Interior design
A lifeline on land O
With an offi cial lifespan of 30 years, maturing cruise vessels often face a cantankerous afterlife, fated for the malarial shores of Alang, India, and stripped for steel by armies of workers. Others are offl oaded to third-world cruise lines or sold on secondary markets. But, what if these ageing giants could be repurposed for other means? Brooke Theis speaks to Chris d Craiker, president of Craiker Associates, Architects and Planners, and Joost van Rooijen, architect and managing partner of Studio Komma, about giving old cruise ships a fresh lease of life on dry land.
nce gleaming holiday vessels, what happens to ageing cruise ships when they become unseaworthy? Rather than sailing romantically off into the sunset, most get sold for scrap when they’re truly dilapidated, their rusting parts recycled. With an average lifespan of 30 years, around 800 ships are retired each year and anchored on the beaches of one of the world’s three largest scrap yards: Alang in India, Chittagong in Bangladesh or Gadani in Pakistan, where a large workforce strips them.
This has only been accelerated in the past several months as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, which has sent an influx of mammoth ships still in their prime to an early grave. Cruise lines have
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been forced to cut their losses by any means necessary, ruthlessly downsizing their fleets. While in 2020, it was projected that there would be 32 million passengers aboard cruise ships, the pandemic reduced that figure to almost none, crippling many lines.
Unlike the financial crisis of 2009 from which the industry was able to bounce confidently back, Chris d Craiker, president of the eponymous Californian architecture and planning practice, believes that “continuing pandemic fears could affect the industry for decades”. Indeed, last summer, Carnival Cruise Line sold three of its ships – the 1990 Carnival Fantasy, the 1995 Carnival Imagination and the 1996 Carnival Inspiration;
World Cruise Industry Review /
www.worldcruiseindustryreview.com
Komma/Buro Poelman Reesink.
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