Eupalinos, or The Master Shipwright: The Threshold between Land and Sea as a Design Tool

The essay discusses the epistemic quality of the famous "objet ambigu" in Paul Valéry's dialogue "Eupalinos, or The Architect" in the context of the history of naval architecture and the methods of ship design. Thus not only the motif of the seashore becomes essential for the understanding of the objet ambigu, but even more can the episode of the shipwright Tridon be read as a counterpart that competes against the objet ambigu episode. Since Tridon's design method is clearly anti-Platonic, the thesis puts forward the possibility of Tridon's discourse and the possibility of conceiving such a thing as the objet ambigu, which is affirmed historically by the appearance of a new ship-design method during the second half of the eighteenth century. The imaginary waterlines that this new method used to describe the shape of hulls originated from contour lines that came into use with the first cartographic representations of the seafloor, which for a long time represented the shapeless chaos par excellence. As the threshold between architectonic structure and the chaotic sea became a dynamic tool of design, shapes were generated from methods to describe shapelessness.