Syd designs ship of the future

It’s fair to say that the design of Norwegian Epic has not met with universal approval, and I was intrigued to receive a comment on my recent item about the ship from someone who is a noted designer.
Syd Mead (left) has worked on science fiction films such as Blade Runner and Aliens. He created the light cycle which features in the Disney film Tron, and he worked on the Turn A Gundam anime series made for Japanese TV.
What I did not realise was that in his extensive career, he has also been commissioned to design cruise ships. And by an earlier incarnation of Norwegian Cruise Lines, who built Epic, of which he wrote: “This ship is unbelievably ugly; a floating monstrosity that mocks the whole concept of gracious maritime design.
“The only good thing about joining the 4,100 passengers would be that once on board you couldn’t see it. This looks like a left-over collection of bankrupt hotel projects all carelessly lumped together in a mind-numbing pile of unrelated, ill-conceived bits and pieces.”
I couldn’t leave it there, so I contacted Syd at his studio in Pasadena, California, where he is still working hard at the age of 76.
He told me that in 1976, when he was a design consultant for the electronics company Phillips in the Netherlands, he was commissioned to develop a new concept for cruise liners.
“The design had the NCL’s signature twin funnel shrouds that resembled vertical stabilisers on planes. The ship idea had an internal five-deck atrium which the engineers at the time stated would never work. Now they all have them.
“We had outside elevators up the outboard sides of the twin funnels, and an aft underwater bar that allowed passengers to see the ship’s four screws turning.
“I also established a specified number of cabins that, by unlocking a separation wall and rotating it 90 degrees, would create a two-cabin suite.”
The project came to nothing, partly because the company was hit by a financial crisis involving Ted Arison, founder of rival Carnival Cruises, who was then NCL’s representative in Miami .
Syd recalls: “It was a heady time; designing a cruise ship from scratch in conjunction with the ultra-conservative naval engineers in Copenhagen who just wanted to put a new top on an existing hull.”
I bet it was exciting, and I would love to see someone today picking up on the idea of having an underwater observation bar. If NCL and Carnival won’t maybe it’s one for Royal Caribbean’s Harri Kulovaara to pick up. And why not ask Syd to come up with some newer concepts at the same time?