Message

“Dirty” is different from “messy.” Sometimes, messiness is essential for the creative process. When we visited the school, one of the teachers apologized for the many papers pinned up all over the place. I replied, “On the contrary, I’m very happy to see the papers and drawings on the walls and windows. It makes me feel that this school is alive.” The completion of a building is nothing more than the beginning. Many people liked the curved walls and wanted the surfaces to remain clean.

“Dirty” implies a disorganized situation without intention, often associated with sanitation problems—something nobody likes. “Messy,” on the other hand, can be the result of a creative process. In the film A Beautiful Mind, there’s a secret hideout filled with newspapers pinned on the walls. Red strings connect pins, indicating hidden connections between numbers. The scientist believes he’s been assigned to crack secret codes for the government. Eventually, it’s revealed that these scenes exist only in his imagination. It’s a fictional story about a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician.

The school principal told us, “I used to enjoy visiting my grandfather’s metal workshop. It looked messy, but it was actually organized. Each tool had its place.”

The messy papers in the teachers’ area are the result of deep thinking about progressive education. The process resembles codebreaking. Fragments of evidence lie before the eyes, but their meaning is hidden between the facts. To understand that meaning, one must step back and observe the whole picture. This is very different from analysis. Analysis seeks to find a paradigm within the facts—a diagram that can be explained with equations. Observation, however, is the process of discovering shared meaning.

Blue textiles float beneath the ceiling. I imagine they represent the sky or the surface of water for the children. Inside the school, there is both sky and sea—but only for them.