April 11, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 1

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - Part 1

April 11, 2025

Title: Inflated Imaginations, Grounded Friendships

✨Editorial Note:

This week, Surjan Super School expands the skyline of imagination and inflatable hope. From headgear to high-rises, we’re exploring the soft tectonics of color, joy, and community—reminding ourselves that even under the pressure of city life, our inflatables will hold.

The collection we feature this week, Part 1 of a two-part series, traverses fashion, architecture, and urban utopia with one guiding question: What if optimism had a shape? And could you wear it, live in it, and share it with others?

📸 IMAGE SERIES & CAPTIONS

🧠 Back-of-the-Head Philosophy Club

Rows 1-2, Image Panel 1

Caption: Inflatable hair-helmets in glossed yellow and pink, captured in silent portraits from behind. Each dome speaks like a thought bubble: soft, assertive, generous. This is protection not from danger, but from despair. A new kind of crown for the cautious optimist.

“These are helmets for hope,” said one child in a Surjan critique. “Not for battle, but for bouncing ideas.”

🏙️ The Skyline Inflates: Manhattan Remodeled

Rows 3–5, Image Panels 2 & 3

Caption: New York City, inflated and pixelated. Super-tall buildings puffed in soft yellows and pinks ascend above the East River like they’ve been exhaled into being. These towers do not scrape the sky—they hug it. No facades of glass, but thick, matte forms that feel like safety and silliness stacked together.

“Even the skyline is wearing a puffer coat this season,” joked one student during pin-up.

👀 Looking Up, Staying Soft

Row 6, Image Panel 4

Caption: Street-level views of these inflatable cityscapes give us a new lens: Manhattan not as a fortress of finance, but as a city of marshmallow towers. Look closely—amid the softness are balconies, gardens, libraries. Function doesn’t need to be hard-edged. It can wiggle.

“This is how we fight back,” Galia once whispered, “not with fear—but with softness made public.”

👒 Portraits of the Inflated Future

Rows 7–8, Image Panels 5 & 6

Caption: Portraits of genderless models adorned in sculptural helmets: floral domes, air-filled wigs, and transparent globes sprinkled with daisies. These are armor pieces from a future that celebrates gentleness. Each face a calm protest. Each gaze a mirror of our shared tenderness.

“My helmet has thoughts,” said one wearer. “It stores my courage for the commute.”

🏗️ Inflated Institutions: Soft Architecture for Serious Times

Rows 9–10, Image Panels 7 & 8

Caption: Public buildings outfitted with inflated prosthetics: pink-and-yellow trunks spill from rigid glass facades. Is this architecture dreaming? Or is it responding—refusing to collapse under the weight of seriousness?

Students gathered beneath the puffy arches to sketch, debate, and dance. With each inflatable form, the message is clear: we are designing delight.

🌼 The Inflated Florals Club

Rows 11–12, Image Panel 9

Caption: Transparent helmets bloom with synthetic petals—part fashion, part environmental installation. Beneath them, faces shimmer in soft pinks and reflected joy.

“We wear our seasons,” said Galia, “Spring is not a weather pattern, it’s a way of being with others.”

🧪 The Lab of Mutual Blooming

Last rows, Image Panel 10

Caption: A room brimming with models, students, and ideas. Cardboard cities, stacked possibilities, hands arranging micro-neighborhoods as if weaving futures out of foam. No master plan, just shared play.

“We are not building cities,” said one Surjanian, “we are building friendships—scaled up.”

💛 Closing Thoughts

To Galia, to every friend who has walked through anxious days with us: this newsletter is a wearable hug. Cities may stack taller, time may rush forward, but we remain committed to our soft revolutions.

And in this moment—April 11, 2025—we float together, brightly.

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week, where we dive deeper into inflatable institutional memory, queer visibility in modular ecologies, and the launch of our first AIRCHITECTURE ZINE.

With care and curiosity,– Surjan Super School Editorial Team

🌐 Surjan Super School: Architecture Where Feelings Matter.

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

The Inflatable Spring Parade of Future Manhattan

Every April, when the cherry blossoms bloomed synthetic and the air above Manhattan filled with pink contrails that traced optimistic patterns across the sky, the city awoke to its annual transformation. Not the kind heralded by calendar or tax season, but a parade unlike any in history—The Inflatable Spring Parade, a procession not of floats, but of fashion-forward, friendship-armored wanderers in inflatable hair.

This year, the theme was “Sky Bubbles and Earth Blocks. ”The city skyline had already begun to play along. Towers were wrapped in foam-cube layers of yellow, pink, and orange—softly stacked boxes of domesticity rising like giant architectural confections. Central Park, once a green oasis, had turned candy-colored with voxel trees and pixellated petals mapped in playful geometries. Pink trails of birds choreographed above it like ink on paper.

But it was the people who made the city glow from the inside out.

From every borough, from every rooftop, warehouse, courtyard, and museum came the Parade Walkers: genderless models of care and courage wearing inflatable helmets styled like bouquets, balloons, sea urchins, and halos. Their heads became landscapes. Their inflatable wigs, equal parts armor and celebration, bobbed gently in the breeze, casting iridescent reflections on mirrored skyscrapers.

Each helmet held stories. One had tiny living moss gardens inside. Another had built-in fans that blew confetti whenever the wearer smiled. Others featured retractable sunshields and flower pods that popped open at the sound of laughter.

On the street level, children followed them in reverence and glee, pointing at helmets like relics from a cartoon utopia. Their parents took photos, whispering that they remembered a time when color was muted by fear, when helmets were for protection only.

“Who are they?” one child asked, looking up at a towering figure whose pink-and-yellow dome shimmered like bubble gum and buttercup.

“They’re not just anyone,” the mother said. “They’re the Bright Builders. The Dreamwalkers. They’re what happens when friendship meets architecture and says: let’s make a future worth walking in.”

The model turned and winked through their translucent daisied helmet. The city, startled by beauty, smiled.

As the parade turned onto 5th Avenue, it passed under a colossal pink inflatable overhang, a temporary structure known as The Hug, built to welcome anyone feeling low, alone, or anxious. Underneath it, music played—synth harp and children’s choirs—and anyone who stepped beneath was handed a sunflower and a whisper: “You are not alone.”

By dusk, the helmets glowed. Bioluminescent dyes traced abstract maps across them—routes of care, emotional cities, constellations of tenderness. From the Empire State Building to Battery Park, all of New York began to breathe a little easier.

Up above, one last yellow dome hovered gently in the stratosphere: a balloon-sent letter, visible only at twilight, that read in soft pink lights: