Most people wouldn’t think to look at ships for architecture, but with the size of Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas, one can begin to see how it could apply. It’s large enough to be a floating city at 1188 feet long (nearly a quarter mile!) and 228,000 gross tons. For my high school graduation, my grandparents took my cousin and I on a Mediterranean cruise out of Barcelona, and this is the boat that we took.
From the outside, it just looks like an oversized cruise ship. The real architecture is on the inside.
The middle of the ship is open to the sky, and there’s a boardwalk with restaurants and shops. The space is so large that they have small trees and bushes planted along the boardwalk. The stateroom balconies lining the boardwalk made me feel like I was standing in a dense and modern city.
What’s even crazier than having an open air street in the middle of a cruise ship is having another interior street right below it, filled with even more restaurants, shops, and even an art gallery. The glass skylights that partition the top street illuminate the bottom one, making it feel like I was walking between two skyscrapers. There were several nights where they used the lower street to have dance parties or parades, and others where they used the upper street for some more relaxing performances. Towards one end of the street was a massive formal dining room, and on the other was an indoor theater. If one theater wasn’t enough, there was a second open air theater on the rear of the ship!
To top it all off, on the top deck there were multiple pools, a mini-golf course, a rock climbing wall, 2 wave surfers, and a kid’s water park. I was on board for 2 weeks and didn’t have time to try everything.
I thought it was quite impressive how the designers created an artistic combination of urban style and verdant nature on something that would sail in the middle of the ocean. Its style and variety of activities make the Symphony of the Seas a floating city, with architecture that rivals some of its land based cousins.
