Luxe et al magazine is delighted to announce that Sedlmayer Associates Pty Ltd have been shortlisted for Concept over 40 Metres Award in The International Yacht & Aviation Awards 2017.
Spectrum 61’s unique, bold character, commanding presence and performance are designed to excite the most discerning superyacht owners and their distinguished guests. The principal design objective was to achieve the highest-possible enjoyment and excitement experience, and pride of ownership. Every single area is designed and tested for utility, excitement-value, and atmosphere. There are unique 5-metre iris openings in the sailing deck and main deck, open the atrium space up vertically from water to sky, as well as horizontally. The iris units are engineered as self-contained, replaceable cassettes, for standard deck loads and can be used as dance floors when closed and locked. They can only be opened after surrounding safety rails are swung into place, closing an electrical circuit allowing hydraulic activation. 
The passionate red deck-head panels outside are kept visually constrained within sharp, geometric borders, striking bold contrasts to the otherwise formal black and white ship character. From a distance, the formal dominates, and only glimpses of the rebellious red seem to escape their formal constraints. At anchor, beach clubs are opened like a lotus flower and the dockside café atmosphere set up, the aft-deck grill and bar come to life. Neighbouring yacht owners and their crews can be invited over for drinks, to spin tales and enjoy a hearty evening meal. Small and larger groups then retreat to the many lounging areas to recount the day’s excitement, while others recline to a movie in the ship’s THX-rated theatre. All ship functions are resolved for efficiency, and for structural, mood and aesthetic balance. The hull underwater form is optimised from 40-years’ experience of designing efficient, well-behaved, low-resistance hulls, proven quantitively through extensive tank testing, and confirmed qualitatively from successful service mileage of many similar hulls. The optimised sailing-cat bulb works perfectly in a reverse, axe-bow profile. The hull sides and superstructure shapes are generated in 3D from pure geometric primitives comprising planes, cylinders and spheres for ultimate fairness. Hull topsides are generated with only three master-stations and three vertices each, to be as close as possible to a spherical segment for ultimate fairness and a planar sheer.
Sedlmayer Associates’ favourite aspect of the project is the transition from a superlative fast sailing catamaran by day, to a placid lotus flower resting on the water in the evening, with open petals, providing continuous high-quality life-experiences. Six months of intensive design work was invested into every nook and cranny of the ship, to assure that everything lives up to and exceeds expectations. According to Sedlmayer Associates, a sailing vessel is intrinsically environmentally friendly, although the Superyacht category is basically not. Spectrum 61 is designed for maximum cross-ventilation to minimise air-conditioning demands, although many onboards systems, like hydraulics, food storage and preparation, and electronics nevertheless have their particular power demands. To mitigate the designers have assigned 50m2 solar BIPV surfaces on top of the flat view-towers for best efficiency. Under power the two 1650 kW main engines plus auxiliaries consume 333 litres of MDF per hour at 15 knots and 792 lph at 20 knots. Sailing would be the predominant form of propulsion but during lack of wind, the main engines are necessary. From frequent tank testing and similar-hull comparisons, the designers know that all hulls they have designed fall into the lowest 10% in resistance comparison, of around 60 similar hulls tested, so in low resistance the hulls perform very well.
