Designing for a roof area the size of a single story suburban house on boat, has its obvious drawbacks if something is not done to counter the sheer ‘bulk’ of the house.
Apart from looking awkward, the effect in terms of wind resistance starts to add up.
Suburban houses were not meant to be pushed though the ocean at 20 knots.
It’s for this reason, and others, that a design decision to reduce the cabin bulk has been deliberate and manifest.
It’s also for this reason that the bulk of the side accommodation has been lowered to about your hip height to reduce bulk. Like a half height caravan, the roof component of each side cabin lifts in a ‘pop-top’ configuration to give head height, with ribbed fabric walling from hip height, to above head height.
The second agenda behind the pop-top concept, is all about the sun declination. The pop-top roofs can be angled so as to best pick up the sun, so the photovoltaic’s stay within the comfortable 25 degrees of sun angle.
Above where the half height cabins abut the taller central cabin, there is a strip of window glazing.
The pop-tops roofs are hinged to the bottom of these windows, and when the roof is raised, the pop-top roof rises, along with the strip windows. This is like a gull wing principle, with a flexible ‘elbow’ in the join of window and pop top, to afford better flexibility towards sun declination angles.
This means the pop tops effectively hinge from the eaves line of the main cabin. This then has the flow on effect of opening up the interior of the boat to a domestic house size dimension of 11m by 14m. The interior working and living space is also then very adaptable to the sudden need for large number of occupants, whilst being able to reduce down to a ‘coupe’ size for fast passage making in tough conditions.
Inside the 4 side cabins is a hose out floor and adjustable low height furnishing, for the cabins occasional use as clinics or workshops. 950mm high kitchen benches divide the central living area from the accommodation or clinic cabins. Small, half height bathrooms, with heavy shower curtain containment, will give each cabin a small wet area, with a shower above a lift up grid, below which will be an Asian style squat toilet doubling as a floor drain.
There is a philosophical departure from the accommodation ideas embodied in the Cable and Wireless Adventurer, and or Earthrace. The concept of spreading the accommodation across the decking towards the outer hulls, is driven by the simple inability to squeeze any meaningful accommodation into a central hull, not much wider than a man’s tip to tip arm span. There is accommodation within the main central hull, but it is mainly intended for passage making and storage. Most of the central hull is devoted to machinery rooms, battery room, or storage…aside of two small wet areas and a tight, 4 bunk, crew quarters.
With the side accommodation bridging above the water below, drainage is simple for hose out options.
In terms of plan shape, the half height accommodation is laid out in a diamond shape, with the ‘pointy’ end facing windward for obvious reasons.
As designers, we are interested in receiving ideas for a simple and light hydraulic method of raising and lowering the pop-top cabins. Over lapping and over locking edging to the pop-tops will keep the internal areas well sealed at sea, recalling these side cabins are self draining in the event of a water penetration problem.
In nutshell, the Trybrid will be ‘coupe’ at sea, but ‘circus tent’ meets solar array, at anchor. It’s an unusual design, and wheeled up a London boat ramp off the Thames, the Trybrid may well raise a few eyebrows.
In form meets function intent, the Trybrid’s upward ’sun worshipping’ function is reflected in the short, extended ‘eave’ at each layer of the boat…with these short eaves stretching to catch the sun from the edge of both the main cabin and the pop-top cabins, this ‘edge’ is again adopted at the junction of the hull and decks, where decks will extend slightly over the topsides, to provide a rubbing strip protection for the topsides, for tougher Asian wharfing realities, whilst providing some lateral, anti-wave slam strength by bracing the super narrow bow sections.
The boat will have a purposeful face skywards. Compare the plan of the narrow central hull with the wider decks above, and this design ‘edge’ has the vague appearance of a stingray’s side flap. Strange as this may sound, the replication or mimicry of nature’s proportions has always been a foundation of all famous architectural forms, and whilst Da Vinci and others may have spelt out the mathematics of this ‘golden mean’ proportioning years ago, a careful exercise to align the boats proportions is continually subject to what some call sacred geometry, whereas others might just say we are simply copying nature’s ever constant proportions. Trybrid is about biomimicery.