DESIGN
However, one of the thin listels of wood has been overturned and broken, while the lead that held it in place has slipped to the floor, sticking its sharp nail into the parquet, just a few centimetres from his foot. Carlo gives the hint of a smile, almost a grimace: it’s not the first time it’s happened, but his foot is safe because he is aware and, over many years of patient attention, he has learned that the drawing table has to remain perfectly level and that the template have to be very stable, supported but not forced in their curvature. The leads, therefore, preferably need to rest on the tapered, more flexible ends, where the waterlines tend to close up again… and the leads distance themselves from the architect’s feet. However, it’s a pity that the thin core of the template did not withstand the involuntary shift of the lead, almost certainly caused by a slight touch of the elbow, sufficient to trigger a reaction that abruptly awoke Carlo from his creative reveries but, above all, led to the loss of one of his precious work tools. This was the last waterline template left on the rack. It was long but docile, with a tapered form that slimmed down perfectly gradually from the large “belly” to the very fine ends. They were made by lute makers, who worked with the wood, refining it so gradually as to not affect the flexion resistance, without ever cutting
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into the fibres of the external face, which had to ensure the continuity of the bend radiuses. It would be difficult to replace because there were almost no poor lute makers who resigned themselves to making template for architects left. Times were changing rapidly, just like the manual work tools. In fact, Carlo has never really loved template: his thorough self-taught cultural training had stimulated his artistic sensibility, enabling him to instinctively perceive the correctness of the forms without the need for using them. He preferred using wooden patterns or panels with a progressive curvature, whose skilful use made it possible to follow any curve, as the shipwrights did on a larger scale in the moulding room. Above all, they could be made by an astute user and didn’t need horrible, dangerous lead weights to hold their shape!” (*1) (*1) Carlo is an imaginary figure, like the other characters who populate this short tale. However, the reference to Carlo Sciarrelli is not coincidental and aims to pay tribute to his memory. A simple, ingenious master of Italian yachting, he influenced its early years, raising it to the highest level, that is to say the level of the British seafaring culture.
This short extract from the life of a naval architect can be dated to the period of the first crisis in the 1960s. Many things have changed since then, although our everyday
lives are almost the same. Television continues to accompany our evenings and even back then it showed us the first man on the Moon. The streets were packed with cars, the first Commodores appeared on the desks of designers, particularly engineers. Architects were excluded from this because “electronic processors” crunched numbers, not graphics. Boat designs were still closely tied to what took place in the yard’s moulding room, to manual work with the materials, not to alphanumerical lucubrations. All the focus and concentration went on drafting the construction plan, matching up the intersecting points of the forms perfectly and linking them with harmoniously curved connection lines. A little later, people would start to say that the route of a line gets off to a good start if “the expression of the upper degrees of its bend radiuses” can in turn by represented by a curve lacking in points or breaks... the functions of computational calculation were already taking over this sector too. The indispensable skill involved in drafting a construction plan could be replaced by a simple computer programme. What was the work of a small number of masters for centuries, was brutally trivialised within the space of a few seasons. The naval engineer, whose design work resembles