ARMAN have been shortlisted for the International Yacht & Aviation Awards 2014, entering the Yacht Concept Design over 30 metre category with their project Dune 75.

Overall: An innovative design language enabling the use of LED-embedded glass facades in yachting to serve as a platform for a new level of yacht personalization.

The goal for this project was to develop a yacht with flat surfaces and more monolithic proportions, allowing the use of LED- embedded glass panels on a large portion, if not the entirety of the yacht’s superstructure. For this, a canvas-like screen was created that can be used to personalize the yacht’s superstructure according to the owner’s mood, the yacht’s natural environment or for special events like birthday parties or corporate events.

The glass panels are designed on a grid-base, so that they can be tiled with a standardized, repeatable shape and size across the superstructure’s surface with minimal need for special parts. The modularity of the glass tile allows the yacht’s superstructure to be manufactured in parallel to the hull (pre-fab), off-site in an adequate environment. Also, the material properties of glass have a beneficial effect on yacht ageing, compared to traditionally painted superstructures. All this allows for quality, timing and maintenance improvements, very important factors in modern-day yacht building.

A key aspect to this project is the wow-effect of a floating audiovisual art-piece of this magnitude compared to more orthodox designs, no matter what size.

In order for the “canvas” to be useful, a very simple, monolithic volume was needed to display images in an undistorted way. The monolithic nature of the design, which could easily result in a boring and static design has resulted in a very elegant and dynamic design. It holds plenty of visual interest in terms of lines, proportions and surface transitions, while remaining subtle enough to serve as a backdrop for feature-rich digital content displayed on the superstructure’s canvas.