Technology and Culture - Boats: Architects and sailing

Why teach architecture students about traditional boat design?

There are a variety of benefits to exploring parallel design disciplines, particularly those that operate within similar strictures to architecture. The design of a boat considers the environment and context that a boat will sail in, climatically, economically, socially and in terms of the available local materials and skills. Those elements are brought together to design something that will be used in that specific area. This is how traditional boats were created and how many racing classes came about, they are some of the elements that are close to architecture and distinguish the exercise from industrial design.

The design of a boat is a master-class in the drawing of curves, architects are often quite crude with curves, dynamic curves are refined, practiced and purposeful, every aspect of a sailing boat and its performance has refined curves. The process of designing a boat, from first sketches to outlining and sanding a half model to preparing balanced lines plans requires an attention to dynamic curves that have a direct consequence to both the behaviour of the boat and the ease of its construction. Some curves are better refined in 2d while others benefit from a three dimensional appreciation. Every plan, section and elevation of a boat are necessary to describe the complex curves of a boat’s form. In practice the students struggled with controlling curves during early surveys but have become more adept and confident with splines and the balancing of volume and stability using manual and computer based tools, new tools to them.

Sailing boats as structures are a balancing act of competing forces all delicately counter balanced against each other, a kind of ever-changing model of timber, shells, beams, ribs, stringers, braces, knees and laminates. But the crucial difference with most forms of architecture is that they are dynamic structures subject to changing, unpredictable, sometimes extreme forces. In dynamic structures the weight, strength and elasticity of materials all have different consequences not only for the use of the boat but its longevity, maintenance and safety. Oversizing of structure, ‘to be on the safe side’, often does not work. The use of bracing or reinforcing with steel, common practices for strengthening buildings tends to work against the unity and flexibility of a boat design.

On another level it is about learning about wood, when you learn about wood for architecture you are told things but you don’t feel them. You are told a timber is durable for 60 years, ok....you are told a timber is suitable for reducing spread of flame or will have a suitable core strength if seasoned, ok.....but when you go sailing in a timber boat and you lean out against the heel of the wind and the boat twists beneath you, creaks but doesn’t break, and you go through a wave and the bow rises you feel the qualities of the wood, if you feel it you’ll remember it. Sometimes it takes the senses to activate the imagination, there is fun, risk and a romantic quality to taking to the water that changes one’s perspective on life. Space and comfort are minimal, every movement is defined by the design of the parts around you, visibility and balance are vital, you are relatively in control but subject to the conditions you find yourself in, a conditional vehicle.

Carlo Scarpa said that as architects we should concern ourselves with what we touch, there’s a lot of touching in boats.

Renzo Piano is a keen sailor and this seems to influence some of his buildings, he also designed interesting boats for himself, Kirribilli (I & II) with some novel details.