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Ship Style: Modernism and Modernity at Sea in the Twentieth Century

This international research project brought together academic and non-academic maritime, architecture and design historians from the UK, Canada, the USA, Israel and Italy to research the examine between the modern movement in architecture and design and the design of passenger ships and passenger ship interiors in the twentieth century. This work sought to fill a significant gap in scholarship in relation to the production and experience of modernism in naval architecture and shipboard interior design. Contrary to Hitchcock and Johnston’s universal and internationalist approach, the research reflected revisionist trends in scholarship on modernism by identifying various modernisms. Thus, the first chapter focuses on shipboard modernity in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras and its relationship to the development of large iron and steel-frames structures housing hotels and department stores on terra firma. The sections addressing the inter-war era examine the influence on ships of the 1925 Expositions des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and also investigates how Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany accommodated modernist and historicist impulses and influences in the design of ships commissioned by these totalitarian regimes. There follows two sections examining various approaches to passenger ship design in Europe and the USA in the post-war era, the final chapter focusing on post-modernism in recent cruise ship and ferry design. Since publication in December 2010, the book has been sold internationally but (at the time of writing this in January 2012) there have not been many reviews published.