Dickie and I were discussing one evening what makes the experience of living on a boat so unique, and came to the conclusion that Peregrine achieves a degree of aesthetic perfection with few equivalents. Especially when on the ground but also inside, you take a look at Peregrine, and you can see right away the beauty of her curved forms and how they contribute to the wholeness of her structure. Those forms are foremost determined by their structural utility, following the Modernist statement of “form follows function.” Yet Peregrine does so in a more perfected way: all her components are connected and integrated with each other, so that nothing is superfluous and nothing can be added or removed. In that sense, she is more like a Gothic church. I’ll take once more a Parisian example, my beloved Notre-Dame.

    Stuart in the nave of Notre-Dame

Notre-Dame’s entire structure (with its skeleton of piers, buttresses, ribbed vaulting) is designed to hold in equilibrium the different forces at play so that they neutralize each other. Peregrine like Notre-Dame uses the broken arch to bring a unity to its structure, and Notre-Dame borrows Peregrine’s grandma’s features of unity in her nave. Yet, Peregrine is more beautiful than Notre-Dame: her integrity cannot be challenged. The original design of Notre-Dame suffered many change-orders, one being the flying buttresses added later on to support a dysfunctional structure. Peregrine did not suffer those kinds of compromises. Her entity cannot be touched without some part going out of balance and breaking—think of the mast and standing rigging. Changes can only be applied to the next boat, and Peregrine will preserve her very own organic integrity.

Then you’ll ask, how does Peregrine differ from a car? I agree that most cars are merely boxes on wheels, but aren’t some perfectly adjusted to their function and “truthful” in their own way? Don’t they get to keep their integrity from one model to the other? Ah! But you see, a car is subservient to us. No matter the weather, we crank the heater and make that thing go anywhere we want, at speeds where we can’t distinguish apple trees from weeds. On the other hand, Peregrine brings us close to forces of wind and waves we cannot control, close to God-given water and sky. She transports us beyond the earthly world. She gives the experience of beauty.