The ship whereupon Pangea university is built, would be a USS Enterprise 65, a retired Aircraft Carrier built in 1958 and out of service since 2012. It’s 342 meters in length, it can accommodate up to 6000 people and can reach a speed of 65 km/h. It would be disarmed from guns and made into an empty canvas, symbolizing the blank canvas which the students are about to paint and fill up with their ideas and dialogues.

 

If the ship would be painted in any other color, there will be the problem of that colors have different meanings in different cultures. Some cultures also don’t even consider colors at all, like the inhabitants of the Bellona island in Polynesia. The belief that there are universal systems of color shared by all cultures is a romantic idea that originates in Western European culture. However, since a sheet of paper is in a light tint, and the idea of what a person does with a paper is something universal and inter-cultural, I decided to let the ship be an empty canvas, just like a sheet of paper, ready to be drawn and written all over.

 

As you also will see in this chapter, the school building on top of the ship can take all kinds of shapes and forms. That’s another reason for the empty canvas, to leave openness around the project. Perhaps the ship can take its shape during the route, just like the students of the Black Mountain College did construction in their school. In that way it will be built by different cultures with different forms of architecture.