Two Ships Inspired by the Dolphin

“Ships today are made like shoe boxes, like hotels put on top of a barge.”

The words are those of Italian architect Renzo Piano, whose first building, the Pompidou Center in Paris, created an international stir in 1971.

Feeling the way he did, Piano set out to make sure that the first ships he was commissioned to design--the Crown Princess and the Regal Princess, for Los Angeles-based Princess Cruises--be something extraordinary.

Piano began with the concept of a dolphin swimming through the water, then worked for three years with the designers and engineers of Italy’s Fincantieri shipyard near Trieste to turn the concept into reality.

“The metaphor of the dolphin was just that, a metaphor,” Piano said, “but then we decided to make (the ship) with round edges and double curves. It is not so easy to do. (But) modernity needs a strong connection with the past and with memory.”

Piano, 52, considers a ship “a magic object very important in the collective memory of people,” and describes his design for the Crown Princess as “round corners, soft shapes, belonging to the water.”

An ardent sailor, Piano had designed sailboats for his own use but nothing on the scale of these 70,000-ton, 1,590-passenger vessels. His contribution, he is quick to point out, was limited to the top of the ship, the interior and exterior of the forehead-shaped dome and the topmost decks, where the sleek curved lines soften the usual boxy cruise ship silhouette.

From inside, the dome resembles what Piano calls “the inside of a whale,” with polished, rounded, bone-colored ribs arching from ceiling to floor and framing wide curved windows. Nineteen feet high in the center, the dome will serve as casino, observation lounge, cocktail lounge and dance floor. The designer compares it to a piazza in a small town where “you walk to meet people.”

One deck down, Piano has designed the buffet lunch and breakfast area with teak floor and stark white-and-glass bulkheads similar to the dome. The stern bulkheads are transparent, giving a view to the sea.

The designer says he started on the project three years ago and made 3,000 drawings (“not sketches”), working on each tiny detail. He showed as an example a finished section of a step in teak with incised grooves filled with silvery metal strips.

Critics of Piano’s design point to the tall vertical funnel as looking less dolphin-like than Princess’ traditional raked, streamlined stack. Piano counters by saying it is “frank, clear, strong, a strong statement . . . and it works beautifully, by the way, to take the smoke away.”

He also insists that he does not want to push the dolphin metaphor too far: “A ship is a ship, it’s not a dolphin.”

The Crown Princess is the ninth ship in the line, which began in 1965 with a single vintage ferry called the Princess Patricia which offered informal sailings down the west coast of Mexico, later dubbed the Mexican Riviera by Princess Cruises.

Fincantieri officials say that the Crown Princess is on schedule, and it is expected to begin cruising for Princess on July 8 from Athens. Four pre-inaugural Mediterranean sailings will be followed by a transatlantic crossing to New York, arriving Sept. 21.

After several days of festivities there, the Crown Princess will sail to its home port of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., from which it will cruise the Caribbean on two seven-day itineraries priced from $1,295 to $2,985 per person, double occupancy, including air fare to and from Ft. Lauderdale.