DESIGNER GENES
Successful sons of prominent designers: is it nature, nurture or something else?
When Max Verstappen lined up his Toro Rosso on the starting grid at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne this past March, he became the youngest driver in the history of Formula 1—and the 12th son of a former driver to compete in a world championship. Eager to live up to the legacy of his father, Jos Verstappen, Holland’s most successful F1 driver in the ’90s, the younger Verstappen’s debut ended in disappointment when a technical gremlin forced him to retire the car before the end of the race.
A similar burden of expectation rests on the sons of celebrated yacht designers who follow in the footsteps of their famous parents. Perhaps the most telling example is Dickie Bannenberg. His father, Jon Bannenberg, established the modern role of the yacht designer virtually single-handedly by wresting aesthetic control away from naval architects. In the process, Dickie absorbed almost by osmosis an awareness of the design process, but he is quick to downplay any direct comparison with his father.
“Remember that I plow a different furrow to that unique one laid out by Jon,” Dickie says. “He was an out-and-out designer, capable of designing absolutely anything, quite apart from yachts. I don’t pretend to be the same thing at all. I head up the Bannenberg & Rowell studio and, after almost 20 years of working alongside my father, I have a pretty clear idea about the direction we should take and how we should do it. Add that to the 40 years of simply being his son and growing up
in that design world he inhabited—or bestrode—and I guess I have a design sensibility that has infused into me over the years.”
The late Pierluigi Spadolini is sometimes credited as the Italian Jon Bannenberg. An architect by training, he was the frst to hold a professorship in industrial design at an Italian university and went on to infuence a whole generation of designers and architects, including his son, Tommaso Spadolini. In particular, Pierluigi’s Akhir range (after the Arabic word for the bright Achernar star in the Eridanus constellation), created for Cantieri di Pisa in the ’70s, became one of the most iconic series of its kind. As Italian as Ferrari and Sophia Loren rolled into one svelte and well-proportioned profle, the Akhir models are the basis of many of today’s fybridge motoryachts.
“To my mind the Akhir 22 Sport is still, even today, the best example of a clean and pure yacht design,” says Tommaso, who accompanied his father on childhood visits to boatyards. He also inherited his father’s decisive sense of exterior styling based on extended horizontal lines that has proved popular and timeless, evidenced by 138-foot (42.2-meter) Nina J, which is as fresh-looking today as when Baglietto launched her in 2005. He even managed to introduce the long strips of dark window glazing—a trademark feature of the Akhir—into the exterior styling of Aslec 4 built by Rossinavi, despite the fact she is a 147-foot (45-meter)