Fantastic Voyage

For Voyager alone, RCCL ended up with a dozen outside architects. The ice rink was designed and engineered in Boston; Portland, Oregon; Turku; and the Tirolean region of Austria. The main dining rooms and the large casual dining areas were designed in Viken, Sweden. The 5,000-gallon saltwater aquariums -- the largest ever on a ship -- were designed and built in Grand Junction, Colorado; a company in Florida stocked the fish. The Egyptian dance lounge and the cigar club were both designed in London. The 24-hour sidewalk café and the English pub on the Royal Promenade were designed in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A London-based firm coordinated all the art, which was bought from artists in eight countries. The casino was designed in Miami.

To anyone who is accustomed to managing large projects (let alone a kitchen renovation), such a dispersal of talent and responsibility sounds like a prescription for disaster. And it is not necessarily the industry standard. Carnival Cruise Lines, which is bigger than RCCL, not only uses one person to design all of its cruise ships, but Carnival also employs the same person to design every single space on every one of those ships.

The idea of a simpler, cheaper way to design and build ships makes Kulovaara smile. He has a corner office in Royal Caribbean's headquarters, in the Port of Miami -- the windows overlook Biscayne Bay, which changes dramatically with the weather. "Our strength is that our designers come from different backgrounds," he says. "I cannot build a ship with these two hands. I would not even get the keel laid. When you're leading this kind of process, the most important thing is to have creative, reliable people -- people who do what they say they will do.

"I've been involved in the building of 35 ships. Execution is relatively easy, compared with finding talent," he says. "It's more important that the designers know what they are doing than that they live in a convenient place." In a strange way, the spectrum of talent gives Kulovaara and Fain more control rather than less. It allows them to demand standards of quality and attention to detail that might be hard to enforce if everyone actually worked for RCCL in Miami or Oslo.

A steering committee oversees design, cost, and overall progress. But this committee destroys most notions about meetings and committees: Its sessions are long -- a full day, often two -- but they're rarely dull. Real work gets done. Innovative design survives the committee, and sometimes gets even better. Everyone always sits in the same place. Fain, Kulovaara, and Jack Williams can be found on one long side of the conference table, flanked by others from RCCL in Miami. The new-building group, from Oslo, sits opposite Fain, anchored in the center by Olav Eftedal, its technical director. Eftedal, 64, is a deceptively mild-mannered engineer who joined the company back in 1968, when it was building its first cruise ship; he oversees all day-to-day shipbuilding procedures. In discussions, when Eftedal wants to look up something about a ship, he hoists a full-size ledger filled with his careful handwriting onto the table and says wryly, "Let me consult my laptop." Against the wall sit the designers. In an adjacent room are their models, plans, renderings, and samples.

The format is simple: Each meeting has a schedule of presentations. You say what you've come to say, show your opera-themed dining room or the art that will hang in the 10-story atrium, mention any problems, and ask for any decisions that need to be made. Then the fun begins, usually the same way, with Richard Fain saying, "Can I ask a couple questions?"

It's the first hour of a steering-committee meeting that took place late last year. Fain raises a variety of topics: the size of luxury cabins, the adequacy of handicapped access to the main theater, and the sturdiness of sneeze guards for the ship's self-service cafeteria.

The decisions usually range from trivial to dramatic. In the afternoon, Arkitektbyrån presents a redesigned top-deck area for six ships being built in Germany. The first ship is almost done; Kulovaara wanted a more distinctive topside for the sister ships, and the proposal includes a spectacular curved-glass stern.

After discussing potential problems, Fain rocks back in his chair, does a head swivel, looks down at the models, and says, "I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm speechless. You've convinced me, Harri. You can really build it? At a reasonable price?"

"Yes," affirms Kulovaara.

"The wisdom of these meetings," says Scott Wilson, of Wilson Butler Lodge, "is that the freewheeling style results in some things that wouldn't have happened otherwise. There is a real lack of ego at those meetings -- my idea, your idea -- and it becomes the adopted philosophy of the team."