CITY AT SEA

We’ve seen the floating hotel, even the floating prison. But now there’s the floating city, which goes well beyond the cruise liners of old not only dwarfing them in size and but in presenting a mobile urban landscape

Words Hugh Pearman | CGI images Royal Caribbean International
Photos Simon Brooke-Webb

Le Corbusier. One cannot talk about architecture and ships without mentioning Corb. In the Esprit Nouveau essays, later republished in 1923 as Vers une Architecture, he argued that the new spirit of design was already apparent in ocean liners, aircraft and cars. These represented everything that architecture should be: fit for purpose, functional yet beautiful, not a rivet out of place. He chose photographs of ventilation trumpets and funnels to illustrate his theme. High-tech 1970s architecture owes much to this line of inquiry. In 1933 the fourth CIAM Congress – with Corb firmly at the helm – was held on board the SS Patris II, sailing between Marseilles and Athens.
But that was then. Patris II was a slip of a ship, a mere 3,902 tons. The largest liner of the 1930s, the Normandie, was 83,000 tons and measured 339m long by 36m wide by 56m high above the waterline. But today you have a different kind of vessel.

Royal Caribbean International’s Oasis of the Seas, recently launched and the world’s largest, weighs in at 225,282 of todays gross tonnage. It is 360m long by 64m beam and is 65m tall. So the biggest ships have not got so very much longer or even prodigiously taller, though Oasis is already slightly larger than the future dimensions of the expanded Panama canal, now under construction. The key change is that these vessels (there will soon be a sister ship, Allure) are nearly twice as wide as Normandie, and pack a huge amount more accommodation into their height. 

Look at it from the point of view of population: where the Normandie housed 1,972 passengers and 1,345 crew, Oasis has a maximum capacity of 6,296 passengers and 2,165 crew. So this is a community equivalent in size to an English country town such as Marlborough or Glastonbury, gathered up into something more like an urban megastructure. After all, this is essentially a 16-storey apartment block – something made very clear by the photos of it entering Miami harbour past remarkably similar blocks on land. Given that everything you need is provided on board, you might even regard it, in Corb terms, as a Unité d’Habitation – with eight times the number of apartments. The architecture, of course, is not very Corb, and not very ship-like, either. We must draw a distinction here: an ocean liner, with its powerful engines and high-sided hull to cope with rougher all-year-round conditions in mid-ocean, is still recognisably ship-like: the last remaining example is Cunard’s RMS Queen Mary 2. Cruise ships are slower and broader, with lower-sided hulls and the general appearance of a resort hotel. You would not expect to find one powering through an Atlantic storm in midwinter – as the now-retired QE2, which survived a freak 90-foot wave in 1995 in the North Atlantic, was designed to do.

Some may remember a curious cruise liner, originally and excrutiatingly called The World of Residensea, launched in 2002. The world’s super-rich bought apartments on board, much as they bought apartments in Dubai and elsewhere, as places to drop in on as they globe-trotted.  It is unique in that its ‘residents’ – a few of whom apparently do live there all year round – almost immediately bought the freehold of the ship off its operators. The World, as it is now known, may not be anything like as big as Oasis – at 43,500 gross tonnes it is a minnow in comparison – but then again it travels the world with a population of a mere 200 passengers and 250 crew. It has restaurants and so forth, but the apartments are self-contained with their own kitchens. There is therefore a food shop on board, too. You got the occasional resident on the older liners, as you do in hotels - in fact a very elderly lady, Beatrice Muller, who lived on the QE2 for the last 14 years of its service, had to leave her monthly-rented home when the ship was decommissioned in late 2008. But The World attempts the logical next step, to be built and marketed as a property development rather than as a ship. There is a certain irony in the fact that the QE2 was destined to become a floating hotel in Dubai but fell victim to the emirate’s property and financial recession, and now sits forlornly in a sandy state of limbo. There is anyway an obvious sadness about a ship that cannot move.

The World is like all post-Millennium cruise ships in that it resembles an apartment block with a pointy snout and a curved rear. And like all the others, its preferred style of interior decoration is wealthy-trad, all panelling and wingback armchairs. Some interiors of some ships are a little more contemporary, but scarcely modernist. And this brings us back to the Oasis of the Seas. How to describe it, as a piece of architecture? The intention appears to be familiar enough resort architecture, with the theming of the various areas recalling everything from Las Vegas to the Bluewater shopping mall in Kent. There are two interesting open public areas: a big Epidauros-style theatre at the stern and what is claimed to be the first-ever park at sea, the ‘Central Park neighbourhood’.  This is what interests me most. Look at the section: this ship is wide enough to split its accommodation in two, set either side of the gardens. The hull of the ship is pretty wide to start with, but to give themselves more room the designers have cantilevered the blocks sideways to overhang the hull. They’re rather like those container ships you see with their improbably high-stacked cargoes.
Harri Kulovaara, the naval architect who is now the executive vice-president of Royal Caribbean, is the man who overseas its new ships. For him, this splitting of the accommodation is crucial, because it resolves the greatest problem of ever-increasing size; an ever-larger area of dark space within the deep plan of a more conventional ship. By introducing daylight in this way, you can also stack the cabins higher and increase ceiling heights, because you open up a different kind of inward-looking ‘outside’.

This, then, is a first: a ship broad enough for its apartments to form an elongated, landscaped and planted town square. Never mind the clunky aesthetics, here we have something that has moved beyond being a mere floating building, instead aspiring to be a complete urban district with seven distinct themed ‘neighbourhoods’, each carefully aimed at one of three age groups: grandparents, parents, and children.  The construction cost, £855m, fits the city-scale. The construction time, just three years at a Finnish shipyard, puts large fast-track building projects to shame. And whereas ships used to be notorious polluters, Oasis has onboard sewage treatment works and recycling/compaction plant, meaning nothing beyond cleaned waste water gets discharged into the sea. Most non-recyclable waste is incinerated on board, and the ship also makes its own fresh water in an onboard desalination plant. But although it claims to be the most environment-conscious cruise ship yet, there’s no getting away from the fact that you have to burn an awful lot of oil to move and power something that big. It may do this as efficiently as it can, but of course it does not have to exist. It is not necessary. If it were not there, people would just holiday somewhere else and there is plenty of spare capacity right now in the cruise business. But then, plenty of conventional buildings get built which could not be regarded as strictly necessary, either. Over a lifespan of up to 30 years, Oasis will weather many economic ups and downs.

The list of architects and designers, around 15 in all, is instructive. The general layout of the ship was developed in-house by Royal Caribbean, going through 15 iterations. Then outside consultants were brought in. There was a masterplanner, Wilson Butler Architects of Massachusetts. Various areas were done by Atkins Global, Gensler, RTKL, and Arkitektbryan AB of Sweden. Another Massachusetts firm, Waterfield Design Group, contributed landscape and civil engineering. And there was the usual crop of interior-design firms.  These are people with a great deal of experience particularly in resort and retail design.  What you don’t find is anyone of the Pritzker Prize tendency. Because this is a resort, and resorts don’t use that kind of big-name architect. Perhaps rightly: although Renzo Piano helped design a pair of cruise ships with a relatively distinctive profile in 1990 for the now-defunct Crown Princess Line, these were in reality just slightly-modified standard products. People who run holiday companies are not looking for Pritzkerish architecture. Kulovaara emphasises the collaborative nature of the design process, in which no one individual takes overall credit.

Is the ship now the destination, rather than the places it visits in its ambles around the Caribbean? Not quite, replies Kulovaara, but since all the cruise ships in a given region tend to visit the same places, the commercial difference has to be the ship. ‘We have tried to elevate the onboard experience to another level.’ There is evidence that the strategy is working: being the world’s largest has certainly helped keep bookings healthy.  And, he suggests, there is no particular reason why such ships should stop growing, given the growth pattern of ships through history. They cannot go much deeper in the water, and extra length would mean expensively reconfiguring moorings while certain bridges restrict height: but there’s still plenty of opportunity when it comes to width. I think we can expect such ships to get steadily less ship-like in their proportions.

Is this, then, the pattern for the floating city of tomorrow? Kulovaara estimates that his flagship is fully self-sufficient for a fortnight maximum before it needs to plug into shore services. Were it military, of course, it would be much longer. But the way to look at such vessels, perhaps, is neither as ships nor as floating architecture, but something else: successful examples of large-scale off-grid self-contained infrastructure. Architects, planners and project managers can learn much from them. ­­­