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Business Flowing Royally: Milwaukee Design Company Creates Water Display Fit for a King

Posted on: Saturday, 13 May 2006, 03:05 CDT

By Rick Romell, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

May 13--When you're working for the world's longest-reigning monarch and, arguably, its coolest king, you want to deliver the royal treatment.

The folks at Pevnick Design Inc. are trying to do just that.

The tiny Milwaukee firm, spawned by an art professor's experiments with computer-controlled water sculpture, already has staked out fertile ground in the trade-show business, concocting attention-grabbing displays for some of the world's largest corporations.

Now, Pevnick is neck deep in its most unusual commission yet -- creating a large Graphical Waterfall in Bangkok to help celebrate the 60th anniversary of the ascension to the throne of Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

"I'm really happy to have it," company President Stephen Pevnick, an art professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said of the work. "That's really a glamorous job. It's like the King of Siam, you know -- like that movie. It really is."

In fact, Bhumibol Adulyadej, an accomplished jazz musician and composer (his works include a piece called "His Majesty's Blues"), is the great-great grandson of the monarch Yul Brynner portrayed in "The King and I."

Until a few weeks ago, Pevnick didn't know Thailand had a king. Now, his company is preparing to honor the monarch with a display of images and words carved into a curtain of water -- thousands of droplets precisely dispatched by computers so that, collectively, they act much like a dot matrix printer.

"They want a silhouette of a large saxophone, and they want some musical notes," Pevnick said of his clients, "and they have a proverb in Thai language that they want, and a salutation."

King revered

An advocate for the poor and a jazzman who used to hold palace jam sessions with the likes of Stan Getz, Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton, Bhumibol is widely revered in Thailand. The tourism authority there describes him as "Father of the Nation,""Beloved King" and "the Monarch whose kindness towards His people is like the comforting shade of a big tree."

That last description might be a little much to write with drops of water. And the intricate tracery of the royal seal, which the Thais have requested in the waterfall, will be difficult. But the 44-consonant, 32-vowel Thai language shouldn't pose a problem. The Pevnick Design crew has created water-formed messages in French, Spanish, German, English, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew.

They've installed their fountains in Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Mexico City, Johannesburg, at trade shows all over the United States, and at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. They likely will be doing a job in Dubai this fall.

"Dots are dots," Lee Schneider, Pevnick's chief hardware and systems design engineer, said casually of the challenge of writing in yet another alphabet.

Connecting the dots

To create the royal Thai dots, Pevnick is shipping 5,000 pounds of equipment -- water filters, tanks, plumbing fittings, hoses, electronic gear -- halfway around the world.

All will be assembled there to create a 28-foot-wide by 24-foot-high sheet of falling water, spit out by 3,456 spigots that together can release 69,120 drops per second. Computers tell each spigot exactly when to open or close. The absence or presence of water at any given instant creates words and images ranging from oak leaves to a cell phone to just about anything a client wants programmed.

Timing, pressure and droplet size -- Schneider calls these "the holy triumvirate" -- must be tightly controlled. If Schneider sees letters with bumps or ridges, it probably means a spigot is sticking. If two streams of water aren't quite parallel, a nozzle might be bent.

The firm wrestles with such problems in an almost-hidden west-side shop that you enter from the alley. Inside are a couple of engineers and plumbers, a carpenter, a tool-and-die maker and a digital-industrial-artistic vibe.

Clothing runs toward T-shirts, jeans and well-worn baseball caps with healthy crops of hair squirting out. The house videographer is a storm chaser who lights out for the Great Plains on short notice each spring. Schneider is a Mountain Dew devotee who's wondering if he'll be able to find the caffeinated beverage in Bangkok.

Pevnick Design gets many of its clients because someone sees one of the company's displays at a trade show. Their impact is stronger in person than on video or, especially, in photographs.

"People are still awed by it," said Sheryl Povalski, exhibit and display manager for Kohler Co., which has used Pevnick waterfalls to attract visitors at trade shows since 1989. "People just stand there and stare at it trying to figure out how it's doing it."

Quick work

A personal encounter generated the Bangkok job. Someone from the Thai company staging the royal exhibition apparently saw a Pevnick waterfall at an auto show in Switzerland earlier this year and sent off an e-mail asking if something similar might be put together for the king.

Pevnick's wife, Laurie, who oversees the firm's business affairs, at first was nonchalant.

"At the same time we got this from Thailand, we had a request from some lady in South America and a guy in Chile and this one in Dubai," she said. "The truth is, we get an awful lot of requests for shows that don't go on. So we were kind of like, 'OK, Thailand.' "

His majesty's men, though, meant business. Not only did they want "our most special design," Laurie Pevnick said, but they also wanted it on a tight deadline.

"We are crazy," she said as the firm worked to get the shipment assembled on time and make arrangements for staff members to fly to Bangkok. "Very, very, very short notice."

But it looks like it's coming together. Several crates loaded with the stuff necessary to create a watery greeting saying "Long Live the King" and the other images were shipped on May 7. Schneider, Stephen Pevnick and a computer programmer will follow. The display is to be ready on May 26.

The royal schedule has been more hectic than that of a typical job, and where the Pevnick team usually previews each display in the shop before setting up on site, they'll be heading to Bangkok without a practice run. But working on behalf of a king carries some benefits.

"They said they could help with the visas," Pevnick said.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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Source: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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