.  If his nerves were up, things went one of two ways, he knocked the ball to the rafters, or he whiffed hard at air, even when the ball was crap. He had been doing a lot of whiffing, in clutch moments with this movie. He thought he had come through enough to not be absolute rubbish, but his ability to slide into home while everybody was watching kept alluding him, like why anybody played a boring sport like baseball let alone watched it mystified him. It felt different today, tonight. For tonight, was nothing, if not a performance.  Though he wasn't sure what was riding on it beyond his heart. But he felt like he was knocking it of the park right now. From the smile on Ada's face, it was a grand slam. She had been watching him since he caught her when she fell. He'd felt it when he walked away from her. Those big brown eyes on him. It was a change, he wasn’t exactly relaxed, but he was relieved. The secret, like Jeff said or course, was to "act good." Was that it? Which was the chicken and which was the egg? Did he act good, so she softened, or did she soften so he could act good? Harry was likely to think it was not him. She had been soft with him today on set, when she did that, was kind and quiet and direct, he performed. Hmmmmmm. It was her, she was soft pitching him today and tonight. Definitely tonight, soft beautiful eyes too. And it was making him hard. Which was unfortunate because he was on stage and the performance required him to draw a lot of attention to his pelvis.  He needed to think about the moves. Kinda, they were written on his hip flexors. He's done it a lot. When he was little he spent a lot of time, pre YouTube, he congratulated himself, watching his icons perform. It's why his Jagger impression didn't require to much work on SNL, and he was able to lay it on thick on stage with Niall. He’d been doing it for years, along with Freddie Mercury and Elton John.  Strangely after all the comparisons, not Bowie. Not David, but definitely Elvis! He'd been mimicking Elvis since his mom played him in the kitchen when she danced off bad days. She'd mimic the moves and Harry would copy her. He was about three. He reckoned when his mom found video of Elvis performing for him to watch. And then he had his own little Elvis impersonating ring, which got a surprising amount of business for a village the size of Holmes Chapel. He had at least 3 gigs. So he could do the gyrating thing in his sleep. People focused on his hips a lot, looking for that ever elusive bulge shot, he was happy tonight was a friendly get together and nobody was filming him. Well, Kunichi was, but chest up. He hammed it up when his hair grew a mind of its own and hoped that deflected pelvic attentions. It made him go down at least. He took several deep breaths and got ready for the crescendo of the song. He vocalized along, popped his lips and hips once more, and grinned, scanning the clapping hands. He'd been more focused with the eye contact that he usually was, a small familiar crowd. Ada. She hadn’t taken her eyes off him, until a lighbulb seemed to go off above her head and she’d been on her phone. She was looking down now and he wanted her attention back. He’d have to go get it. He shook himself of the persona and jumped down, taking a couple hugs on his way off stage. Hugs, from Japanese people, they were drunk. Well, that was good, worse video quality when these videos made their way to the internet and a delay without him asking for it. Bless hangovers. Harry was making his way back to Ada. He had a clear view of the table, pathway too, almost like it had been cleared. The light even seemed to illuminate the ground ahead of him. It felt like a movie moment. Her focus on him and the two fresh drinks in front of her. What a set up. The sense of inevitability he had had since he met her matched the moment and her eyes. He still saw green fields when he first looked at her on set each day, but sometimes, they were amber and dry by nightfall. Mostly because Ada did not seem to share the portent. He felt like he was destined to love her, and she didn't seem bothered by him at all. Well in the English way, she seemed plenty bothered by him in the American sense. Irritated. Not tonight, a flip had switched and all that karma for being the single minded devotion of so many when you felt not the same at all, literally didn't know they were alive, he thought had come back to bite him. He wasn't sure he believed in cosmic payback, but he knew sometimes his careless heart hurt those he cared for too. He'd sat up late one night looking at Instagram wondering if maybe he'd earned her indifference. Not directly, but because he couldn’t possibly adequately return or take all the love showered upon him. So, he’d somehow lost his claim to the love he wanted. Her indifference hurt. Some days indifference was a wish. Better than when he was afraid she disliked him. "Wow! Harry Presley! You just gave me a whole new idea for a scene!" She may not be on the same page as him, waiting for more, but she wasn’t indifferent and her grabbing his hand made him sure she didn’t hate him.  A new scene sounded exciting. And then she talked shop for an hour. It was a pleasure, felt like when somebody had a riff and he had a lyric and they fit, or vice versa. Except this time he was the instrument.  And he loved the way she played him. "So, there is already the rockabilly tradition and the karaoke tradition!" Her eyes sparkled, like really, it wasn't even the light or the make up. She wore little- her skin was just that good. Shit, pay attention. "So what if, they have a fight, like we already have planned, and to make it up to him, Henry arranges to meet Akio somewhere, more public than it should be, and he's dressed like Akio’s day dream." She paused there slightly more pensively, like her mind was already onto the next question while she posed this one to him. “And sings him an Elvis song!" He was dumbfounded, he liked it, movie magic. Licensing would be a bitch, though. She was staring. Oh, he’d wandered. He looked spacey when he was thinking. He wished he looked more like she did when pondering. "You will won't you, sing for the film?" She'd taken his hand. He's do anything then, but. "Yeah, of course”, he was already giving his truth and possible credibility. He'd sing, it bugged him the way singer‘s who acted got waved off. The other way was praised. And even Elvis’' cheesiest movies were entertaining and had great songs. She took her hands and clapped. She was a tough cookie, but she was currently fluffier than the slime he'd made with Arlo. So excited. "What song should he sing?" She eyed him, "all shook up?" "No," he pulled his lip while he thought, "it's not deep enough. Not a sorry.”

“Well, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ could be cute, but still not a sorry, ‘Don't’ Be Cruel’ is a good one, but a little too inverted for the situation, ‘Return to Sender’?” He shook his head while he mentally ticked through the catalog. Ada's bit her lip and her brow curled and she looked at the table top. Suddenly, her large eyes were saucers, "Can't Help Falling In Love!" "No!" He almost yelled it. He didn't mean to react like that. But absolutely not. He couldn’t sing that song for this. "Oooookay," she side eyed him, but extended him the same grace he had to her. But he could see she would press later, had noticed she got curious. "That's probably a good call anyway, with Crazy Rich Asians and all." She let him off the sharing hook.

She tapped her lip. "’The Wonder Of You’? ‘She's Not You’? ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?" She was muttering, mentally scanning through hits. But she’d missed the perfect one. He almost wondered if she was letting him come up with it to boost his confidence. He shared it anyway. "Love Me Tender." Harry said with finality and Ada slapped the table. “That's perfect!" She clinked her glass to his, a dollop splashing out, and took a swig. "Now we just have to find the time to film an unplanned scene. When we are behind." She looked at him.  level and more sober than her momentary spill had suggested. "So I need you to do better Harry. Like today, but everyday.  If you could bring whatever sauce you are on to set for the rest of the film. I think this scene may be one of those ones that people remember, like Molly Ringwald and Jake Ryan sitting on the table kissing over the cake?" "I love that scene!" Harry enthused. "Everybody loves that scene." Ada playfully rolled her eyes at him. "It's an iconic scene, so good we still talk about the movie despite the racism. It’s like you singing Elvis will be, without the terrible cultural illiteracy.” "I wish somebody hadn't already done the dirty dancing lift thing. Though I suppose I got the idea from the movie." The last bit he said to himself. "Wait? What? Like the Ryan gosling thing where he picked up Emma Stone in 'Crazy Stupid Love?' His move?" She was chuckling at him. He could feel the color in his cheeks- he might be the color of a ripe tomato. "Is it so cheesy?" He kinda knew it was, he could be a little cheesy. But most people liked cheese, it was the hardest part about eating vegan for him. "I mean, you could melt it on bread and call it dinner, but everybody likes grilled cheese. "Cheese toastie, “ he corrected. He liked the way she was biting her lip. "What?" "Does it work?" Her brows flashed, and she'd leaned into him closer.  "The move." Harry shrugged. He wasn't sure how to say the next bit without sounding like a total ass. "It's always worked for me, especially if the girl has seen the movie! What? Why are you laughing at me?" Ada took a full 30 seconds to get herself together. He thought he saw a tear at the corner of her eye. "Sorry, Sorry, it's just.. why do you have a move anyway, couldn't you just say 'I'm Harry Styles’' and get laid?" "It's really not that easy, and if it is I don’t want it!" He was a little offended, but he knew what she meant. Her mouth opened a little bit and he bit his tongue when she leaned in like she was gonna share a secret. He wasn't sure whose secret.   "You like the chase?" God her mouth was really close to his, and she tasted like vodka and verve. "Um," shit if he just licked his lips it might count as a kiss. "I like to earn it." He could feel how true that was, though he wasn't sure he could have articulated it before. Like learning an instrument, or winning an audition after a long process. He knew he could have most things he wanted, and he was a little insecure about why he got things, so he liked it when he knew, no shadows of doubt, that he earned them. He wanted to earn Ada, he thought he might have a shot now. Ada cocked her head to the side, pursed her lips and nodded. Then stood up and took her hand off his, "Well, then I’m gonna need a little less conversation and a little more action."  

He should have followed her out.

Her wink on the way out the door kept him rooted in the booth.

#harry styles #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fanfic #a premontion of love #apol #harry presley #chapter 5 #kekkou desu

[charlesccastill]

BPDA Board Approves Nine Development Projects, Mostly Residential Units

BOSTON–The Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA) Board of Directors approved nine new development projects at their October meeting. The projects will generate 193 residential units, including 81 total affordable units, and 885 jobs once construction is complete.

Two of the projects approved, 41 North Margin Street in the North End and Morton Station Village in Mattapan, are fully affordable, generating 63 of the 81 affordable units approved at this meeting.

In addition to the development projects, the Board approved a two-year pilot program for a Compact Living Policy and an Interim Planning Overlay District (IPOD) for East Boston. A result of the launch of PLAN: East Boston this summer, the IPOD is an interim zoning tool that is used to maintain increased public review and community voice in the evaluation of proposed new development during the planning process.

These initiatives and the approved units build on Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s updated housing targets, announced this fall to meet Boston’s population growth by supporting the creation of new affordable housing, increasing access to homeownership opportunities, and preventing displacement of residents.

Development Projects

41 North Margin Street approval brings fully affordable senior living project to the North End

Live: 23 affordable senior housing units, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessible Work: 50 construction jobs, over $12 million in investments Connect: Residents’ community room, Knights of Columbus meeting space Size: 24,257 square feet

Funded through the Hub on Causeway’s linkage payments, 41 North Margin Street will consist of 23 rental units, 1,500 square feet of Knights of Columbus meeting space and 13 parking spaces. All 23 rental units will be designated for senior affordable housing. The units will be a combination of 12 studio units and 11 one-bedroom units.

The project will include the construction a five-story addition, add an additional two-stories and renovate the existing three-story building. Once complete, the construction will total 24,257 square feet.

Morton Station Village brings 40 affordable housing units, community space to Mattapan

Live: Nine income restricted homeownership units, 31 income restricted rental units Work: 37 construction jobs Connect: 1,500 square feet of community space adjacent to the City of Boston Parks Department-designed Steven P. Odom Serenity Garden Size: 57,265 square feet

Located at 872 Morton Street, the Morton Station Village project consists of 40 units of income restricted housing, consisting of nine income restricted homeownership units and 31 income restricted rental units. In order to create an economically diverse new residential community and to meet the needs of and desires expressed by neighborhood residents through the seven community conversations, the 40 units of housing will be made available to residents earning from 30% to 100% of the Area Median Income (AMI).

Nine one-bedroom and two-bedroom units will be created as affordable homeownership condominium units restricted at 80% AMI to 100% AMI. All 31 rental units will be deed-restricted affordable between 30% and 100% AMI. This income mix has been purposely established both in response to neighborhood objectives and to provide opportunity for a wide-ranging population to afford to rent or purchase a condominium here. The unit mix consists of 14 one-bedroom units, 22 two-bedroom units and four three-bedrooms. In addition, the project will feature common areas including laundry, a fitness center, bicycle storage, onsite management and parking in a modern LEED Silver Certifiable structure. There will be 30 parking spaces on-site.

Work with the community has led to the incorporation of nearly 1,500 square feet of community space in the building adjacent to the City of Boston Parks Department-designed Steven P. Odom Serenity Garden. The garden will sit towards the rear of the project site near Hopkins Street and provide a respite location for the community in a public park setting. The community space will be intricately tied into the garden to enable the community and neighbors to use these spaces together.

New Leather District hotel approved for 150 Kneeland Street will feature 300 free hotel nights annually to people in need

Live: 300 free hotel nights per year, collaboration with Housing Stability and Chinatown non-profit, funding for Project Place neighborhood cleaning, improvements to Leather District Park and Reggie Wong Park Work: Over 40 retail and hotel jobs, 150 construction jobs, new hotel employment opportunities Connect: Access from hotel development to South Station, street infrastructure and security upgrades, three Boston Police linked cameras, LEED Silver Certifiable Size: 81,600 square feet

The existing site of the approved 150 Kneeland Street project is composed of two parcels, currently occupied by vacant commercial buildings. A new building with mid-rise tower housing and a well-designed, top-quality hospitality facility will be constructed in its place. The new building will be contemporary in style, featuring elements that relate to the surrounding area and will generate a supply of hotel space to the immediate South Station area. As proposed, the project is expected to be a 21-story, 230 room hotel. In addition to guest rooms, the hotel will include meeting spaces, publicly accessible food and beverage on the ground floor, as well as other amenities. There will be no parking associated with this project.

Once complete, the project will provide public benefits including job creation, infrastructure upgrades, visual streetscape improvements, a new destination for locals and tourists. Most notable is this project’s commitment to a unique 10-year contribution of 300 free hotel nights annually to people in need of accommodation, an effort meant to address short-term housing emergencies that may occur from crises such as loss of property, medical issues, and immigration displacement.

610 Rutherford Avenue approval to generate 22 residential ownership units, three IDP in Charlestown; contribute funding toward Rutherford Avenue/Sullivan Square Design Project

Live: 22 residential ownership units, three affordable units, public community space, top floor with roof deck access Work: 120 construction jobs Connect: 10 bike storage units, building wifi, walking distance to Sullivan Square MBTA Station Size: 25,450 square feet

The 610 Rutherford Avenue project site currently has a four unit two-story residential building which has been approved for demolition by the Landmarks Commission. The redevelopment of this site will feature the construction of a new five-story building with 22 condominium units. Three of the units will be designated as IDP units. The first floor of the building will consist of the a residents lobby, bike storage and parking for 19 vehicles. There will also be a loading/drop-off area to service the building. Upon the issuance of the building permit for this project, a $20,000 contribution toward the City of Boston’s Transportation Department (BTD) will be made for the Rutherford Avenue/Sullivan Square Design Project in Charlestown.

East Boston’s 277 Border Street to create 18 units of housing, contribute toward East Boston Social Centers and the East Boston Greenway

Live: 18 housing units of which two are ADA accessible, 16 market-rate units, two affordable units, Work: 40 construction jobs Connect: $20K in community benefits toward East Boston Social Centers and East Boston Greenway Size: 20,595 square feet

The approved 277 Border Street project will construct a five-story, mixed-use building. The building will feature 18 condominium units, made up of 16 market-rate units and two IDP units. In addition, the building will also have one commercial unit. There will be eight off-street garage parking spaces located at-grade level. Bicycle storage and a trash/recycling room will be located within the ground-level of the building. The 18 condominium units will consist of a mix of four studio units, 11 one-bedroom units, two two-bedroom units, and one three-bedroom unit.

The project has committed $10,000 contributions to both the East Boston Social Centers and the East Boston Greenway.  The East Boston Social Centers contribution will be used to fund youth athletic and enrichment programs, while the East Boston Greenway contribution will be used to fund construction and improvements.

Approval of 400 Dorchester Street in South Boston to yield 35 housing units, provide funding toward a future Transportation Action Plan for the PLAN: South Boston/Dorchester Avenue study area

Live: 35 housing units of which two are ADA accessible, 29 market-rate units, six affordable units Work: 50+ constructions jobs, new commercial space with job opportunities upon completion of project Connect: $35,000 in community benefits toward Transportation Action Plan funding and a neighborhood restaurant Size: 38,437 square feet

As approved, the 400 Dorchester Street project proposed to construct a six-story, mixed-use building. The building will contain 35 rental units, made up of 29 market-rate units and six IDP units. There will be a mix of 30 one-bedroom units, and five studio units. The ground floor will consist of 2,535 square feet of commercial retail space for a new restaurant use. The proposed project will also include a roof deck as an amenity for residents. A trash/recycling room and bicycle storage will be located within the building.

The proposed project will provide community benefits for the South Boston neighborhood and the City of Boston as a whole. In order to mitigate the transportation network impacts of the project, $35,000 has been committed toward a future Transportation Action Plan for the PLAN: South Boston Dorchester Avenue study area.

425 Border Street to bring 16 residential units to East Boston, contributions to East Boston Social Centers and East Boston Greenway

Live: 16 residential units, including two affordable units Work: 50 construction jobs Connect: Community benefits supports East Boston Social Centers and East Boston Greenway Size: 20,762 square feet

425 Border Street will bring a five-story, 16 residential unit building, consisting of 14 market rate units and two affordable units to East Boston. All 16 units will be two bedroom units. The project is located five blocks from Central Square and less than one mile from the MBTA’s Blue Line Maverick Station, and is well served by multiple bus lines operating in East Boston. The project has committed $10,000 contributions to both the East Boston Social Centers and the East Boston Greenway.

New BIDMC Inpatient Building approved will provide needed single-bed patient rooms, intensive care beds, and expanded surgery and clinical support spaces

Live: $40,000 parks contribution to benefit surrounding neighborhoods Work: 80 – 100 permanent jobs Connect: $300,000 in transportation mitigation Size: 325,000 square feet

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) will construct a 325,000 square foot, 10 story inpatient building on its West Campus in the Longwood Medical Area bounded by Brookline Avenue, Francis Street and Pilgrim Road. The new inpatient building will include up to 128 single-bed/surgical rooms and up to 30 clinical rooms.

In addition, the project will provide $40,000 in Parks funding, between 80 and 100 permanent jobs, and $300,000 for pedestrian and cyclist improvements in the vicinity of the Riverway and Brookline Avenue.

111 Terrace Street in Mission Hill to include designated artist units, pedestrian improvements, and transportation study

Live: 34 market rate units, five affordable units, two designated for artists Work: Artist work space, 50 construction jobs Connect: Transit-oriented, On-site bicycle storage Size: 31,862 square feet

111 Terrace Street will construct a five story, 31,862 square foot residential building with 39 residential rental units, 21 off-street parking spaces and at least 48 on-site bicycle storage spaces. Five units within the project will be created as IDP rental units made affordable to households earning not more than 70% of the AMI. The project is located within a six minute walk of the Roxbury Crossing Station connecting to the MBTA Orange Line and bus service.

Two studio units within the project will be built out and designated as income restricted artist live units and will have access to the shared work area on the ground floor.

In addition the project will fund a transportation study/analysis of the Terrace Street corridor, the installation of signage and a new pedestrian crosswalk at the intersection of Cedar Street and Terrace Street, will generate pedestrian access improvements along Terrace Street including widened sidewalks and landscaping improves, and the installation of new lighting along the building perimeter to improve visibility and pedestrian safety.

from boston condos ford realtor https://bostonrealestatetimes.com/bpda-board-approves-nine-development-projects-mostly-residential-units/

#boston #condos #boston condos #boston luxury condo #boston condominium #boston rentals #boston condo

[gystink]

Call for artists: Denver Museum of Nature & Science and The Denver Arts & Venues Public Art program need a site-specific art installation (Colorado)

Denver Museum of Nature & Science Public Art Project Wellington E. Webb Municipal Building Denver Office of Cultural Affairs Public Art Program 201 W. Colfax Avenue Dept. 1007 Denver, CO 80202

APPLY TO THIS CALL  

Entry Deadline: 5/28/18 REQUIREMENTS: Media Images - Minimum: 6, Maximum: 6  Total Media - Minimum: 6, Maximum: 6  View Site Details

Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Budget: APPROXIMATELY $85,000.00 (Colorado artists only)

 DEADLINE: Monday, May 28, 2018 11:59 p.m. MST

 Introduction

The Denver Arts & Venues Public Art program, now in its 30th year, and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS), seek to commission a Colorado artist or team of artists to create a site-specific art installation to be integrated into the exterior site design for the Morgridge Family Exploration Center, formally the new Education & Collections Facility (ECF), of the DMNS, a 126,000-sq. ft. addition on the south side of the existing building.   Mission and Vision: Denver Museum of Nature & Science

 Be a catalyst! Ignite our community’s passion for nature and science.

Vision The Denver Museum of Nature & Science envisions an empowered community that loves, understands, and protects our natural world.

Core Values

·         We love science.

·         We are curious, creative, and playful.

·         We cultivate relationships with each other, diverse communities, the environment, and for our future.

·         We think critically and act with empathy.

 Students and park goers are the primary visitors to the Southeast end of the plaza and Morgridge Family Education Center. The pathway to the Morgridge Family Exploration Center from the bus drop-off is an opportunity for students to connect to the natural environment with a walk through the City Park.  This arrival sequence defines the idea that Denver Museum of Nature & Science is City Park’s Museum. Two carefully preserved large existing deciduous trees frame the foreground of the Morgridge Family Exploration Center and the park’s irrigated lawn abuts the building around the perimeter reinforcing the engagement of the building with the park. 

  City Park

City Park is a historic 330-acre urban park in Denver, CO. The park contains the Denver Zoo, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Ferril and Duck Lakes, and the Pavilion. City Park, the largest and most notable park in Denver, is located in central Denver, slightly more than a mile east of downtown. The park is one mile long and three-quarters of a mile wide. The park's boundaries are:

West-York Street

South-17th Avenue

East-Colorado Boulevard

North-23rd Avenue

The initial park layout was designed by Henry Meryweather in 1882 in the tradition of both English pastoral gardens and Central Park in New York City, with a flowing, casual design. Construction of the park began in 1886 with “a sinuous tangle of winding carriageways, walks and promenades” put into place. City Beautiful movement, initiated at the 1893 World’s Fair, further influenced the design. The arrangement of roads and walks gave the park its pastoral feel, many of which are still in place today.

 After the turn-of-the-century the park was linked, as originally envisioned, to a wider system of parks using parkways and grand boulevards. During this period and consistent with the City Beautiful philosophy, monumental sculpture was introduced, including the McLellan Gateway, the Sopris Gateway, the Monti Gateway, the Sullivan Gateway and the Thatcher Memorial Fountain, each marking park entrances.

 Public Art at the DMNS

 Goals

The art selection panel has set forth a set of specific goals and parameters for this public art project with the hope of creating guidelines that will inspire a unique, one-of-a-kind installation for the museum, the park, Denver and the region.

 The Site for the Artwork

The selection panel seeks for a public artwork to be sited on the circular mulch area near the southeast corner of the building for a stand-alone artwork or multiple artworks. It should not compete with the existing artwork located on the hardscape plaza to the west and it cannot be placed under the canopy of any tree. This surrounding area is accessible to all citizens, not just ticketed museum-goers. The selection panel encourages artwork that attracts and engages the community with an unexpected element. The artists may be required to participate in some of the programming initiatives held at DMNS or outreach programs to Denver neighborhoods.

Materials & Media

The selection panel is open to two-dimensional and/or three-dimensional artwork in all media, materials and formats including interactive art, environmental art, eco-art, sound art and landscape art. However, because the main site for artwork is located above a state-of-the-art collections facility, it is imperative that the artwork not utilize liquids of any kind, nor require irrigation systems.

 Appropriate & Unique

Consistent with the overall mission of Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the public art for the Morgridge Family Exploration Center project should “inspire curiosity and excite minds of all ages through scientific discovery and the presentation and preservation of the world’s unique treasures,” and tie into the DMNS’s vision to “create a community of critical thinkers who understand the lessons of the past and act as responsible stewards of the future.” In accordance with these goals, several themes/criteria were identified by the selection panel.

·         Interactive: The artwork should be dynamic and community members should be able to interact in some way so that their action (cause) can create a result (effect). Multimodal interaction with the artwork (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) and a variety of perspectives/experiences is encouraged.

·         Science/Nature: The artwork should have a focus on science and nature, without requiring interpretive signage or instructions to the audience. 

·         Unique: The exterior of the museum already features two large dinosaur replicas, a large crystal sculptural artwork, and several life-like bronze animal sculptures. A unique and broader interpretation of science and nature is encouraged for this commission.

·         Community: The Museum embraces and celebrates the cultural diversity of our region. Artwork should reflect that diverse perspective, and should be inclusive and culturally accessible to all regardless of age, education, or cultural and racial background.

·         School Children: Each year, more than 250,000 school children enter the museum through the south school entrance. The artwork should be relevant to children preschool through grade 12, without requiring interpretive signage or instructions as noted above. 

·         Sustainability: The new DMNS wing has achieved LEED platinum certification and the artwork should also be sensitive to sustainability and conservation issues. The artwork could reference (directly or indirectly) the sustainability of the planet.

·         One commission: The selection panel hopes to commission one artist/team for this commission, but encourages multiple sites for artwork rather than a solitary “moment.”

 Maintenance & Durability

All applicants are expected to consider the issues of long-term conservation and maintenance of public art, along with time and budget. These projects exist in the public realm and are exposed to weather and physical stresses, as well as vulnerable to vandalism. Public art projects should be fabricated of highly durable, low-maintenance materials. Semifinalists are encouraged to consult with a professional conservator prior to the submission of a final proposal. Selected artist proposals will be reviewed by the City of Denver’s Public Art Committee and other appropriate city agencies to ensure conformity with city standards of maintenance and durability, as well as ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) standards. All finalists are expected to stay on budget and to complete work in an approved timeframe.

 Eligibility

This project is open to artists residing in Colorado, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, gender variance, sexual orientation, national origin, age, religion, marital status, political opinion or affiliation, or mental or physical disability. Artists working in any media are eligible to apply. Artists are not required to have previous experience in public art. Emerging artists are encouraged to apply for this commission. Contact the Denver Public Art office with any questions regarding this designation.

 Applying for These Opportunities

In response to this RFQ, applicants will be asked to submit six digital images, a résumé, and a statement of interest no longer than 2,000 characters viawww.callforentry.org (CaFÉ™). From these applications, the selection panel will choose up to five semifinalists who will be brought in for an interview with the panel. If a formal proposal is requested, the artist will be provided an honorarium of $500 to prepare and present the proposal in person. Semifinalistswill receive more specific information regarding the site and have the opportunity to meet with project representatives, the DMNS and Denver Public Art staff.  Artists/teams selected as semifinalists will be required to submit a Diversity & Inclusiveness Form in order for their proposals to be considered, which will be provided upon notification. As directed by Executive Order 101, this form must be submitted for all city solicitations of proposals. Denver Arts & Venues Public Art Program staff can provide guidance on filling out this form. Semifinalists will be expected to pay for travel expenses from the honorarium. From the interview or proposal, an artist or artist team will be selected for this commission. The selected artist or artist team for the commission will collaborate with the Public Art Program staff, the DMNS, and Denver Parks and Recreation design team when finalizing their designs for installation.

 Please visit: www:artsandvenuesdenver.com/public-art/denver-public-art-collection for examples of recent commissions.

 Can a Team Apply?

Applicants may apply as a single artist or multi-person collaborative group.  If applying as a team, please submit one résumé for the team, with one to two pages per team member.

 Diversity and Inclusiveness

Denver Executive Order No. 101 establishes strategies between the City and private industry to use diversity and inclusiveness to promote economic development in the City and County of Denver and to encourage more businesses to compete for City contracts and procurements. The Executive Order requires, among other things, the collection of certain information regarding the practices of the City’s contractors and consultants toward diversity and inclusiveness and encourages/requires City agencies to include diversity and inclusiveness policies in selection criteria where legally permitted in solicitations for City services or goods. Diversity and Inclusiveness means inviting values, perspectives and contributions of people from diverse backgrounds, and integrates diversity into its hiring and retention policies, training opportunities, and business development methods to provide an equal opportunity for each person to participate, contribute, and succeed within the organization’s workplace. “Diversity” encompasses a wide variety of human differences, including differences such as race, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, physical disabilities, appearance, historically underutilized and disadvantaged persons, as well as social identities such as religion, marital status, socio-economic status, lifestyle, education, parental status, geographic background, language ability, and veteran status.

 Budget

The budget for this commission is approximately $85,000 USD which will be allocated to the artist/team selected. These funds come from the City of Denver’s One Percent for Art Ordinance resulting from several Bond-funded projects at the DMNS. This contract amount is inclusive of all costs associated with the project including, but not limited to: the artist’s design fee, other consultation fees such as structural engineering consultation, insurance (including Colorado Workers Compensation), tools, materials, fabrication, transportation, installation, any building or site modification required, travel to and from the site, per diem expenses, project documentation, contingency to cover unexpected expenses, and any other costs. For all work done on city property, prevailing wage requirements will be applied.

 Tentative Timeline

(Except for online application deadline, timeline is subject to adjustments)

 Monday, May 28, 2018: 11:59 MST          Deadline for entry (via CaFÉ™ system)

July 2018                                                             Semifinalist Selection

August 2018                                                        Finalist Selection

September 2018                                               Finalist Notification

 Project Selection Panel

According to the Denver Public Art Policy, the Art Selection Panel plays an active role in the acquisition of public art for Denver. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science selection panel is comprised of 10 voting members. The selection panel is responsible for reviewing the site, establishing criteria, writing a call for entry, reviewing applications, and selecting and interviewing semi-finalists and finalists. 

 Selection Process

Up to five artists/artist teams will be selected as semifinalists. Semifinalists will be required to consult with DMNS staff and Denver Public Art staff prior to the submission of a final proposal. The selection panel will interview semifinalists and/or review proposals from the semifinalists and recommend finalists for the commission. The final recommendation of the selection panel will be presented to the Public Art Committee, the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs, and Mayor Michael B. Hancock for final approval. All decisions of the City and County of Denver are final.

 Materials to be Submitted

Please read this section carefully. Incomplete applications will NOT be considered. The applicant’s name must appear on all materials submitted.

 All materials must be submitted online, via the CaFÉ™ website (www.callforentry.org). There is no application fee to apply or to use the CaFÉ™ online application system.

 Digital Images - In order to be considered for this project, the applicant must electronically submit six digital images of previously completed artworks through the CaFÉ™ system. Artists who wish to submit kinetic, sound or media works must submit a complete CaFÉ™ application and include links to the work uploaded online, such as YouTube or Vimeo.

 Instructions on how to format images to CaFÉ™ specifications can be found at www.callforentry.org/imaging_tips.phtml. Assistance in using the CaFÉ™ system is available during regular business hours by calling 303-629-1166 or 888-562-7232, or via email at [email protected]. If an artist does not have access to a computer, s/he may call 720-865-5562 to make arrangements to use a computer at Denver Arts & Venues offices.

 Statement of Interest—Please submit a statement briefly outlining your interest in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science Public Art Project and experience working on projects of this kind (2,000-character maximum) via CaFÉ™. 

 Résumé—Submit a one to two-page current résumé via CaFÉ™ that highlights your professional accomplishments as an artist. Please name your résumé file accordingly: Last name.First initial (i.e. Smith.J.pdf).  Résumés that are more than two pages will not be downloaded. If applying as a team, please submit one résumé with one to two pages per team member.

 Please direct all questions about the project to Public Art Administrator Rudi Cerri at 720-865-5562 or [email protected]. 

[telecomupdate]

Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Commsignia for Customer Value Leadership for its Development of V2X Solutions and C-ITS Projects

Commsignia is poised to benefit from growth of the vehicle-to-vehicle communications market due to its customer-tailored V2X software stack and superior value propositions

SANTA CLARA, California, Sept. 6, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the C-ITS industry, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Commsignia with the 2017 European Customer Value Leadership Award for its end-to-end vehicle-to-everything (V2X) solutions. Commsignia's solutions can be tailored to fit project requirements of automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), Tier I suppliers and Smart City deployments.

Globally, over one million fatalities are reported each year due to automotive accidents, costing individual countries 2% to 3% of their gross domestic product (GPD). Of these fatalities, it is estimated that up to three-quarters could be avoided by using V2X communication technology. V2X is enabled by communication technologies—dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) which is proven and commercially available today, or cellular communication (C-V2X, 5G) which offers more advanced features but is in earlier stages of development and to be proven in pilot deployments. C-V2X and 5G will become commercially available within a few years.

V2X software applications are:

In an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) or Telematics Control Unit (TCU) of a new vehicle,

Included in an Onboard Unit (OBU) fitted in an existing vehicle, or

Inside a Roadside Unit (RSU) installed along the roadside infrastructure.

To reap the benefits of V2X applications, sufficient proliferation of the technology is required. Innovative OEMs, including Volkswagen, Toyota, and GM, are announcing the introduction of V2X functionality in volume production models—even ahead of the final determination by the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) on mandating V2V communication in all new light vehicles by 2023.

"Commsignia developed the cutting edge of V2X technology, offering a tailored V2X software solution that is agnostic regarding both hardware platforms and operating systems, as well as the communication media (DSRC & cellular). It is also scalable, and has application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable third parties to write their own applications," said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst, Siddhanth Kumaramanickavel.

In terms of performance, independent testing has shown that (compared with competition) the Commsignia V2X software has:

Low latency and is quick to process information

Low use of electronic control unit (ECU) computing resources with a robust IEEE1609.2 compliant public key infrastructure (PKI)/security credential management system (SCMS) for data security

These attributes translate into key value propositions in terms of offering flexible solutions with the latest automotive chipsets and operating systems, optimized time to market and bill of materials cost, and the best trade-off between computer power and use of resources. When compared to other market participants, Commsignia has an advantage in terms of a market-ready and tested end-to-end V2X software suite. Commsignia V2X applications have been tried and tested in pilot deployments with major OEMs and smart mobility projects in over 14 countries.

"To be chosen to support a project; government or intelligent transportation system, organizations go through a selection process, where solutions are tested against key metrics," said Kumaramanickavel. "Commsignia has proven itself by showcasing its technology and winning contracts, most notably with the Tampa Hillsborough County Expressway Authority (THEA) Florida, the European C-ITS Corridor, and Compass 4D, as well securing a very strong position in the automotive OEM/Tier I market."

The Tampa Connected Vehicle Pilot will employ innovative vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technology to improve safety and traffic conditions in downtown Tampa. This is one of three sites selected for the USDOT Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program, which seeks to spur innovation among early adopters of connected vehicle applications. Commsignia is an approved supplier for this pilot and expects to supply a large number of the OBUs for the 1,600 cars, 10 buses and 10 trolleys to be fitted.

Commsignia's founders are respected industry experts and are backed by a strong team of hardware and software engineers. The company invests time at an early stage of a project to leverage its in-depth knowledge and act as a trusted advisor for its clients, thereby building a loyal customer base. Commsignia is working in a nascent market that does not feature many participants, but it has seen an increase in its sales pipeline in terms of projects and request for quote (RFQ) from Tier I and OEM projects. Commsignia uses customer relationship management tools to effectively manage its customer interactions. As a result, Commsignia has emerged as the preferred supplier for major Tier Is, including—among other major non-disclosed names—Laird, Ficosa, and Valeo (US). For these reasons, Commsignia has earned Frost & Sullivan's 2017 European Customer Value Leadership Award.

Jozsef Kovacs, Commsignia CEO commented, "In a nascent market, it is important that customers have a positive experience with their first V2X implementations. In order to make this happen, Commsignia invests time with customers, advising the best solutions to ensure that demanding project requirements are met. I am very proud that with the Customer Value Leadership award, Frost & Sullivan has recognized both the added value of our end-2-end solutions as well as our dedicated customer approach."

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognizes the company's unique focus on augmenting the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and customer base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About Commsignia

Commsignia (www.commsignia.com) is the market's most dynamic V2X company thanks to its cutting-edge technology and market ready portfolio. Commsignia specializes in Connected Car / V2X software and hardware products compatible with IEEE 802.11p and Cellular V2X helping to build the next generation autonomous car and smart mobility ecosystem that will make driving safer whilst reducing congestion and lowering emissions. Commsignia supplies best-in-class V2X (Car2X) Communication Software, hybrid V2X /ADAS Applications with robust PKI and SCMS security, a V2X SDK as well as Onboard (OBU) and Roadside Units (RSU) for connected car and Smart City deployments.

Contact: Nicolas Richter P: [phone] or + 1 650 614 1771 E: [email protected]

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.

Contact:

Samantha Park P: 210.348.1001 F: 210.348.1003 E: [email protected]

  Read this news on PR Newswire Asia website: Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Commsignia for Customer Value Leadership for its Development of V2X Solutions and C-ITS Projects

#Telecom

[autobizupdate]

Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Commsignia for Customer Value Leadership for its Development of V2X Solutions and C-ITS Projects

Commsignia is poised to benefit from growth of the vehicle-to-vehicle communications market due to its customer-tailored V2X software stack and superior value propositions

SANTA CLARA, California, Sept. 6, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the C-ITS industry, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Commsignia with the 2017 European Customer Value Leadership Award for its end-to-end vehicle-to-everything (V2X) solutions. Commsignia's solutions can be tailored to fit project requirements of automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), Tier I suppliers and Smart City deployments.

Globally, over one million fatalities are reported each year due to automotive accidents, costing individual countries 2% to 3% of their gross domestic product (GPD). Of these fatalities, it is estimated that up to three-quarters could be avoided by using V2X communication technology. V2X is enabled by communication technologies—dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) which is proven and commercially available today, or cellular communication (C-V2X, 5G) which offers more advanced features but is in earlier stages of development and to be proven in pilot deployments. C-V2X and 5G will become commercially available within a few years.

V2X software applications are:

In an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) or Telematics Control Unit (TCU) of a new vehicle,

Included in an Onboard Unit (OBU) fitted in an existing vehicle, or

Inside a Roadside Unit (RSU) installed along the roadside infrastructure.

To reap the benefits of V2X applications, sufficient proliferation of the technology is required. Innovative OEMs, including Volkswagen, Toyota, and GM, are announcing the introduction of V2X functionality in volume production models—even ahead of the final determination by the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) on mandating V2V communication in all new light vehicles by 2023.

"Commsignia developed the cutting edge of V2X technology, offering a tailored V2X software solution that is agnostic regarding both hardware platforms and operating systems, as well as the communication media (DSRC & cellular). It is also scalable, and has application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable third parties to write their own applications," said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst, Siddhanth Kumaramanickavel.

In terms of performance, independent testing has shown that (compared with competition) the Commsignia V2X software has:

Low latency and is quick to process information

Low use of electronic control unit (ECU) computing resources with a robust IEEE1609.2 compliant public key infrastructure (PKI)/security credential management system (SCMS) for data security

These attributes translate into key value propositions in terms of offering flexible solutions with the latest automotive chipsets and operating systems, optimized time to market and bill of materials cost, and the best trade-off between computer power and use of resources. When compared to other market participants, Commsignia has an advantage in terms of a market-ready and tested end-to-end V2X software suite. Commsignia V2X applications have been tried and tested in pilot deployments with major OEMs and smart mobility projects in over 14 countries.

"To be chosen to support a project; government or intelligent transportation system, organizations go through a selection process, where solutions are tested against key metrics," said Kumaramanickavel. "Commsignia has proven itself by showcasing its technology and winning contracts, most notably with the Tampa Hillsborough County Expressway Authority (THEA) Florida, the European C-ITS Corridor, and Compass 4D, as well securing a very strong position in the automotive OEM/Tier I market."

The Tampa Connected Vehicle Pilot will employ innovative vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technology to improve safety and traffic conditions in downtown Tampa. This is one of three sites selected for the USDOT Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program, which seeks to spur innovation among early adopters of connected vehicle applications. Commsignia is an approved supplier for this pilot and expects to supply a large number of the OBUs for the 1,600 cars, 10 buses and 10 trolleys to be fitted.

Commsignia's founders are respected industry experts and are backed by a strong team of hardware and software engineers. The company invests time at an early stage of a project to leverage its in-depth knowledge and act as a trusted advisor for its clients, thereby building a loyal customer base. Commsignia is working in a nascent market that does not feature many participants, but it has seen an increase in its sales pipeline in terms of projects and request for quote (RFQ) from Tier I and OEM projects. Commsignia uses customer relationship management tools to effectively manage its customer interactions. As a result, Commsignia has emerged as the preferred supplier for major Tier Is, including—among other major non-disclosed names—Laird, Ficosa, and Valeo (US). For these reasons, Commsignia has earned Frost & Sullivan's 2017 European Customer Value Leadership Award.

Jozsef Kovacs, Commsignia CEO commented, "In a nascent market, it is important that customers have a positive experience with their first V2X implementations. In order to make this happen, Commsignia invests time with customers, advising the best solutions to ensure that demanding project requirements are met. I am very proud that with the Customer Value Leadership award, Frost & Sullivan has recognized both the added value of our end-2-end solutions as well as our dedicated customer approach."

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognizes the company's unique focus on augmenting the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and customer base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About Commsignia

Commsignia (www.commsignia.com) is the market's most dynamic V2X company thanks to its cutting-edge technology and market ready portfolio. Commsignia specializes in Connected Car / V2X software and hardware products compatible with IEEE 802.11p and Cellular V2X helping to build the next generation autonomous car and smart mobility ecosystem that will make driving safer whilst reducing congestion and lowering emissions. Commsignia supplies best-in-class V2X (Car2X) Communication Software, hybrid V2X /ADAS Applications with robust PKI and SCMS security, a V2X SDK as well as Onboard (OBU) and Roadside Units (RSU) for connected car and Smart City deployments.

Contact: Nicolas Richter P: [phone] or + 1 650 614 1771 E: [email protected]

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.

Contact:

Samantha Park P: 210.348.1001 F: 210.348.1003 E: [email protected]

  Read this news on PR Newswire Asia website: Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Commsignia for Customer Value Leadership for its Development of V2X Solutions and C-ITS Projects

#Auto

[geraldkeil]

New Post has been published on http://wp.me/p3vOup-3DH

eMirrors and Smart Cameras Set to Transform North American and European Rear-view Mirrors Market

Adoption of smart cameras will eradicate blind spots and drive new growth opportunities in ADAS, finds Frost & Sullivan’s Mobility team

The advent of autonomous, connected and electric vehicles with integrated advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), is propelling original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to replace traditional interior and exterior rear view mirrors with electronic mirrors (eMirrors) and smart camera feed modules. Combining camera technology and mirrors with lighting and telematics will allow for greater visibility with real-time information, eliminating blind zones around the vehicle, reducing aerodynamic drag, and improving future cockpit and cabin design and functionality.

Frost & Sullivan’s latest analysis on the North America and Europe Rear View Mirrors Market, 2017, offers insight on various aspects of the market such as interior and exterior mirror technology, integration of rear view mirrors with ADAS, and the role of digital rear view mirrors in semi-autonomous driving.

“By 2025, one in three vehicles is expected to offer electrochromic auto-dimming interior rear-view mirrors, along with a host of advanced functions like antenna integration for various applications,” said Frost & Sullivan Mobility Senior Research Analyst Manish Menon. “A hybrid solution like adding a camera module to traditional exterior mirrors is the best solution as it addresses the challenges posed by replacing a traditional exterior mirrors with a camera module.”

Digital mirrors, also known as hybrid mirrors, are extremely important to migrate the control from vehicle to driver and vice versa, in a smooth and hassle-free manner. However, the introduction of advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) with technologies such as heads-up display, blind spot detection, and lane keeping assist have partly made traditional external mirrors and to an extent, interior mirrors redundant in highway traffic.

Several developments and trends are driving growth in the North American and European rear-view mirrors market:

By 2025, traditional interior and exterior rear-view mirrors in the E, F, and G vehicle segments will give way to camera-powered, 2-in-1 video screens that provide normal mirror functions as well as a video feed of the vehicle’s surroundings.

Camera-integrated rear-view mirrors are expected to reach about 1.4 million in unit shipment by 2025 with a host of luxury vehicles offering multiple camera-driven continuous feed mechanisms.

Proliferation of ADAS and safety functions, such as blind spot detection and lane departure warning, along with the convenience of continuous camera feed, will boost the uptake and adoption of exterior eMirrors.

Connected living lifestyles will be pushed through future mirror systems that integrate ADAS functions with biometrics.

“Future driver interaction with the vehicle cockpit is expected to be largely hands-free. OEMs and suppliers should look toward developing or acquiring advanced human-machine interface concepts, such as natural language and gesture recognition, to gain a competitor advantage,” noted Menon.

North America and Europe Rear-view Mirrors Market, 2017, is part of Frost & Sullivan’s Automotive & Transportation Growth Partnership subscription.

#eMirrors #Smart Cameras

[lostsullivans]

TURN BACK THE CLOCK DRABBLES - FRANKIE EDITION

AGE 10

          It had taken a little placating, a little convincing, but Ada finally allowed her son to take his younger brother up to the roof. She’d always warned Frankie about it, how he could get locked up there and likely no one would hear a thing, but she knew damn well he went up there all the time anyway. Unfortunately for her, his arguments were too compelling to not let him bring Mikey this time.

“Ma, I wanna show Mikey the world. He deserves to see what he’s gonna rule someday.” He grinned like his father, that all-too-sure-of-himself sort of grin that landed Ada securely into John’s life, and she had to laugh.

“Oh? He’s gonna rule it someday, huh? And what are you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna tell him how to, of course. Now can we please? I promise I’ll make sure to keep the door open.”

AGE 16

          “You gotta do it, Pearly, or else we ain’t eatin’ for a week.” That wasn’t true, but then again, most things Frankie told her weren’t, or were, at the very least, highly exaggerated.

“C’mon, no. There’s gotta be somethin’ else we can do.” The look of disgust on her face should have made him pause, but it didn’t. She had ways of making people do things he didn’t. At least this kind of people. If the guy liked boys, well…

“C’mon nothin’. You don’t even have to do much, just… Flirt with him a little. I don’t know, but it’s this or we stick around the Pops’s and wait on him to pretend to give a damn. Who knows when he’ll be back from his–” Frankie lifted his fingers and did air quotes. “Fishin’ trip.”

Bullet crossed her arms, almost like she was holding herself and looked away. “Just flirtin’ then? Nothin’ else?”

“Nothin’ else. Promise. And if he thinks so, I’ll knock his goddamn teeth out. How ‘bout that deal?” He waited for her to nod before slinging an arm around her shoulders and leading her off. “That’s the spirit. We’re family, Pearl, we’re all we got; we have to help each other outta this mess.”

#( frankie. / && drabble. ) #( connection. / && michael sullivan. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and ada sullivan. ) #( dynamic. / && frankie and mikey. ) #( dynamic. / && the lost sullivans. ) #( ask to tag )

[ecoamerica]

Watch the 2024 American Climate Leadership Awards for High School Students now: https://youtu.be/5C-bb9PoRLc

The recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by student climate leaders! Join Aishah-Nyeta Brown & Jerome Foster II and be inspired by student climate leaders as we recognize the High School Student finalists. Watch now to find out which student received the $25,000 grand prize and top recognition!

#ACLA24 #ACLA24HighSchoolStudents #youtube #youtube video #climate leaders #climate solutions #climate action #climate and environment #climate #climate change #climate and health #climate blog #climate justice #climate news #weather and climate #environmental news #environment #environmental awareness #environment and health #environmental #environmental issues #environmental education #environmental justice #environmental protection #environmental health #high school students #high school #youth #youth of america #school

[repwincoml4a0a5]

The Last Original Frank Lloyd Wright Owners

Paul and Helen Olfelt | Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Gerte and Seamour Shavin of Chattanooga, Tennessee, were sure the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright would be too busy to design a house for them. So they wrote a letter, in 1949, asking him to recommend a good architect. Wright responded, “The best one I know is myself,” Gerte, now 95, recalls.

In 1954, Bette Koprivica Pappas, now 90, and her husband, Theodore (since deceased), spent a week composing a missive to Wright, asking him to design a house for them outside St. Louis. They expressed both trepidation (“I don’t know if we can afford two bathrooms”) and excitement (“Our faith in you is so great that I am sure if you did accept our offer it would be exactly what we wanted”).

When Wright agreed to work with the Shavins and the Pappases, they felt he was doing them a favor. Perhaps, but at the same time they were allowing him to extend his creativity into the last years of his life.

Wright, whose 150th birthday is being celebrated this year, was phenomenally productive up until his death at 91, in 1959. As the late architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted in her 2004 biography, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life, “More than one-third of his total executed work was done in the last nine years of his life.” Those projects included not only important public buildings, like New York’s Guggenheim Museum—16 years in the making, it opened just months after Wright died—but also scores of private houses, each one customized down to the built-in furniture. “I think he was flattered when young people would seek him out,” says Paul Olfelt, 92, who was 33 in 1958 when he commissioned Wright to design his house in Minneapolis.

Original homeowners like Olfelt, Shavin and Pappas are a source of valuable insight into Wright and his practice, a 21st-century connection to the man Philip Johnson puckishly called “the greatest architect of the 19th century.” Barry Bergdoll, the curator of a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, opening in June, says that “because Wright’s work always arose from conversations with clients, their memories are almost as important as drawings to understanding the origins of his designs.”

Wright was born in Wisconsin in 1867. After taking classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he moved to Chicago in 1887 and found work as a draftsman. The next year, he was hired by the architect Louis Sullivan, and in 1893 he opened his own studio. In 1911, Wright commenced work just south of Spring Green, Wisconsin, on his famous Taliesin compound, which would become his home and studio. (In contrast to his well-ordered designs, his personal life was somewhat turbulent, involving a scandal-making affair, a murdered lover, tragic fires, ongoing financial stress, eight children, three marriages and two divorces.)

During the Great Depression, to help make ends meet, Wright began taking on apprentices, called fellows, who paid tuition. In 1937, he started building the outpost that became Taliesin West, in what is now Scottsdale, Arizona. Wright and his students were soon dividing their time between the two Taliesins, where Wright worked with T-square, straightedge, compass, triangles—and lots of sharpened pencils.

In the postwar years, Wright’s practice flourished as his innovative approach jibed with the country’s newly optimistic mood. His relatively affordable houses, which he called Usonian (the term is sometimes said to be a combination of U.S. and utopian), were generally single-story brick or wood structures. Large living/dining rooms, often with massive fireplaces, were served by small, efficient kitchens. Bedrooms lined up like ships’ cabins. Outside, roofs extended over carports (which Wright claimed to have invented) in front and terraces in back. The layouts, Huxtable wrote, were designed for “a generation living a simpler, more mobile and much less formal life,” attracting, she noted, “well-educated professionals and intellectuals in middle-class communities.”

Gerte Shavin in her living room, seated on a banquette typical of Wright’s designs.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

OVER THE COURSE of his 70-year career, Wright completed more than 300 houses. A decade ago, when I started tracking the Wright clients still living in their Wright homes, I found dozens, including several spry octogenarians whose houses seemed to give them a sense of purpose. When I returned to the subject last year, for this article, the number of houses still in original hands had shrunk to five. There were seven owners: two widows (Bette Koprivica Pappas of St. Louis and Gerte Shavin of Chattanooga); a widower (Roland Reisley, who lives in Westchester County, New York); and two couples (Paul and Helen Olfelt of Minneapolis and Bob and Mary Walton of Modesto, California).

“I’m aware that I’m part of a rapidly dwindling group,” notes Roland Reisley, a retired physicist. But he’s hanging on. “People have observed that I’m in pretty good shape for 92,” he says. “It’s pure speculation, but I have reason to believe that living with a source of beauty in a comforting, enriching environment is psychologically beneficial. There’s not a day of my life when I don’t see something beautiful: the sun on a particular stone; the way the wood is mitered.”

The two wings of the Olfelts’ home overlook a sloped lawn. “I did all the mowing until last year,” Paul says. “Then the kids got after me.”

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Not all the homeowners are faring as well. Last year, because of health concerns, the Olfelts reluctantly moved out and put their house—their home since 1960—on the market. Still, in December, the couple hosted their annual Christmas Eve celebration there, as they have for more than 50 years.

A few months before the Olfelts moved, I met with them in their living room, where a vast sloped roof extended the house into the landscape. “We feel like we’re practically outside,” Paul said, adding, “Mr. Wright believed the outside should be a living space.”

Helen Olfelt, 92, pointed to a Wright-designed coffee table, which she noted was big enough for all of her great-grandkids to crowd around at mealtimes. Paul put his feet up on a hexagonal ottoman and recounted how the couple came to own a Wright house. “Helen and I were both undergraduates, and we knew someone working at Taliesin,” he said, referring to Wright’s Wisconsin studio. “We asked [our friend] if there were any good apprentices. He said, ‘Speak to the boss.’ ”

The next thing they knew, Wright himself was designing a home for their nearly four-acre plot. (The architect never visited the site; he worked off detailed topographic maps and photos.) Paul, a retired radiologist, led me on a tour of the house, which included two small children’s bedrooms. In Wright’s original plan, there were doors from those rooms to the backyard. Paul remembered, “I said, ‘Mr. Wright, we don’t want our children escaping in the middle of the night.’ ” Helen jumped in, saying, “He gave us quite a lecture on why we shouldn’t be so controlling of children.” The Olfelts were adamant, and Wright replaced the doors with windows. But other issues remained, including a master bedroom with windows so irregular, Paul noted, “it was impossible to hang drapes.”

The Olferts’ large living room features a dramatically angled ceiling. Wright hid structural supports in the window mullions.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

In Modesto, Mary Walton explained that her older brother studied under Wright, and while still in high school she met “the master” at his Arizona studio. Impressed with the architecture and the “marvelous conversation,” she waited until she was married and then told her husband, who is British, that she wanted a Wright house. “Bob was very skeptical of the whole thing,” she says—which makes it ironic that their house, completed in 1957, became known, in the sexist terms of that era, as the Robert G. Walton House.

The Waltons scheduled a meeting with Wright. “I took to him when I met him,” says Bob, who is 94. “What impressed me was that before he would even think of designing the house, he wanted an aerial photograph, he wanted to know the flora and fauna. And he wanted to know how we were going to live.” Bob had to persuade Wright to factor in a living room wet bar. Meanwhile, the couple thought two dormitory-style bedrooms would suffice for their six children. Wright told them, Bob recalls, that “every child needs a place to be alone, to meditate.” On this point, Wright prevailed, designing the home’s most distinctive feature: a bedroom wing with a hallway nearly 100 feet long.

The Waltons wanted an adobe house, but Wright persuaded them to use concrete block. The flat roof leaked for many years.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Asked what he thinks of the house today, Bob says, “We enjoyed having a large family, and the house fit very well into the management of that family. And I’m happy that Mary got something she always wanted.” Bob adds, of other Wright homeowners, “There is a tendency for some people to almost make Wright a religion. I look to him as a man who made good-looking houses that were very practical.”

WRIGHT SPENT a lifetime challenging structural conventions. Each commission gave him a chance to try new materials, new room arrangements and new geometries. Reisley marvels at Wright’s genius in basing his suburban New York house not on rectangles but on hexagons: “It wasn’t about showing off; it was a geometric system that gave him two more directions to work with.”

And unlike most 1950s houses, which stood straight up on flat suburban plots, Wright’s houses often burrowed into the land. “It looks like a part of the hill, like it’s been there forever,” says Gerte Shavin of her house, completed in 1952. Made of crab orchard stone and cypress, it has stunning views of the Tennessee River.

But Wright’s unusual designs often caused complications. “Getting a building permit wasn’t easy, because they didn’t know if the roof was going to stay up,” Paul Olfelt explained. “Eventually the building inspector said, ‘If you’re that crazy, go ahead.’ ” The flat roofs of some of the houses resulted in leaks; Mary Walton said it took “10 or 15 years” to get their dripping under control.

For all his talk about accommodating clients’ wishes, Wright, Huxtable wrote, “was relentlessly dictatorial about building in furniture of his own design and including his own accessories—he was known to go into his houses during the owners’ absence and rearrange everything to his taste.” Reisley had a formula for working with him. “If you said, ‘I’d like this here instead of there’ ”—questioning Wright’s judgment—“that’s what led to all the sparks. But if you described a need, he’d try to satisfy that.”

The carport of the home of Roland and Ronny Reisley, an innovation Wright claimed to have invented.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Wright, by all accounts, didn’t care much for budgets, either. Reisley says his house came in at “several times the estimated cost”—about $100,000 altogether. He adds, “I was frustrated, but I was lucky that as our circumstances improved it became affordable.” Wright, meanwhile, wrote him, “Stretch yourself. Building this house is one of the best things you’ll ever do. I promise you’ll thank me.”

Paul Olfelt says he gave Wright a budget of $30,000–$40,000. “We stayed within twice that. It was a lot of dough for me.” The couple did much of the construction themselves. But, Olfelt says, “cutting bricks at 60-degree angles was a lot of work.”

When Theodore and Bette Pappas told Wright they were concerned about money, he advised them, self-servingly, “Don’t worry about the money. It will come. It will come. It always does.”

Meanwhile, the couple asked his advice on finding the right piece of land. According to Bette, Wright told them, “Go out as far as you can go, and when you get there, go 10 miles farther, and still you won’t be out far enough. By the time your home is completed, you will be part of suburbia.” He was correct, especially because the house, which he designed in the 1950s, wasn’t completed until 1964. (Bette couldn’t be interviewed or photographed, but she told the story of the house in her 1985 book, No Passing Fancy.)

Roland Reisley has kept the house exactly as it was when it was finished.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

The owners didn’t think of their houses as investments, and it’s just as well. Several Wright masterpieces, such as Fallingwater, in western Pennsylvania, are considered priceless, but most of his houses go for little more than nearby listings by lesser architects. At savewright.org, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy maintains a database of Wright houses for sale. At press time, there were five, including the Olfelt House, at $1.395 million. The others ranged in price from $365,000 for a small house in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, to $1.95 million for a larger place in Bernardsville, New Jersey.

Janet Halstead, the conservancy’s executive director, explains the market this way: “Wright houses do receive a premium in some cases, but that premium might not be as high as the sellers imagine.” The maintenance required and the scrutiny of preservationists are drawbacks. Brokers say it can often take a year or more to find the right buyer.

Though a number of Wright’s best houses are open to the public, including the Frederick C. Robie House (1910), in Chicago; Fallingwater (1939), in Mill Run, Pennsylvania; and Wingspread (1939), in Racine, Wisconsin, most Wright homes are privately owned, and their owners often struggle to balance notoriety, which brings steady streams of architecture buffs, with the desire for privacy.

“Our kids were not impressed that we lived in a house by probably the best architect of the 20th century,” Paul Olfelt says. But his daughter Jean notes, “It was impressive to have busloads of Japanese tourists outside.”

Reisley, who has also written a book about his experiences with Wright, didn’t mind the attention. He says that he and his late wife, Ronny, expected the home to be “beautiful and a good place to raise a family.” But unexpectedly, he says, “it turned out to be much more than that: A community of Wright owners and Wright enthusiasts developed that continues to this day. It has become a central core of my life that I could not have anticipated.”

Each time an owner dies, a Wright house is endangered. “Even selling to someone who appears to be very preservation-minded can lead to surprises later as the new owner’s circumstances change,” says Halstead. To protect his house, Reisley plans to execute a preservation easement, limiting the ability of future owners to alter it—and almost certainly lowering its market value.

“I don’t like mismatched things,” says Mary Walton, “so I like the furniture because it was all made for here.”

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

But the Waltons have chosen not to go that route. “My children really thought that would make it harder to sell the house after we died,” says Mary Walton. “I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from it, but you have to be somewhat practical about it.”

The Olfelts too have no control over the future of their house. “Its fate is entirely in the hands of the next owner,” Paul Olfelt said in a phone message. Sounding emotional, he added, “I think we were good stewards of the house, and we assume that anyone who buys it will be the same.”

The post The Last Original Frank Lloyd Wright Owners appeared first on Real Estate News & Advice | realtor.com®.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2l3dJHY

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[repwinpril9y0a1]

The Last Original Frank Lloyd Wright Owners

Paul and Helen Olfelt | Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Gerte and Seamour Shavin of Chattanooga, Tennessee, were sure the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright would be too busy to design a house for them. So they wrote a letter, in 1949, asking him to recommend a good architect. Wright responded, “The best one I know is myself,” Gerte, now 95, recalls.

In 1954, Bette Koprivica Pappas, now 90, and her husband, Theodore (since deceased), spent a week composing a missive to Wright, asking him to design a house for them outside St. Louis. They expressed both trepidation (“I don’t know if we can afford two bathrooms”) and excitement (“Our faith in you is so great that I am sure if you did accept our offer it would be exactly what we wanted”).

When Wright agreed to work with the Shavins and the Pappases, they felt he was doing them a favor. Perhaps, but at the same time they were allowing him to extend his creativity into the last years of his life.

Wright, whose 150th birthday is being celebrated this year, was phenomenally productive up until his death at 91, in 1959. As the late architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted in her 2004 biography, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life, “More than one-third of his total executed work was done in the last nine years of his life.” Those projects included not only important public buildings, like New York’s Guggenheim Museum—16 years in the making, it opened just months after Wright died—but also scores of private houses, each one customized down to the built-in furniture. “I think he was flattered when young people would seek him out,” says Paul Olfelt, 92, who was 33 in 1958 when he commissioned Wright to design his house in Minneapolis.

Original homeowners like Olfelt, Shavin and Pappas are a source of valuable insight into Wright and his practice, a 21st-century connection to the man Philip Johnson puckishly called “the greatest architect of the 19th century.” Barry Bergdoll, the curator of a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, opening in June, says that “because Wright’s work always arose from conversations with clients, their memories are almost as important as drawings to understanding the origins of his designs.”

Wright was born in Wisconsin in 1867. After taking classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he moved to Chicago in 1887 and found work as a draftsman. The next year, he was hired by the architect Louis Sullivan, and in 1893 he opened his own studio. In 1911, Wright commenced work just south of Spring Green, Wisconsin, on his famous Taliesin compound, which would become his home and studio. (In contrast to his well-ordered designs, his personal life was somewhat turbulent, involving a scandal-making affair, a murdered lover, tragic fires, ongoing financial stress, eight children, three marriages and two divorces.)

During the Great Depression, to help make ends meet, Wright began taking on apprentices, called fellows, who paid tuition. In 1937, he started building the outpost that became Taliesin West, in what is now Scottsdale, Arizona. Wright and his students were soon dividing their time between the two Taliesins, where Wright worked with T-square, straightedge, compass, triangles—and lots of sharpened pencils.

In the postwar years, Wright’s practice flourished as his innovative approach jibed with the country’s newly optimistic mood. His relatively affordable houses, which he called Usonian (the term is sometimes said to be a combination of U.S. and utopian), were generally single-story brick or wood structures. Large living/dining rooms, often with massive fireplaces, were served by small, efficient kitchens. Bedrooms lined up like ships’ cabins. Outside, roofs extended over carports (which Wright claimed to have invented) in front and terraces in back. The layouts, Huxtable wrote, were designed for “a generation living a simpler, more mobile and much less formal life,” attracting, she noted, “well-educated professionals and intellectuals in middle-class communities.”

Gerte Shavin in her living room, seated on a banquette typical of Wright’s designs.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

OVER THE COURSE of his 70-year career, Wright completed more than 300 houses. A decade ago, when I started tracking the Wright clients still living in their Wright homes, I found dozens, including several spry octogenarians whose houses seemed to give them a sense of purpose. When I returned to the subject last year, for this article, the number of houses still in original hands had shrunk to five. There were seven owners: two widows (Bette Koprivica Pappas of St. Louis and Gerte Shavin of Chattanooga); a widower (Roland Reisley, who lives in Westchester County, New York); and two couples (Paul and Helen Olfelt of Minneapolis and Bob and Mary Walton of Modesto, California).

“I’m aware that I’m part of a rapidly dwindling group,” notes Roland Reisley, a retired physicist. But he’s hanging on. “People have observed that I’m in pretty good shape for 92,” he says. “It’s pure speculation, but I have reason to believe that living with a source of beauty in a comforting, enriching environment is psychologically beneficial. There’s not a day of my life when I don’t see something beautiful: the sun on a particular stone; the way the wood is mitered.”

The two wings of the Olfelts’ home overlook a sloped lawn. “I did all the mowing until last year,” Paul says. “Then the kids got after me.”

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Not all the homeowners are faring as well. Last year, because of health concerns, the Olfelts reluctantly moved out and put their house—their home since 1960—on the market. Still, in December, the couple hosted their annual Christmas Eve celebration there, as they have for more than 50 years.

A few months before the Olfelts moved, I met with them in their living room, where a vast sloped roof extended the house into the landscape. “We feel like we’re practically outside,” Paul said, adding, “Mr. Wright believed the outside should be a living space.”

Helen Olfelt, 92, pointed to a Wright-designed coffee table, which she noted was big enough for all of her great-grandkids to crowd around at mealtimes. Paul put his feet up on a hexagonal ottoman and recounted how the couple came to own a Wright house. “Helen and I were both undergraduates, and we knew someone working at Taliesin,” he said, referring to Wright’s Wisconsin studio. “We asked [our friend] if there were any good apprentices. He said, ‘Speak to the boss.’ ”

The next thing they knew, Wright himself was designing a home for their nearly four-acre plot. (The architect never visited the site; he worked off detailed topographic maps and photos.) Paul, a retired radiologist, led me on a tour of the house, which included two small children’s bedrooms. In Wright’s original plan, there were doors from those rooms to the backyard. Paul remembered, “I said, ‘Mr. Wright, we don’t want our children escaping in the middle of the night.’ ” Helen jumped in, saying, “He gave us quite a lecture on why we shouldn’t be so controlling of children.” The Olfelts were adamant, and Wright replaced the doors with windows. But other issues remained, including a master bedroom with windows so irregular, Paul noted, “it was impossible to hang drapes.”

The Olferts’ large living room features a dramatically angled ceiling. Wright hid structural supports in the window mullions.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

In Modesto, Mary Walton explained that her older brother studied under Wright, and while still in high school she met “the master” at his Arizona studio. Impressed with the architecture and the “marvelous conversation,” she waited until she was married and then told her husband, who is British, that she wanted a Wright house. “Bob was very skeptical of the whole thing,” she says—which makes it ironic that their house, completed in 1957, became known, in the sexist terms of that era, as the Robert G. Walton House.

The Waltons scheduled a meeting with Wright. “I took to him when I met him,” says Bob, who is 94. “What impressed me was that before he would even think of designing the house, he wanted an aerial photograph, he wanted to know the flora and fauna. And he wanted to know how we were going to live.” Bob had to persuade Wright to factor in a living room wet bar. Meanwhile, the couple thought two dormitory-style bedrooms would suffice for their six children. Wright told them, Bob recalls, that “every child needs a place to be alone, to meditate.” On this point, Wright prevailed, designing the home’s most distinctive feature: a bedroom wing with a hallway nearly 100 feet long.

The Waltons wanted an adobe house, but Wright persuaded them to use concrete block. The flat roof leaked for many years.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Asked what he thinks of the house today, Bob says, “We enjoyed having a large family, and the house fit very well into the management of that family. And I’m happy that Mary got something she always wanted.” Bob adds, of other Wright homeowners, “There is a tendency for some people to almost make Wright a religion. I look to him as a man who made good-looking houses that were very practical.”

WRIGHT SPENT a lifetime challenging structural conventions. Each commission gave him a chance to try new materials, new room arrangements and new geometries. Reisley marvels at Wright’s genius in basing his suburban New York house not on rectangles but on hexagons: “It wasn’t about showing off; it was a geometric system that gave him two more directions to work with.”

And unlike most 1950s houses, which stood straight up on flat suburban plots, Wright’s houses often burrowed into the land. “It looks like a part of the hill, like it’s been there forever,” says Gerte Shavin of her house, completed in 1952. Made of crab orchard stone and cypress, it has stunning views of the Tennessee River.

But Wright’s unusual designs often caused complications. “Getting a building permit wasn’t easy, because they didn’t know if the roof was going to stay up,” Paul Olfelt explained. “Eventually the building inspector said, ‘If you’re that crazy, go ahead.’ ” The flat roofs of some of the houses resulted in leaks; Mary Walton said it took “10 or 15 years” to get their dripping under control.

For all his talk about accommodating clients’ wishes, Wright, Huxtable wrote, “was relentlessly dictatorial about building in furniture of his own design and including his own accessories—he was known to go into his houses during the owners’ absence and rearrange everything to his taste.” Reisley had a formula for working with him. “If you said, ‘I’d like this here instead of there’ ”—questioning Wright’s judgment—“that’s what led to all the sparks. But if you described a need, he’d try to satisfy that.”

The carport of the home of Roland and Ronny Reisley, an innovation Wright claimed to have invented.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Wright, by all accounts, didn’t care much for budgets, either. Reisley says his house came in at “several times the estimated cost”—about $100,000 altogether. He adds, “I was frustrated, but I was lucky that as our circumstances improved it became affordable.” Wright, meanwhile, wrote him, “Stretch yourself. Building this house is one of the best things you’ll ever do. I promise you’ll thank me.”

Paul Olfelt says he gave Wright a budget of $30,000–$40,000. “We stayed within twice that. It was a lot of dough for me.” The couple did much of the construction themselves. But, Olfelt says, “cutting bricks at 60-degree angles was a lot of work.”

When Theodore and Bette Pappas told Wright they were concerned about money, he advised them, self-servingly, “Don’t worry about the money. It will come. It will come. It always does.”

Meanwhile, the couple asked his advice on finding the right piece of land. According to Bette, Wright told them, “Go out as far as you can go, and when you get there, go 10 miles farther, and still you won’t be out far enough. By the time your home is completed, you will be part of suburbia.” He was correct, especially because the house, which he designed in the 1950s, wasn’t completed until 1964. (Bette couldn’t be interviewed or photographed, but she told the story of the house in her 1985 book, No Passing Fancy.)

Roland Reisley has kept the house exactly as it was when it was finished.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

The owners didn’t think of their houses as investments, and it’s just as well. Several Wright masterpieces, such as Fallingwater, in western Pennsylvania, are considered priceless, but most of his houses go for little more than nearby listings by lesser architects. At savewright.org, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy maintains a database of Wright houses for sale. At press time, there were five, including the Olfelt House, at $1.395 million. The others ranged in price from $365,000 for a small house in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, to $1.95 million for a larger place in Bernardsville, New Jersey.

Janet Halstead, the conservancy’s executive director, explains the market this way: “Wright houses do receive a premium in some cases, but that premium might not be as high as the sellers imagine.” The maintenance required and the scrutiny of preservationists are drawbacks. Brokers say it can often take a year or more to find the right buyer.

Though a number of Wright’s best houses are open to the public, including the Frederick C. Robie House (1910), in Chicago; Fallingwater (1939), in Mill Run, Pennsylvania; and Wingspread (1939), in Racine, Wisconsin, most Wright homes are privately owned, and their owners often struggle to balance notoriety, which brings steady streams of architecture buffs, with the desire for privacy.

“Our kids were not impressed that we lived in a house by probably the best architect of the 20th century,” Paul Olfelt says. But his daughter Jean notes, “It was impressive to have busloads of Japanese tourists outside.”

Reisley, who has also written a book about his experiences with Wright, didn’t mind the attention. He says that he and his late wife, Ronny, expected the home to be “beautiful and a good place to raise a family.” But unexpectedly, he says, “it turned out to be much more than that: A community of Wright owners and Wright enthusiasts developed that continues to this day. It has become a central core of my life that I could not have anticipated.”

Each time an owner dies, a Wright house is endangered. “Even selling to someone who appears to be very preservation-minded can lead to surprises later as the new owner’s circumstances change,” says Halstead. To protect his house, Reisley plans to execute a preservation easement, limiting the ability of future owners to alter it—and almost certainly lowering its market value.

“I don’t like mismatched things,” says Mary Walton, “so I like the furniture because it was all made for here.”

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

But the Waltons have chosen not to go that route. “My children really thought that would make it harder to sell the house after we died,” says Mary Walton. “I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from it, but you have to be somewhat practical about it.”

The Olfelts too have no control over the future of their house. “Its fate is entirely in the hands of the next owner,” Paul Olfelt said in a phone message. Sounding emotional, he added, “I think we were good stewards of the house, and we assume that anyone who buys it will be the same.”

The post The Last Original Frank Lloyd Wright Owners appeared first on Real Estate News & Advice | realtor.com®.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2l3dJHY

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[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

The Last Original Frank Lloyd Wright Owners

Paul and Helen Olfelt | Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Gerte and Seamour Shavin of Chattanooga, Tennessee, were sure the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright would be too busy to design a house for them. So they wrote a letter, in 1949, asking him to recommend a good architect. Wright responded, “The best one I know is myself,” Gerte, now 95, recalls.

In 1954, Bette Koprivica Pappas, now 90, and her husband, Theodore (since deceased), spent a week composing a missive to Wright, asking him to design a house for them outside St. Louis. They expressed both trepidation (“I don’t know if we can afford two bathrooms”) and excitement (“Our faith in you is so great that I am sure if you did accept our offer it would be exactly what we wanted”).

When Wright agreed to work with the Shavins and the Pappases, they felt he was doing them a favor. Perhaps, but at the same time they were allowing him to extend his creativity into the last years of his life.

Wright, whose 150th birthday is being celebrated this year, was phenomenally productive up until his death at 91, in 1959. As the late architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted in her 2004 biography, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life, “More than one-third of his total executed work was done in the last nine years of his life.” Those projects included not only important public buildings, like New York’s Guggenheim Museum—16 years in the making, it opened just months after Wright died—but also scores of private houses, each one customized down to the built-in furniture. “I think he was flattered when young people would seek him out,” says Paul Olfelt, 92, who was 33 in 1958 when he commissioned Wright to design his house in Minneapolis.

Original homeowners like Olfelt, Shavin and Pappas are a source of valuable insight into Wright and his practice, a 21st-century connection to the man Philip Johnson puckishly called “the greatest architect of the 19th century.” Barry Bergdoll, the curator of a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, opening in June, says that “because Wright’s work always arose from conversations with clients, their memories are almost as important as drawings to understanding the origins of his designs.”

Wright was born in Wisconsin in 1867. After taking classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he moved to Chicago in 1887 and found work as a draftsman. The next year, he was hired by the architect Louis Sullivan, and in 1893 he opened his own studio. In 1911, Wright commenced work just south of Spring Green, Wisconsin, on his famous Taliesin compound, which would become his home and studio. (In contrast to his well-ordered designs, his personal life was somewhat turbulent, involving a scandal-making affair, a murdered lover, tragic fires, ongoing financial stress, eight children, three marriages and two divorces.)

During the Great Depression, to help make ends meet, Wright began taking on apprentices, called fellows, who paid tuition. In 1937, he started building the outpost that became Taliesin West, in what is now Scottsdale, Arizona. Wright and his students were soon dividing their time between the two Taliesins, where Wright worked with T-square, straightedge, compass, triangles—and lots of sharpened pencils.

In the postwar years, Wright’s practice flourished as his innovative approach jibed with the country’s newly optimistic mood. His relatively affordable houses, which he called Usonian (the term is sometimes said to be a combination of U.S. and utopian), were generally single-story brick or wood structures. Large living/dining rooms, often with massive fireplaces, were served by small, efficient kitchens. Bedrooms lined up like ships’ cabins. Outside, roofs extended over carports (which Wright claimed to have invented) in front and terraces in back. The layouts, Huxtable wrote, were designed for “a generation living a simpler, more mobile and much less formal life,” attracting, she noted, “well-educated professionals and intellectuals in middle-class communities.”

Gerte Shavin in her living room, seated on a banquette typical of Wright’s designs.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

OVER THE COURSE of his 70-year career, Wright completed more than 300 houses. A decade ago, when I started tracking the Wright clients still living in their Wright homes, I found dozens, including several spry octogenarians whose houses seemed to give them a sense of purpose. When I returned to the subject last year, for this article, the number of houses still in original hands had shrunk to five. There were seven owners: two widows (Bette Koprivica Pappas of St. Louis and Gerte Shavin of Chattanooga); a widower (Roland Reisley, who lives in Westchester County, New York); and two couples (Paul and Helen Olfelt of Minneapolis and Bob and Mary Walton of Modesto, California).

“I’m aware that I’m part of a rapidly dwindling group,” notes Roland Reisley, a retired physicist. But he’s hanging on. “People have observed that I’m in pretty good shape for 92,” he says. “It’s pure speculation, but I have reason to believe that living with a source of beauty in a comforting, enriching environment is psychologically beneficial. There’s not a day of my life when I don’t see something beautiful: the sun on a particular stone; the way the wood is mitered.”

The two wings of the Olfelts’ home overlook a sloped lawn. “I did all the mowing until last year,” Paul says. “Then the kids got after me.”

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Not all the homeowners are faring as well. Last year, because of health concerns, the Olfelts reluctantly moved out and put their house—their home since 1960—on the market. Still, in December, the couple hosted their annual Christmas Eve celebration there, as they have for more than 50 years.

A few months before the Olfelts moved, I met with them in their living room, where a vast sloped roof extended the house into the landscape. “We feel like we’re practically outside,” Paul said, adding, “Mr. Wright believed the outside should be a living space.”

Helen Olfelt, 92, pointed to a Wright-designed coffee table, which she noted was big enough for all of her great-grandkids to crowd around at mealtimes. Paul put his feet up on a hexagonal ottoman and recounted how the couple came to own a Wright house. “Helen and I were both undergraduates, and we knew someone working at Taliesin,” he said, referring to Wright’s Wisconsin studio. “We asked [our friend] if there were any good apprentices. He said, ‘Speak to the boss.’ ”

The next thing they knew, Wright himself was designing a home for their nearly four-acre plot. (The architect never visited the site; he worked off detailed topographic maps and photos.) Paul, a retired radiologist, led me on a tour of the house, which included two small children’s bedrooms. In Wright’s original plan, there were doors from those rooms to the backyard. Paul remembered, “I said, ‘Mr. Wright, we don’t want our children escaping in the middle of the night.’ ” Helen jumped in, saying, “He gave us quite a lecture on why we shouldn’t be so controlling of children.” The Olfelts were adamant, and Wright replaced the doors with windows. But other issues remained, including a master bedroom with windows so irregular, Paul noted, “it was impossible to hang drapes.”

The Olferts’ large living room features a dramatically angled ceiling. Wright hid structural supports in the window mullions.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

In Modesto, Mary Walton explained that her older brother studied under Wright, and while still in high school she met “the master” at his Arizona studio. Impressed with the architecture and the “marvelous conversation,” she waited until she was married and then told her husband, who is British, that she wanted a Wright house. “Bob was very skeptical of the whole thing,” she says—which makes it ironic that their house, completed in 1957, became known, in the sexist terms of that era, as the Robert G. Walton House.

The Waltons scheduled a meeting with Wright. “I took to him when I met him,” says Bob, who is 94. “What impressed me was that before he would even think of designing the house, he wanted an aerial photograph, he wanted to know the flora and fauna. And he wanted to know how we were going to live.” Bob had to persuade Wright to factor in a living room wet bar. Meanwhile, the couple thought two dormitory-style bedrooms would suffice for their six children. Wright told them, Bob recalls, that “every child needs a place to be alone, to meditate.” On this point, Wright prevailed, designing the home’s most distinctive feature: a bedroom wing with a hallway nearly 100 feet long.

The Waltons wanted an adobe house, but Wright persuaded them to use concrete block. The flat roof leaked for many years.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Asked what he thinks of the house today, Bob says, “We enjoyed having a large family, and the house fit very well into the management of that family. And I’m happy that Mary got something she always wanted.” Bob adds, of other Wright homeowners, “There is a tendency for some people to almost make Wright a religion. I look to him as a man who made good-looking houses that were very practical.”

WRIGHT SPENT a lifetime challenging structural conventions. Each commission gave him a chance to try new materials, new room arrangements and new geometries. Reisley marvels at Wright’s genius in basing his suburban New York house not on rectangles but on hexagons: “It wasn’t about showing off; it was a geometric system that gave him two more directions to work with.”

And unlike most 1950s houses, which stood straight up on flat suburban plots, Wright’s houses often burrowed into the land. “It looks like a part of the hill, like it’s been there forever,” says Gerte Shavin of her house, completed in 1952. Made of crab orchard stone and cypress, it has stunning views of the Tennessee River.

But Wright’s unusual designs often caused complications. “Getting a building permit wasn’t easy, because they didn’t know if the roof was going to stay up,” Paul Olfelt explained. “Eventually the building inspector said, ‘If you’re that crazy, go ahead.’ ” The flat roofs of some of the houses resulted in leaks; Mary Walton said it took “10 or 15 years” to get their dripping under control.

For all his talk about accommodating clients’ wishes, Wright, Huxtable wrote, “was relentlessly dictatorial about building in furniture of his own design and including his own accessories—he was known to go into his houses during the owners’ absence and rearrange everything to his taste.” Reisley had a formula for working with him. “If you said, ‘I’d like this here instead of there’ ”—questioning Wright’s judgment—“that’s what led to all the sparks. But if you described a need, he’d try to satisfy that.”

The carport of the home of Roland and Ronny Reisley, an innovation Wright claimed to have invented.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Wright, by all accounts, didn’t care much for budgets, either. Reisley says his house came in at “several times the estimated cost”—about $100,000 altogether. He adds, “I was frustrated, but I was lucky that as our circumstances improved it became affordable.” Wright, meanwhile, wrote him, “Stretch yourself. Building this house is one of the best things you’ll ever do. I promise you’ll thank me.”

Paul Olfelt says he gave Wright a budget of $30,000–$40,000. “We stayed within twice that. It was a lot of dough for me.” The couple did much of the construction themselves. But, Olfelt says, “cutting bricks at 60-degree angles was a lot of work.”

When Theodore and Bette Pappas told Wright they were concerned about money, he advised them, self-servingly, “Don’t worry about the money. It will come. It will come. It always does.”

Meanwhile, the couple asked his advice on finding the right piece of land. According to Bette, Wright told them, “Go out as far as you can go, and when you get there, go 10 miles farther, and still you won’t be out far enough. By the time your home is completed, you will be part of suburbia.” He was correct, especially because the house, which he designed in the 1950s, wasn’t completed until 1964. (Bette couldn’t be interviewed or photographed, but she told the story of the house in her 1985 book, No Passing Fancy.)

Roland Reisley has kept the house exactly as it was when it was finished.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

The owners didn’t think of their houses as investments, and it’s just as well. Several Wright masterpieces, such as Fallingwater, in western Pennsylvania, are considered priceless, but most of his houses go for little more than nearby listings by lesser architects. At savewright.org, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy maintains a database of Wright houses for sale. At press time, there were five, including the Olfelt House, at $1.395 million. The others ranged in price from $365,000 for a small house in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, to $1.95 million for a larger place in Bernardsville, New Jersey.

Janet Halstead, the conservancy’s executive director, explains the market this way: “Wright houses do receive a premium in some cases, but that premium might not be as high as the sellers imagine.” The maintenance required and the scrutiny of preservationists are drawbacks. Brokers say it can often take a year or more to find the right buyer.

Though a number of Wright’s best houses are open to the public, including the Frederick C. Robie House (1910), in Chicago; Fallingwater (1939), in Mill Run, Pennsylvania; and Wingspread (1939), in Racine, Wisconsin, most Wright homes are privately owned, and their owners often struggle to balance notoriety, which brings steady streams of architecture buffs, with the desire for privacy.

“Our kids were not impressed that we lived in a house by probably the best architect of the 20th century,” Paul Olfelt says. But his daughter Jean notes, “It was impressive to have busloads of Japanese tourists outside.”

Reisley, who has also written a book about his experiences with Wright, didn’t mind the attention. He says that he and his late wife, Ronny, expected the home to be “beautiful and a good place to raise a family.” But unexpectedly, he says, “it turned out to be much more than that: A community of Wright owners and Wright enthusiasts developed that continues to this day. It has become a central core of my life that I could not have anticipated.”

Each time an owner dies, a Wright house is endangered. “Even selling to someone who appears to be very preservation-minded can lead to surprises later as the new owner’s circumstances change,” says Halstead. To protect his house, Reisley plans to execute a preservation easement, limiting the ability of future owners to alter it—and almost certainly lowering its market value.

“I don’t like mismatched things,” says Mary Walton, “so I like the furniture because it was all made for here.”

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

But the Waltons have chosen not to go that route. “My children really thought that would make it harder to sell the house after we died,” says Mary Walton. “I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from it, but you have to be somewhat practical about it.”

The Olfelts too have no control over the future of their house. “Its fate is entirely in the hands of the next owner,” Paul Olfelt said in a phone message. Sounding emotional, he added, “I think we were good stewards of the house, and we assume that anyone who buys it will be the same.”

The post The Last Original Frank Lloyd Wright Owners appeared first on Real Estate News & Advice | realtor.com®.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2l3dJHY

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The Last Original Frank Lloyd Wright Owners

Paul and Helen Olfelt | Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Gerte and Seamour Shavin of Chattanooga, Tennessee, were sure the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright would be too busy to design a house for them. So they wrote a letter, in 1949, asking him to recommend a good architect. Wright responded, “The best one I know is myself,” Gerte, now 95, recalls.

In 1954, Bette Koprivica Pappas, now 90, and her husband, Theodore (since deceased), spent a week composing a missive to Wright, asking him to design a house for them outside St. Louis. They expressed both trepidation (“I don’t know if we can afford two bathrooms”) and excitement (“Our faith in you is so great that I am sure if you did accept our offer it would be exactly what we wanted”).

When Wright agreed to work with the Shavins and the Pappases, they felt he was doing them a favor. Perhaps, but at the same time they were allowing him to extend his creativity into the last years of his life.

Wright, whose 150th birthday is being celebrated this year, was phenomenally productive up until his death at 91, in 1959. As the late architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted in her 2004 biography, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life, “More than one-third of his total executed work was done in the last nine years of his life.” Those projects included not only important public buildings, like New York’s Guggenheim Museum—16 years in the making, it opened just months after Wright died—but also scores of private houses, each one customized down to the built-in furniture. “I think he was flattered when young people would seek him out,” says Paul Olfelt, 92, who was 33 in 1958 when he commissioned Wright to design his house in Minneapolis.

Original homeowners like Olfelt, Shavin and Pappas are a source of valuable insight into Wright and his practice, a 21st-century connection to the man Philip Johnson puckishly called “the greatest architect of the 19th century.” Barry Bergdoll, the curator of a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, opening in June, says that “because Wright’s work always arose from conversations with clients, their memories are almost as important as drawings to understanding the origins of his designs.”

Wright was born in Wisconsin in 1867. After taking classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he moved to Chicago in 1887 and found work as a draftsman. The next year, he was hired by the architect Louis Sullivan, and in 1893 he opened his own studio. In 1911, Wright commenced work just south of Spring Green, Wisconsin, on his famous Taliesin compound, which would become his home and studio. (In contrast to his well-ordered designs, his personal life was somewhat turbulent, involving a scandal-making affair, a murdered lover, tragic fires, ongoing financial stress, eight children, three marriages and two divorces.)

During the Great Depression, to help make ends meet, Wright began taking on apprentices, called fellows, who paid tuition. In 1937, he started building the outpost that became Taliesin West, in what is now Scottsdale, Arizona. Wright and his students were soon dividing their time between the two Taliesins, where Wright worked with T-square, straightedge, compass, triangles—and lots of sharpened pencils.

In the postwar years, Wright’s practice flourished as his innovative approach jibed with the country’s newly optimistic mood. His relatively affordable houses, which he called Usonian (the term is sometimes said to be a combination of U.S. and utopian), were generally single-story brick or wood structures. Large living/dining rooms, often with massive fireplaces, were served by small, efficient kitchens. Bedrooms lined up like ships’ cabins. Outside, roofs extended over carports (which Wright claimed to have invented) in front and terraces in back. The layouts, Huxtable wrote, were designed for “a generation living a simpler, more mobile and much less formal life,” attracting, she noted, “well-educated professionals and intellectuals in middle-class communities.”

Gerte Shavin in her living room, seated on a banquette typical of Wright’s designs.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

OVER THE COURSE of his 70-year career, Wright completed more than 300 houses. A decade ago, when I started tracking the Wright clients still living in their Wright homes, I found dozens, including several spry octogenarians whose houses seemed to give them a sense of purpose. When I returned to the subject last year, for this article, the number of houses still in original hands had shrunk to five. There were seven owners: two widows (Bette Koprivica Pappas of St. Louis and Gerte Shavin of Chattanooga); a widower (Roland Reisley, who lives in Westchester County, New York); and two couples (Paul and Helen Olfelt of Minneapolis and Bob and Mary Walton of Modesto, California).

“I’m aware that I’m part of a rapidly dwindling group,” notes Roland Reisley, a retired physicist. But he’s hanging on. “People have observed that I’m in pretty good shape for 92,” he says. “It’s pure speculation, but I have reason to believe that living with a source of beauty in a comforting, enriching environment is psychologically beneficial. There’s not a day of my life when I don’t see something beautiful: the sun on a particular stone; the way the wood is mitered.”

The two wings of the Olfelts’ home overlook a sloped lawn. “I did all the mowing until last year,” Paul says. “Then the kids got after me.”

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Not all the homeowners are faring as well. Last year, because of health concerns, the Olfelts reluctantly moved out and put their house—their home since 1960—on the market. Still, in December, the couple hosted their annual Christmas Eve celebration there, as they have for more than 50 years.

A few months before the Olfelts moved, I met with them in their living room, where a vast sloped roof extended the house into the landscape. “We feel like we’re practically outside,” Paul said, adding, “Mr. Wright believed the outside should be a living space.”

Helen Olfelt, 92, pointed to a Wright-designed coffee table, which she noted was big enough for all of her great-grandkids to crowd around at mealtimes. Paul put his feet up on a hexagonal ottoman and recounted how the couple came to own a Wright house. “Helen and I were both undergraduates, and we knew someone working at Taliesin,” he said, referring to Wright’s Wisconsin studio. “We asked [our friend] if there were any good apprentices. He said, ‘Speak to the boss.’ ”

The next thing they knew, Wright himself was designing a home for their nearly four-acre plot. (The architect never visited the site; he worked off detailed topographic maps and photos.) Paul, a retired radiologist, led me on a tour of the house, which included two small children’s bedrooms. In Wright’s original plan, there were doors from those rooms to the backyard. Paul remembered, “I said, ‘Mr. Wright, we don’t want our children escaping in the middle of the night.’ ” Helen jumped in, saying, “He gave us quite a lecture on why we shouldn’t be so controlling of children.” The Olfelts were adamant, and Wright replaced the doors with windows. But other issues remained, including a master bedroom with windows so irregular, Paul noted, “it was impossible to hang drapes.”

The Olferts’ large living room features a dramatically angled ceiling. Wright hid structural supports in the window mullions.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

In Modesto, Mary Walton explained that her older brother studied under Wright, and while still in high school she met “the master” at his Arizona studio. Impressed with the architecture and the “marvelous conversation,” she waited until she was married and then told her husband, who is British, that she wanted a Wright house. “Bob was very skeptical of the whole thing,” she says—which makes it ironic that their house, completed in 1957, became known, in the sexist terms of that era, as the Robert G. Walton House.

The Waltons scheduled a meeting with Wright. “I took to him when I met him,” says Bob, who is 94. “What impressed me was that before he would even think of designing the house, he wanted an aerial photograph, he wanted to know the flora and fauna. And he wanted to know how we were going to live.” Bob had to persuade Wright to factor in a living room wet bar. Meanwhile, the couple thought two dormitory-style bedrooms would suffice for their six children. Wright told them, Bob recalls, that “every child needs a place to be alone, to meditate.” On this point, Wright prevailed, designing the home’s most distinctive feature: a bedroom wing with a hallway nearly 100 feet long.

The Waltons wanted an adobe house, but Wright persuaded them to use concrete block. The flat roof leaked for many years.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Asked what he thinks of the house today, Bob says, “We enjoyed having a large family, and the house fit very well into the management of that family. And I’m happy that Mary got something she always wanted.” Bob adds, of other Wright homeowners, “There is a tendency for some people to almost make Wright a religion. I look to him as a man who made good-looking houses that were very practical.”

WRIGHT SPENT a lifetime challenging structural conventions. Each commission gave him a chance to try new materials, new room arrangements and new geometries. Reisley marvels at Wright’s genius in basing his suburban New York house not on rectangles but on hexagons: “It wasn’t about showing off; it was a geometric system that gave him two more directions to work with.”

And unlike most 1950s houses, which stood straight up on flat suburban plots, Wright’s houses often burrowed into the land. “It looks like a part of the hill, like it’s been there forever,” says Gerte Shavin of her house, completed in 1952. Made of crab orchard stone and cypress, it has stunning views of the Tennessee River.

But Wright’s unusual designs often caused complications. “Getting a building permit wasn’t easy, because they didn’t know if the roof was going to stay up,” Paul Olfelt explained. “Eventually the building inspector said, ‘If you’re that crazy, go ahead.’ ” The flat roofs of some of the houses resulted in leaks; Mary Walton said it took “10 or 15 years” to get their dripping under control.

For all his talk about accommodating clients’ wishes, Wright, Huxtable wrote, “was relentlessly dictatorial about building in furniture of his own design and including his own accessories—he was known to go into his houses during the owners’ absence and rearrange everything to his taste.” Reisley had a formula for working with him. “If you said, ‘I’d like this here instead of there’ ”—questioning Wright’s judgment—“that’s what led to all the sparks. But if you described a need, he’d try to satisfy that.”

The carport of the home of Roland and Ronny Reisley, an innovation Wright claimed to have invented.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

Wright, by all accounts, didn’t care much for budgets, either. Reisley says his house came in at “several times the estimated cost”—about $100,000 altogether. He adds, “I was frustrated, but I was lucky that as our circumstances improved it became affordable.” Wright, meanwhile, wrote him, “Stretch yourself. Building this house is one of the best things you’ll ever do. I promise you’ll thank me.”

Paul Olfelt says he gave Wright a budget of $30,000–$40,000. “We stayed within twice that. It was a lot of dough for me.” The couple did much of the construction themselves. But, Olfelt says, “cutting bricks at 60-degree angles was a lot of work.”

When Theodore and Bette Pappas told Wright they were concerned about money, he advised them, self-servingly, “Don’t worry about the money. It will come. It will come. It always does.”

Meanwhile, the couple asked his advice on finding the right piece of land. According to Bette, Wright told them, “Go out as far as you can go, and when you get there, go 10 miles farther, and still you won’t be out far enough. By the time your home is completed, you will be part of suburbia.” He was correct, especially because the house, which he designed in the 1950s, wasn’t completed until 1964. (Bette couldn’t be interviewed or photographed, but she told the story of the house in her 1985 book, No Passing Fancy.)

Roland Reisley has kept the house exactly as it was when it was finished.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

The owners didn’t think of their houses as investments, and it’s just as well. Several Wright masterpieces, such as Fallingwater, in western Pennsylvania, are considered priceless, but most of his houses go for little more than nearby listings by lesser architects. At savewright.org, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy maintains a database of Wright houses for sale. At press time, there were five, including the Olfelt House, at $1.395 million. The others ranged in price from $365,000 for a small house in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, to $1.95 million for a larger place in Bernardsville, New Jersey.

Janet Halstead, the conservancy’s executive director, explains the market this way: “Wright houses do receive a premium in some cases, but that premium might not be as high as the sellers imagine.” The maintenance required and the scrutiny of preservationists are drawbacks. Brokers say it can often take a year or more to find the right buyer.

Though a number of Wright’s best houses are open to the public, including the Frederick C. Robie House (1910), in Chicago; Fallingwater (1939), in Mill Run, Pennsylvania; and Wingspread (1939), in Racine, Wisconsin, most Wright homes are privately owned, and their owners often struggle to balance notoriety, which brings steady streams of architecture buffs, with the desire for privacy.

“Our kids were not impressed that we lived in a house by probably the best architect of the 20th century,” Paul Olfelt says. But his daughter Jean notes, “It was impressive to have busloads of Japanese tourists outside.”

Reisley, who has also written a book about his experiences with Wright, didn’t mind the attention. He says that he and his late wife, Ronny, expected the home to be “beautiful and a good place to raise a family.” But unexpectedly, he says, “it turned out to be much more than that: A community of Wright owners and Wright enthusiasts developed that continues to this day. It has become a central core of my life that I could not have anticipated.”

Each time an owner dies, a Wright house is endangered. “Even selling to someone who appears to be very preservation-minded can lead to surprises later as the new owner’s circumstances change,” says Halstead. To protect his house, Reisley plans to execute a preservation easement, limiting the ability of future owners to alter it—and almost certainly lowering its market value.

“I don’t like mismatched things,” says Mary Walton, “so I like the furniture because it was all made for here.”

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson for WSJ. Magazine

But the Waltons have chosen not to go that route. “My children really thought that would make it harder to sell the house after we died,” says Mary Walton. “I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from it, but you have to be somewhat practical about it.”

The Olfelts too have no control over the future of their house. “Its fate is entirely in the hands of the next owner,” Paul Olfelt said in a phone message. Sounding emotional, he added, “I think we were good stewards of the house, and we assume that anyone who buys it will be the same.”

The post The Last Original Frank Lloyd Wright Owners appeared first on Real Estate News & Advice | realtor.com®.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2l3dJHY

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