Neuschwanstein Castle was completed in 1882 as a retreat for King Ludwig II of Bavaria but was also lived in by many servants and courtiers. Some servants may have been there as families and some courtiers may have been Ludwig’s relatives, but Neuschwanstein Castle was no residential palace. It was one man’s architectural fantasy alluding to the romance of knights but speaking clearly and loudly of the privilege of kings.

It’s a surprise to learn it’s only three years older than Chicago’s Reliance Building. 

Neuschwanstein Castle is called a castle but wasn’t designed or built to be defended as one. It was sited somewhere that looked like it could be defended as part of The Look, as were its ramparts that look fit for purpose. The late ninteenth century liked its follies authentic.

The rot had set in sometime around the fourteenth when the military importance of castles lessened because of 1) Europe generally calming down, and 2) because of the impossibility of constructing masonry walls to resist sustained cannon fire. Even so, fifteenth century lords and landowners continued to like the message an imposing and impressive castle sent to those below.

The twelfth century was the golden age of castle building. Castles were sited on high ground not to be picturesque or exploit a view, but because it was easier to spot invading forces. In those pre-Architecture times, it wasn’t possible to conceive of a castle that merely looked strong and impregnable or that represented strength and impregnability. Things were what they were. There was no difference between a thing and what it denoted. A castle looked impregnable if it was. It may well have sent a powerful message of deterrence, but only because of having the visible means to back it up.

Castles are machines for surviving to function in hostile and life-threatening environments. They have much in common with offshore oil-rigs, antarctic research stations, the International Space Station and Harmony of the Seas.  

Here’s Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers near Homs in Syria, close to the border with Lebanon.

Over the years, it’s been controlled by the Kurdish troops of the Mirdasids (1031–1099), the County of Tripoli (1110–1143), the Knights Hospitaller (1143–1271), the Mamluk Sutanate (1271-1516), the Ottoman Empire (1516–1918), the Alawite State (1920–1936), the Syrian Republic (1936–1958), the United Arab Republic (1958–1961), the Syrian Arab Republic (1961–2012), the Syrian opposition (2012–2014) and, since then, again by the Syrian Arab Republic.

Castles have a habit of being in war zones. Taking control of strategically-placed fertile land is one thing, keeping control of it for centuries is another. Exemplary performance in the case of castles means an uninterrupted history but even supercastle Krak des Chevaliers shows it doesn’t always happen. Europe has also had its Levant moments but, once the assorted Goths, Huns, Visigoths and Vandals had dispersed into history, levels of castle defence could be downgraded. In France from the fifteenth century onwards, castles morphed into chateaux. This is Chateau Harcourt.

Castles in Italy morphed into that Italianate affectation called Architecture but Germanic ones weren’t so quick to shed their defences. This next is Prunn Castle, dating from around 1200. Never particularly large, it passed out of the family after a few hundred years and has had a succession of owners since. Because castles were meant to last, many have been converted into repositories of local history. This makes perfect sense for that’s exactly what they are.

More often than not, that history amounts to no more than transitions of land ownership but Lerici Castle, itself from 1152, now houses a paleontological museum after the discovery of fossilized dinosaur footprints nearby.

Wildegg Castle in Switzerland is a hotel.

Over the 11th and 12th centuries, Lenzburg Castle passed from the Lenzburgs to other aristocratic dynasties such as the Kyburgs and the Habsburgs, and was later the private home of a wealthy American family before becoming the museum and visitor centre it is today. 

Here’s Colditz Castle from the 12th century. The Lords of Colditz sold it in 1404. Over the next two hundred years it was enlarged to have 700 rooms. Those many rooms and solid construction led to it being used as a workhouse between 1803 to 1829, and various types of hospital between 1829 and 1924. 

We must remember that the same means that prevent people from breaching castles also work to prevent people escaping them. The Nazis turned Colditz Castle into a prison that famously included prisoners of war from 1939 until 1945 when US forces retook the castle. Then began a period of Soviet control during which the castle was used as a prison for local criminals, a nursing home, a hospital and a psychiatric clinic. After a 2006-2007 restoration, the building is now a youth hostel and, understandably, a museum of itself.

Other castles make impressive venues for weddings and conferences. This is Chillon Castle on Lake Geneva.

“There are four formal great halls in the castle, whose windows all look out over the marvellous view of  Lake Geneva. The Savoy family held sumptuous banquets in them, whilst the Bernese administered justice in some of them.”

Level I is the administration level with its dungeon, gallows and prison. Functionally, and also as far as circulation is concerned, it’s rather perverse for the torture chamber [24] to be on Level IV adjacent to the bedroom [25].

In Eltz, some 400 km to the north, days and nights were uneventful. Built in the 1200’s and never once overrun or seiged, Eltz Castle is still lived in by Eltzes some 33 generations on.

It’s actually three slender castles with party walls. A shared courtyard allows access and deliveries, and shared fortifications serve to discourage hostile access and hostile deliveries. It has around a hundred rooms. 

It’s interesting that, in Germany, different branches of the same family decided to connect their diminished castles for communal defence but, in Italy, wealthy Bolognese were reluctant to trust their relatives even/especially when it came to matters of defence.

The better survival rate of German castles suggests that a shared structure and communal amenities are things any building ought to have if it is to remain viable for the long-term. 

Even if building defence is something owners expect their governments to provide, building security these days is handled on a municipal level by police but on a building level by security personnel as a communal amenity. We may put bars or shutters across windows and other openings to discourage opportunistic burglary but we generally have less to worry about. Our greatest threat is increasingly the one posed by hostile weather and it makes sense for buildings to offer shared defences to that as a communal amenity.

A shared structure and communal amenities make it possible for a building to be more of a closed system. This is another useful characteristic for a building to have.

The military importance of castles declined rapidly with the use of cannons but, prior to that, the largest threat to a castle was seige. Castles had to be capable of being closed systems for extended periods of time. We can do that. Generating a certain amount of power in-house is do-able, as is a certain level of waste management. Food production and water supply remain mediaevally problematic.

In hostile environments, mediaeval castles struck a balance between structural resources, communal amenity, and functionality as a closed system.

These days we use the words durable and sustainable in much the same way to talk about our newly hostile environment but we tend to use communal amenity only to describe facilities that are desirable rather than those that are essential. This is a huge mistake.

Occasionally we think some contemporary building comes close to striking the right balance between functional necessity, occupant amenity and operation as a system.

Such buildings are duly awarded and the implication is that the world would be a better place if there were more such exemplary buildings. This fundamental premise of building rating systems is true only if we compare like with like – if a world full of, say, LEED-Platinum single-family detached houses is compared with a world full of conventional single-family detached houses. However, compared to a larger building doing all the same things for a larger number of people, there must be economies of scale (and hence of resources, and hence of efficiency of use of resources) to be had. One average apartment building for 100 people may perform better than 20 exemplary houses housing five apiece. It’s time to compare apples and oranges. Here, I’m just using LEED Platinum as an example of virtuousness, but

If LEED Platinum is an acceptable indicator of building virtue, then Efficiency of Attaining LEED Platinum is a better one.

For a short while, each of the towers of Bologna achieved some ideal balance between durability, communal amenity, and being a sustainably closed system.

They became obsolete when that balance between durability, communal amenity and being a closed system was upset. Their narrow view of communal amenity became untenable with the advent of cannon-fire as it was beyond the means of any one family to fortify their defences to sufficiently withstand it. The City of Siena found out the hard way. They thought they’d be safer spending an enormous amount of money on fortifications but, after doing that, had no money left to pay an army to man them. There’s two lessons we can we learn from this.

1. A balance between structural durability, communal amenity and being a closed system has to be found.
2. That balance has to be at an appropriate scale.

There’s no reason to think the size of a suburban residential plot or some arbitrary urban office building or apartment site is the optimum scale for this to take place. We don’t know. What worries me is that nobody seems interested in finding out.

Royal Caribbean’s new cruise ship, Harmony of The Seas has much in common with the buildings along some of the coasts it will cruise. A maximum number of rooms face the ocean, and under and alongside them are entertainment, food and drink, and shopping districts providing daytime and nighttime activities for its 5,479 passengers.

Somewhere away from all the fun are engines and fuel tanks, a power generation facility, sewage treatment plants, a waste management system, internal and external communications systems, district heating and cooling and, let’s not forget, sleeping, eating and off-duty areas for its 2,394 crew. Harmony of the Seas has many amazing things, some of the most amazing of which we’ll never get to see or be told about.

For the tech-inclined, this is an advanced membrane bioreactor that removes nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous before returning end-product wastewaster to the ocean. It’s esssential equipment if the vessel is to be allowed to sail in protected seas such as the Baltic.   

Here’s a reverse-osmosis desalinator that makes fresh water.

This is an incinerator for dry and wet waste.

There’s other equipment and systems.

Those dealing with waste are mostly located at the end of the line for reasons more existential than biomimetic. Waste, after all, is waste.

If we forget about all this and the fact that Harmony of the Seas floats and has propulsion and navigation systems, it’s basically some accommodation along a steet and we can thus evaluate it as mere architecture. Or gated-community urbanism if you prefer. First up, an overview.

Configuration

Harmony of the Seas has either sixteen or eighteen decks depending on how you count them, but at least two are used for essential non-recreational amenities such as tendering and the infirmary. Cabins are mostly on decks 9–13 that have been maximised for that very purpose. Crew quarters seem to be on Decks 3, 4 and below. In the image at the top of this post, their open space is probably that with the lights on, beneath the name.

We accept the basics of the configuration: amenity spaces up top, premium accommodation immediately below, worker accommodation beneath, machines out of sight. The top is, by definition, unenclosed and it makes a lot of sense to put outdoor recreational space there. We happily accept that the ocean is just for looking at, and not for swimming in.

It also makes sense to put recreation space up top if you’re on land and don’t have a garden

but it makes no sense if you do.

Cruise liners have more accommodation and recreational space than transatlantic liners built for speed. This is a consequence of the increased amount of accommodation on these sluggish beasts. It makes them essentially rectangular in cross section.

Uppermost deck space is used for terraces, pools, outdoor theatres, tennis courts, minigolf and such and, with Harmony of the Seas, Deck 15 has most.

Sunbathing seems to be a thing of the past, confined to terraced ‘solaraium’ slivers facing the prow. Promenades are also a thing of the past since, when all outwards-facing surface area is monetized as cabins, there’s nowhere to be anymore if you want to lose the crowd.

With Royal Caribbean vessels, what’s called The Royal Promenade is an internal shopping street. Traditionally, the uppermost promenade doubled as lifeboat access deck but, when there’s only one promenade, this function became increasingly obvious such as on Queen Mary 2. (Note those nautical railings.)

Around Royal Promenade is a running track but the view from it, we’re told, is obstructed by lifeboats.

Misfits despises this use of architectural language, preferring to see it as unobstructed access to lifeboats. We’re glad they decided to stick with the yellow. The running track seems like it might an interesting space and is one of the first things I’d want to check out

irrespective of comparisons such as this.

For one, I’d like to get a closer look at those railings where the running track loops around the stern of the vessel just above where the name is painted. They look like the same railings architects once had a thing for.

Outside cabins and most public places, the balustrades are sheets of some transparent material but, in what seems to be restricted areas such as the forecastle [fo’c’s’le] and running track, there are balustrades with open horizontal railings of the type small children love to climb.

They’re absent from the private and the public areas so parents can take their eyes off their kids for a second but their presence on the lifeboat level makes me think they have a safety or rescue function. [?!] Or is it just so waves washing over the ship [!] can drain away? Or both? [!!] One thing for sure: the nautical railing is not trying to be beautiful.

Accommodation

Building ships this big isn’t cheap. You’re looking at $1 billion or roughly the cost of the current US presidential election campaign.

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Enclosed volume isn’t wasted on single-loaded corridors, making them curvy, or ‘breaking them’ with seating areas. At 1,000ft/330m, they’re only two and a half times as long as this famous corridor but just as straight-liney. Longline corridors and narrow rooms are the best way to exploit built volume.

At 218 ft (66.4 m) wide, there’s space for two big-brush strokes of accommodation. Here’s decks 8, 9 and 10. It’s quite an achievement that more cabins have ocean views than not.

It’s basically a hotel and the principles of adding value to built volume apply even if that volume doesn’t exist as a consequence of land. As we’ve seen, trends in hotel space tend to become realities in housing after a few decades. Housing isn’t lagging in exploiting any area or volume unsuited to more housing.

Atrium-view cabins view each other across a courtyard/atrium-like space called Central Park. It’s about 16m wide and equivalent to the UK minimum standard for opposing windows internal to a development.

The unenclosable floor of the courtyard/atrium is value-addingly amenitized by food and beverage outlets that, as with shopping malls and the city streets they try to pretend they are, inject a level of activity and provide a substitute view. Visual barriers and fixed glazing prevent the respective ambiences of the Deck 8 Central Park and the Deck 9 cabins from cancelling each other out.

I’m reminded of that MVRDV market building in Rotterdam. Apartments having views of internal courtyards weren’t new but what was was apartments having a view of a quasi-public space not even a courtyard. It was an alternate view for dual-aspect apartments.

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Something similar is happening here on the Deck 5 Boardwalk that borrows ambient light from the Deck 8 Central Park level of the atrium.

With Market Building, double-loaded corridors weren’t an option as space had to be provided for the market because the market is an amenity for the city, not just for the people incidentally accommodated. The accommodation is merely secondary exploitation of the same land. It’s the opposite with Harmony of the Seas. The quantity of accommodation is paramount, and any space that can’t be used for accommodation is used to add value to that accommodation. Retail and leisure amenities don’t have to compete for custom as patrons will have already paid for many of them whether they patronize them or not.

Apartments

As you’d expect, height, view, area and window area are differentiators. There’s only one Royal Loft Suite. It’s 144 sq.m, has an entrance lobby, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a large terrace with jacuzzi. That second door next to the bookshelves connects to an adjacent Crown Loft Suite L2 that sleeps another two of your family, your friends or your people.

There’s a dining table for eight but no kitchen so significant room service must be available, including staff on-call to man the piano and outdoor bar. It would appear so.

Cabins are Unité narrow and deep. The 180 sq.ft/ 17sq.m Superior Balcony type is the most numerous at 1,288. We immediately recognise it as a studio.

The Oceanview has a window seat instead of a balcony. The hull freeboard on Decks 3 and 4 has neither flare nor tumblehome so the large reveals to the windows of these lower-deck side cabins must conceal some serious hull bracing.

So far so good. There are only eight 2-Bedroom Family Oceanview apartments. We now get to see windowless bedrooms but we’re not as shocked by this as we might once have been.

Ships have a long history of windowless cabins and Harmony of the Seas adds to that history with the K, L, M, N, Q, VB-Virtual Balcony and Studio Single cabins. 

Virtual Balconies use projection screens to offer a real-time view of the outside. They are presented as the new normal. 

We need to process this now. Such projections could easily have live audio although artificially replicating the feel of the wind, but replicating the smell of the ocean, the taste of the air and the feel of the breeze may take some time. Architecture is ahead of the game as far as virtual views of enhanced skies are concerned.

Walls too.

I happen to live in an apartment with a curtain wall of fixed glazing panels. Heat and sounds and sights that I perceive as transmitted, could be replicated without too much trouble and someday some hologram might replicate the 3D effect but, even now, a virtual window (enhanced with dust) might well fool me if I kept still. Philosophers still grapple with the implications of this despite the topic having being thoroughly covered in those projected illusions we call movies. [misfits choose the red.]

With flatscreen televisions now larger than many people’s only window, it’s only a matter of time before they substitute for them.

They already do in some parts of Australia. This easily-roofed plan suited to narrow plots, turns a windowless space unacceptable as a living room into a value-adding feature offering visual stimuli preferable to what’s outside. There’s no living room as such.

Neighbourhoods

Royal Caribbean helps us out with with their website’s neighborhoods link. We might bristle at the use of the word neighborhood but, at this size,

there’s no reason why there can’t be some common identity linking accommodation and the various services and amenities a particular area has to offer. On land it’s increasingly irrelevant whether or not residents are permanent and expected to have an interest beyond the financial, in the social and economic sustainability of their neighborhood.

Attempts at diversity are being attempted and, though commercially driven, we can’t say “worse things happen at sea“. Now added to the mix are conference rooms implying something that sounds like work. The Crown & Anchor pub will cater to different people than the Jamie’s Italian. 

People in one place need more than just recreational activities even if that’s their main reason for being there. There’ll be a multi-faith chapel somewhere. Close to the infirmary on Deck 3 will be a pharmacy and doctors familiar with cardiac and vascular issues. People might happen to die at sea, so there’s going to be a morgue. People might also become unruly and a possible danger to others so there’ll something that won’t be called a brig. Plainclothes security personnel will be skilled in martial arts and at giving the impression a brave bystander (“Ex-military, did you hear?”) happened to be there at the right time.

Architecture

The problem Harmony of the Seas poses for architecture is that it’s not visionary. It exists, and it exists without architects and architecture. It’s the sea claiming back much of what was its own in the first place and showing us the right way to build an instant city.

At $1 bil., Harmony of the Seas costs far more than the equivalent square metreage of motionless buildings that, apart from some token amenities, feed off the greater infrastructure. Anything they give back depends on the economic and social activity of the people they house.

Harmony of the Seas is a machine for farming people and its passive passengers are willing to let themselves be farmed in ways that please them and along a route they selected. It applies the principles of property development selectively, and ruthlessly.

Designing the accommodation bit is simple. Designing the hull and propulsion systems is something best left to naval architects. Designing for real, something that functions as a self-contained city isn’t something architects are equipped to do.

Even though cabins are becoming more spacious, the abundance of communal living and activity spaces means large cruise vessels such as Harmony of the Seas more closely approximate co-living than the average apartment building. In other aspects, it has a long way to go. It’s not made out of sustainable timber or salvaged plastic. It doesn’t grow its own vegetables or fish its own fish. It doesn’t generate its own power from seawater. It’s nowhere near being a closed energy system or ecosystem but it at least it’s aware it has to be one and needs to be better one.

Ocean-going vessels are worth another, less superficial, look. Hopefully, we’ll notice things we can actually learn from. In the meantime, Congratulations and Bon Voyage!

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21st May, 2016: “Hold on guys – not so fast!” An article today says these vessels indeed have a long way to go as far as exhaust emissions are concerned. “At full power the Harmony of the Seas will burn 1,377 US gallons of some of the most polluting diesel fuel in the world an hour.” One comment on that article linked to an on ethical tourism, highlighting the cruise industry’s record on environmental concerns, labour rights of its employees, and human rights violations in some of the countries it visits. I guess this illustrates the folly of ever evaluating anything as architecture only.

[cite]

This is New Monte Rosa Hut, in Zermatt (the German-speaking part of Switzerland) by Bearth & Deoplazes Architekten. Their other projects are simple and dignified with hardly any funny stuff and well worth a look. All these excellent images are taken from their site.

This particular project is what misfits’ likes to encourage. It was featured in the special Green Architecture supplement to the current edition of DOMUS, whose online edition is refreshing if you’re tired of the usual puff pieces, unedited user-generated content and advertisements for watches. I wish I’d known about their site in 2009 when this building was first published.

Environmental amelioration: The building, as you’ll notice, is in an extreme environment. People can die. It’s no place to muck around with the meaning of stuff. This building has other priorities.

Here’s a website giving you today’s weather at Monte Rosa. Mountaineers like hourly forecasts, and for various altitudes.

Footprint: The building has a small footprint and, although not a sphere, is a compact volume because a near-spherical shape has a high volume-to-surface area ratio.

This means there is less heat loss and less energy required to heat the building. It also means that a smaller amount of construction materials needed to be airlifted to build the envelope. In order to avoid heat transfer with the ground, the building is situated on a steel platform fixed into a concrete foundation.

Materials transportation efficiency: The internal structure is timber because it has a high strength to weight ratio. Timber is better value when one has to airlift structural materials. This shows – literally – in the three-layer plywood that is the innermost layer of the external wall. This is the main element absorbing horizontal forces to stiffen the structure. In a lightweight building, this is an important role as I imagine the site can get quite windy. 

Timber also allows a high degree of prefabrication. The entire building was constructed in 420 pieces that were helicoptered to the site and assembled. It it took 3,000 flights to transport materials and a total of 35 workers over two summers to complete the building. 

Construction was possible only between Mid-May and September. 

Structure: The structure has its own repetitive geometry for efficiency and stability whilst the geometry of the shell is determined by the topography, the climate and, thirdly, the internal functional requirements. The building is the most complex timber building ever erected in Switzerland.

Energy: One climatic given is the direction of the sun. The south face of the building envelope is covered with 89 sqm of solar panels that produce 90% of the building’s energy requirements. Excess energy is stored in batteries. There is an emergency fuel-powered backup generator. 

The building’s computerised energy management system is continuously monitored by the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The team in Zurich is currently investigating the recovery of biogas so that gas for the kitchen does not have to be helicoptered in. This will make the building 100% energy-autonomous. 

Ground collectors are used to heat water and regulate the temperature in the rooms. Heating Energy: 17,500 kWh/m²a

Windows: By VELUX, who seem a bit shy about advertising this project. Perhaps it’s because triple-glazed window units aren’t anything special for them.

Spatial efficiency: The size of the building did not allow for central circulation to service a radial plan. Instead, the centre is a distribution corridor to the various accommodation rooms.

It is easy to be awed by the landscape, or drift off into some Modernistic artificial vs. Nature “Isn’t architecture fabulous!” mindset. Let’s not forget that this building is not trying to be beautiful. It’s just doing it’s job helping humans survive an environment where they probably shouldn’t be, but where they’ll go anyway.

Yes, it is energy-efficient. It ought to be. It’s had everything thrown at it in order to make it so. It won Regional Holcim Bronze in 2008. The only thing we need to think about is “Was this building necessary?” Well, there was an older and inadequate and probably less energy-efficient hut it did replace.

But let’s keep it real. The client for the building is the Swiss Alpine Society which has 120,000 members and which might explain both the enthusiasm for the project, the enthusiasm for doing it right, and also its considerable budget of 5.7 million Swiss francs (= approx. US$6 mil.)

That’s $50 per member – once. The building coaxes those Swiss people out of the house on the weekend to get a bit of fresh air and exercise and enjoy some scenery. I think that’s money well spent. The building’s not hurting anyone, hardly touching the planet, and I don’t think the mountain cares.

Thanks to all for these wonderful images of a wonderful project.