Ship (review)
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Ship is the latest book in the Objekt series that Reaktion has published, every eighteen months or so, since 2001. The series’s objective is to “explore a range of types—buildings, products, artefacts—that have captured the imagination of modernist designers, makers and theorists” (p. 2). Other books in this series have been reviewed in the pages of T&C—Aircraft in 2005, Theme Park and Dam in 2010, and a related book, Transport Design (also by Gregory Votolato), in 2009. When considered as part of this series, Votolato’s Ship adequately fills in the maritime aspect of a collection (as the publisher’s website states) “not intended as exhaustive histories of their subject, but . . . as thematic and discursive essays [on] the broader cultural meanings of objects or buildings.” Considered as a stand-alone book on the nature and meaning of ships, however, it falls flat.
A professor and lecturer in design, Votolato states that his aim is to “uncover how our images, experiences and impressions of the ship relate to the physical reality of these designed objects” (p. 11). He leads off his essay with quotes from Le Corbusier and refers to him throughout the book, as the architect was a great admirer of passenger ships and frequently invoked them when creating his terrestrial architecture and interiors.
The first chapter, “Voyager,” takes literary descriptions from authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Dickens, and Jules Verne on the perils and discomforts of sea voyages, and intertwines them with a flying survey of the design evolution of the oceangoing steamship. Votolato primarily fixes his gaze on the interior furnishings of ships, making only passing references to the external styling that frequently distinguished one ship type or shipping line from another. Chapter 2, “Myth and Image,” is a protracted essay on the lore of ships (why are they male in some cultures and female in others?), how they have influenced our conception of terrestrial architecture (Le Corbusier again) and even our mass media. Here we come to a prime example of the book’s greatest flaw—for while Votolato waxes lyrical about Adolphe M. Cassandre’s iconic poster of Normandie, there is no image of it anywhere. A book that purports to be about “designed objects” should have many more images and illustrations of those objects and the works they inspire.
In Chapter 3, “Conflict,” the author concentrates on aircraft carriers and submarines, even though they represent a small fraction of any navy’s fleet. In a book rife with minor technical errors, the one on page 133 is a howler: Votolato mistakenly believes that, since modern nuclear aircraft carriers are built in a modular fashion, they can be lengthened at will just as cargo ships can. As a former designer of aircraft carriers, I state unequivocally [End Page 818] that, because of their extraordinary complexity, they cannot be simply “cut-and-plugged.”
Chapter 4, “Cargo,” is a straightforward recapitulation of the evolution of cargo vessels and systems, from the general break-bulk freighters to specialized containerships and tankers, owing much to Arthur Donovan and Joseph Bonney’s recent book on containers, The Box That Changed the World (2006). Here Votolato also puts the recent spate of piracy into historical perspective. The final chapter,“Port,” compares the characteristics of various port cities and towns around the world (referencing Canaletto’s iconic paintings of Venice without, alas, showing us one). The book ends, as do many vessels, on the beaches of the shipbreaker yards in India, Ban-gladesh, and Pakistan.
The book often has the feel of being cobbled together and the stretches of literary excerpts that dot each chapter do not connect the narrative. As a designer, Votolato could have filled in a noteworthy gap in the literature by expanding on his views of the visual elements of ship design. To date, only Peter Quartermaine’s Building on the Sea (1996) links “naval architecture” to its primordial meaning “architecture of the sea” with any systematic rigor. Ship is perhaps a fine addition to the Objekt essays of modern aesthetic philosophies...
