Between Buildings and Boats

Late last week I sent the following email out to a group of architect friends and acquaintances
as I was looking for insights on a subject I had long thought about. 

Dear….

When it comes to sailing and owning wooden boats, the profession of “Architect” is without doubt, over-represented as compared to the general population; more so than lawyers, doctors, accountants and even those working in financial services!

I was wondering what the reasons for this might be. Why are people who design solid buildings also strongly attached to the curves and movement of wooden craft?  I’m told by friends that it is the same in the UK.  I have a few theories that I have considered melding into an article but then I realised it would be far better to go to directly to the source.

So, if you had a moment over the next few days (perhaps you are in Melbourne!) I would love a few brief comments on the connection between the two activities. 

Many thanks in advance,

Regards Mark.

I was expecting a few pithy sentences that I could easily form into and article.  Instead, I have received 10 pages of insightful content that I’m struggling to present in a coherent way!

At the heart of the matter seems to be a recognition and admiration for forms that have been created because they have been found to be effective after decades and even centuries of refinement through usage. 

Richard LePlastier, the AIA Gold Medal recipient who works from his studio in Sydney’s Lovett Bay is a key figure in Australian architecture and architectural education. He is also the creator and custodian of the beautiful DOROTHY. This is how he expressed it.  

“Many of us are driven by the beauty that relates to pursuit of purpose.... boat design across many cultures is an almost perfect study of vernacular. Particularly with wooden boats Many architects have a deep interest in vernacular. And many of us are driven by beauty. The wooden boat through its design and the craft of its makers exemplifies this.”

- Richard LePlastier

And so, we find that extreme effectiveness in a design, often translates into the object becoming a thing of beauty.  LePlastrier again,

 “I’ve heard many shipwrights say something like
’if she looks right then she is right’. “  

- Richard LePlastier

Which is very much along the lines of Olin Stephens famous remark

"In any design the most important factors of speed seem to be long sailing lines and large sail area, with moderate displacement and small wetted surface. Then comes beauty, by which is meant clean, fair, pleasing lines. Though per se beauty is not a factor of speed, the easiest boats to look at seem the easiest to drive." 

- Olin Stephens

I suppose this shouldn’t really come as any great revelation to us. Dave Allen, the only one in the group I contacted, who is both a professional sailor and a professional architect pointed out…

“Over time, the eye detects what looks right. There is a particular beauty when the lines look right. The curves found in the natural world of birds and sea creatures have developed over millennia producing almost magical powers to flight and swimming. I think we mere mortals have always aspired to have these magical powers. As designers, we spend a lot of time drawing the lines that create buildings. Lines must have the right proportions to produce a beautiful composition.”

- Dave Allen

We should understand that when we watch a dolphin swim in the bow wave of our boats, we are not seeing beauty created by an aesthete, but beauty that has developed from millennia of natural selection.

However, Charlie Salter (NXST Architects and custodian of the Tumlaren SIROCCO) and by far the most prolific contributor to this discussion, suggests that architects sometimes feel restricted in their ability to let form follow function. 

“Apart from the romance of wooden boats, for many architects they are a commitment to the local against the global (Aluminium and plastic). Wooden boat design has simple purpose and is a true expression of “form follows function”. A building rarely has such obligation to strip down and be fit for purpose allowing style to be the dominant architect’s fantasy, forcing structure and function to follow.”

- Charlie Salter

Either way, the desire an architect develops to produce something highly functional and consequentially beautiful seems to lie at the core of the relationship, however Charlie points out that there are some far more direct connections.

“A hull is just skeleton & skin while the rig is a vertical braced cantilever. Flipping the hull produces a roof shelter and turning the mast 90 degrees will produce a very long span beam (Barrett truss or inverted king post). A timber hull must deal with multiple forces of current and flow while a framed roof must respond to differential wind pressures over opposite surfaces. The architect and shipwright are often solving similar problems.”

- Charlie Salter

This is not too dissimilar to Leplastier’s musing that,

“Perhaps the first church was an upturned boat on the sea of Galilee with Christ and the apostles
who were fishermen.”
- Richard LeplastieR

Salter gives us some examples.

• Peter McIntyre (with John & Phyllis Murphy and Kevin Borland) designed the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Pool. This is a gymnastic display of truss and suspended counterweight to achieve a clear span across the pool. Dione and Peter’s design for their own house (the “coat-hanger”) is also a showpiece of bracing and tensile cantilevers. This is the Melbourne “Nuts & Bolts” school that continues to intrigue architects with its overt expression of structure.

Richard Le Plastrier opens and closes the walls of his houses somewhat like trimming sails to suit the wind (Lovett Bay house). In his Cammeray Bay house from 1982, LePlastrier deploys a horizontal beam with Barrett cable brace ... no different to diamonds on a mast. This boatman from the “Nuts & Berries” school, with its devotion to local and vernacular authenticity, skilfully adapts and re-purposes good solutions.

Doug Shields, Royal Yacht Club of Victoria Commodore, SAYONARA Syndicate instigator and founder of Classic Yacht Association or Australia shows how rig and roof are combined with classic tensile systems. The clever use of membrane, king post and cable produce fine wedding tents over the club deck.

Having been mention by Charlie Salter, Doug Shields himself also replied to my email and came up with some interesting ideas of his own based around the longevity of Classic Yachts

“The broad group of architects design and build with goals of excellence in design and construction that if successful can lead to a growing public appreciation of a building through longevity.  If that premise is true it naturally follows that classic yachts would be similarly viewed with reverence and worth. Regardless of the period a classic yacht comes from, for its survival there must be love, care and luck plus appreciation derived from ‘excellence in design and construction that leads to growing appreciation through longevity”.

- Doug Shields

He also suggested the interesting and amusing explanation as to why other professional metiers are not so heavily engaged with old boats,

“Lawyers and doctors exist in a world of immediacy and then move on to the next case. That is very contrary approach to a building project that will take 3 or more years to evolve.  Accountants and financial advisers generally advocate that boats are economically very bad ‘investments!’ “

- Doug Shields

I’m sure that sounds familiar to many of the readers!

Doug Shields’ fellow club Member at RYCV, Craig Brown (McIldowie Partners director and custodian of CYAN) expressed the following theory.

“It’s the position of architecture in a middle of the spectrum between the science or engineering of the construction industry and the refined elegance or beauty of things that appeal to the eye that architects are asked to balance. We are in the middle of the link from civil engineers, who love their drains, and interior designers, who carefully place the last cushion (or perhaps you might say with a foot in both camps) Architects are required to temper or to balance the precision and technical requirements of construction sciences with the artistic or abstract of what we like to see. It is a privilege to be able to address that same degree of refining and pursuit of excellence through tacking or tension in the rig whilst harvesting the energy of the wind in sails that carry an exceptionally curvaceous form that are so attractive to the eye.”

- Craig Brown

And finally, I had a half hour conversation with Rob McIntyre. Rob is the Director of Design Realisation with Studio Bright  but he is also a craftsman. He has built many boats, the latest being a 17’ version of Ian Oughtred’s 15’ Acorn skiff. It is based on a traditional Whitehall rowing boat but for both rowing and sailing in this iteration.

His contribution to the discussion was both original and provocative.

“Firstly, Architecture is a pretty brutal profession out there in the real world, partly because money is involved but also because clients can bring limitations to process….

Boats have something that architecture doesn’t have…. they have NATURE as a client this is fundamentally different. I would like nature to be more in the client group in Architecture.

You will get more pleasure from life if you adhere to natural principles….in boats that’s almost an unquestioned principle.  The idea that boats are ruled by the parameters and constraints of nature and this is where their beauty springs from. This concept is hugely appealing to an architect… 

Secondly, tradition in designing and building boats is an extremely well-honed process where their functionality is superbly expressed. Architects are looking for this in their buildings but finding it more easily in their boats. As Willian Kent one of the originators of the English landscape garden famously said “Nature abhors a straight line “

If you design things that are resolve well technically, are beautiful to look at and most importantly have a cognisance of the natural condition in which they exist then they begin to start to work well.

Buildings aren’t going to move through space…they don’t have to move through water, nature acts on them in a different way…. Boats do something different that obliges them to follow natural rules.

But what is the role that tradition plays… You look at the most beautiful new craft of the moment LUNA ROSSA. Not one single thing about it is traditional or in any way referencing tradition and yet it is sublimely beautiful….to see the science of natural forces applied so skilfully and with such design audacity is breathtaking. Perhaps we are back in a golden age.”

- Rob McIntyre

What a great place to leave the discussion (for the moment), with the idea that the vessels that you might be watching this weekend, screaming around the Hauraki Gulf, are really just the result of an extreme, temporally compressed, pursuit of function: the current state of the vernacular…. the characteristic that architectural practitioners seem to find so attractive.

Next week thanks to Charlie Salter we’ll bring you a few real-world examples of where the disciplines of wooden boats and architectural
design intersect.

EDITOR // Mark Chew