Ship design - the good present days and bad (quite) old days

Some 30 years ago, shipyards around Europe built several passenger vessels on which the cabins were placed forward in the superstructure and the public areas aft. The logic was that passengers could sleep in peace, without being exposed to noise from a nightclub or bar just above or below their cabin.

It sounded good.

However, in my view, that concept produced some of the worst ships in terms of passenger flow. Besides, these ships frequently lacked a Room With a View - forward, that is. By the time the 1977-built cruise ferry Finnjet entered service in may of that year, the concept had been firmly rooted in the minds of shipbuilders. Silja Line operated three French built 12,000 gross ton cruise ferries between Finland and Sweden that had entered service in 1975 and whose layout was based on this concept. Competitor Viking Line soon followed suit.

By the mid-198os, several companies had built cruise ferries along these lines, including Olau Line and TT-Line that operated in the North Sea and the soutern Baltic respectively. Like Finnjet, these were huge, boxy vessels in whose exterior design any consideration to aesthetic grace had been flushed down the toilet. Then, in 1982, Hapag-Lloyd's Europa became the most upscale ship to date built on this concept.

If you pile public areas on top of each other on three decks, which was the format with the said concept, you ask your passengers to trot up and down the stairs all the time and to queue for lifts. You also deny them a proper view forward, unless you e.g. have an observation lounge on top of the bridge, as was the case on Europa. Such a ship feels cramped, disjointed and irrational.

The 1970s and the early 1980s marked a low point in ship design. Before the Second World War, air conditioning was a luxury and therefore even fairly modest vessels, particularly on tropical routes, featured public rooms two decks high. From the 1950s onwards, such public spaces became increasingly rare as air conditioning took care of the pragmatic side of keeping passengers happy and at the same time, limiting deckheight kept the company accountants pleased with your design as well.

Even such great liners of the postwar era as United States (1952) or Michelangelo (1965) had nothing comparable to the greatest public rooms on pre-war ships: while one or two rooms could rise through two decks on each ship, the grandeur of the previous age was gone for good.

As the first cruise liners of the modern age entered service in the late 1960s, it was hard to envisage majestic public rooms on those vessels of 10,000 to 20,000 gross tons. They were small ships by liner-age standards and their design was based on entirely different premises from the liners. The modern cruise ships targeted middle-America and it was their tastes - or the lack of taste in some cases - that set the tone in design of their interiors.

Liners, meanwhile, had been manifestations of national pride and high culture. To some extent, ships like Italian Line's Michelangelo or France (1962) of the French Line succeeded quite well in conveying this ambition to the public, but this was hardly any more the case with Cunard Line's Queen Elizabeth 2 (1969). What had been hip and cool in the late 1960s was hopelessly out of fashion by 1994, when transformation of the ship to meet changing tastes was started in earnest.

I recall a visit to Eugenio C (1965), then flagship of what is Costa Crociere today, when the ship called at Helsinki in 1980. True, there were no public rooms two decks high. However, as you walked from an oval shaped first class lounge overlooking the bow towards the tourst class lido on the aft deck, you passed through a magnificent procession of public rooms. The ship had linoleum floors rather than carpets, so it did not look new. But the rooms and the furniture, desgned mainly by Nino Zoncada, presented timeless elegance and simplicity that aged gracefully indeed.

It would take a long time before designes of modern of cruise liners could boast with anything equally sophisticated and grand. P&O Cruises' Oriana (1995) certainly did that. You could say the same about the newbuildings of Celebrity Cruises that entered service in the middle of the same decade.

However, by then interior designers of cruise liners had finally come to appreciate that paying homage to what had gone before could work well in efforts to impress cruise passengers of today and tomorrow. In addition, they had come to appreciate the importance of deckheight as well: atria and soon other public spaces as well started to rise through two decks and more, creating a feeling of space where to breathe.

Most cruise liners that enter service today are much larger than the liners of the inter-war era and certainly hugely bigger than the first-generation cruise liners built 30-40 years ago. The size of the modern ships has allowed a liberal reintroduction of deckheight. The cabins forward-public space aft concept has long since been abandoned in the design of major passenger vessels.

In fact, in certain ways a modern ship like Celebrity Cruises' 122,000 gross ton Celebrity Equinox has far more in common with a great liner of the past like Ile de France (1927) than a first generation cruise liner: the moment you step on board, the ship's design makes a statement, has wow! effect. And that is exactly how it should be!