Alden • Atkin • Crowninshield • Garden • Hand • Herreshoff
As one develops an appreciation of yacht design, one runs into certain designers’ names again and again. The purpose of this article is to introduce 12 important 20th-century designers and to tell just enough about each one to describe the overall arc of his career. The editors picked a dozen as the number, and we agreed on what we think is a well-rounded group of often-heard names that we hope will benefit the reader who is just starting to appreciate the art and science of yacht design. Six of these designers are portrayed in this issue of Getting Started in Boats, and six more will be presented in the next issue. We don’t mean to say these 12 are “the best of all” designers, although they are certainly among the best of all time, nor is this presentation considered a ranking.
In this issue, our subjects are John G. Alden, William Atkin, Bowdoin Bradlee Crowninshield, William Garden, William Hand, and Nathanael Greene Herreshoff. In Part 2, to appear in WoodenBoat No. 226, the subjects will be Olin Stephens, Philip Leonard Rhodes, Charles Raymond Hunt, W. Starling Burgess, William Fife III, and Leslie Edward “Ted” Geary.
It is the designer’s job to create a boat for a particular individual, pattern of use, or locality. Few objects are created through such a dynamic interplay of science, natural evolution, tradition, and art. One yacht may be judged against another in any of a number of ways depending on the observer’s priorities, such as beauty, construction technology, comfort, or speed, but every yacht must function in harmony with the eternal natural forces of wind and waves in her given locality or across the oceans of the world. There is no escaping the connection between boats and nature, and that may be part of the reason why they seem to affect us on a deeper level than most of the other objects in our lives.
Those who wish to seek a deeper understanding of these yacht designers and yacht design in general will find a solid technical and historical foundation in these books: Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design by Francis Kinney; The Encyclopedia of Yacht Designers, which I edited with Lucia Del Sol Knight; Understanding Boat Design by Edward S. Brewer; and Yacht Designing and Planning by Howard I. Chapelle. Further reading about these designers and their work can be found in numerous WoodenBoat magazine articles (see the online index at the “Research” tab at www.woodenboat.com) or in biographies written about the designers, or in many cases in books written by the designers themselves. The books listed above and those listed at the end of each segment in Parts 1 and 2 are available through The WoodenBoat Store.