Editorial

by Gilda Bojardi

“The boat is a boat, not a house”. This is how Ivana Porfiri, designer of the interiors of the new Codecasa featured in this issue, sums up her design position, in an in-depth interview for Interni OnBoard (no.1, March 2008). It might seem banal, but it isn’t, especially in this moment of great transformation in the field of yacht design. More and more often, the protagonists of design on dry land are getting involved in nautical design, to give a new aesthetic and functional identity to boat interiors. And the habitat concept of yachts is evolving in a revolutionary way. This is undoubtedly a positive phenomenon, because it frees an important production sector – one in which Italy can boast of clear leadership – from an overly technical, specialized, obsolete language and vision. But it also brings the risk of going to an opposite extreme: that of treating contemporary design as a ‘style’ to be slavishly applied, simply replacing the styles of the past. The suggestions and stimuli life on board offer to architects and designers go beyond such formal exercises. Above all, there is the dimension of total freedom offered by the sea, the possibility of establishing a symbiotic relationship with water and sky, the commitment to give meaning and reference points to an architecture that, by nature, is mobile and decontextualized. For example, by introducing new materials capable of multiplying reflections and sensations, as happens in the Flying Dagger by Ivana Porfiri. Or by utilizing the most advanced technologies to free up the space of the boat and make it more livable, as on the Mathisse designed by A-Lab. This is the challenge posed for contemporary designers by the yacht-as-object. One of them, Carlotta de Bevilacqua, the protagonist of the Encounter in this issue, talks about her Dutch skiff: “More than style, for me it is important to design the quality of the experience you have at sea. Which is completely different from experience on land, and should teach us to observe the darkness, to listen to the wind and the silence, to rediscover situations we are not usually aware of...”.
Gilda Bojardi