April 18, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 2

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - Part 2

April 18, 2025

Title: Pneumatic Utopias, Rooftop Realities, and Ductal Couture

This week’s Super Studio Collection invites us into a luminous ecosystem where rooftops stretch toward the sky like citrus-flavored cathedrals, ducts become choreographed symphonies of color, and hair becomes the architecture of a new civic identity. The Surjan Super School continues its investigation into speculative infrastructures of joy, softness, and civic absurdity—where architectural scale meets genderqueer fashion logic in pastel valiance.

SECTION I: ROOFTOP UTOPIAS

An aerial cartography of New York’s secret rooftops reveals a fantastical skyline not of towers, but of playgrounds, planters, and vertical community stacks. Each building is crowned not with HVAC units but with citadel spires, stacked living pods, and white-and-pink observatories.

📸 Top Left Image Grid Caption: Rooftop City: A cluster of modular towers with pink-and-yellow rooftop structures sits like birthday candles in Midtown, offering visual relief to the dense concrete matrix.

📸 Middle Row, Center Image Caption: Air-Ducted Temple: Three pristine monoliths rise, pierced by vivid yellow ducts, suggesting a post-industrial cathedral for climate-conscious contemplation.

📸 Bottom Right Image Caption: The Hanging Gardens of Queer Babylon: Yellow trusses hoist entire garden pods above the Manhattan grid, suggesting a future of elevation and celebration.

SECTION II: DUCTWORK AS FASHION, FASHION AS DUCTWORK

No longer hidden in ceilings, ducts become a language of color-coded joy. Pink curves, yellow trunks, and bubblegum blue tubes swerve through offices, apartments, and alleyways, proposing an HVAC renaissance rooted in transparency and beauty.

📸 Bottom Grid, Second Row Caption: Pastel Pipes Parade: This residence rewrites the building code, revealing exposed piping like a rainbow nervous system across floors and ceilings.

📸 Third Grid, Left Column Caption: Vertical Duct Assemblage: A monumental dance of air pipes scales an urban canyon, defying gravity and expectation with strawberry, tangerine, and cherry red limbs.

📸 Third Grid, Right Column Caption: Architectural Calligraphy: Ducts curl into spirals across a ceiling like cursive letters, spelling an urban script only children and poets can read.

SECTION III: PNEUMATIC FASHION & COLUMNAR REBELLION

This week’s final collection stitches together inflatable helmets, Ionic columns with a sweet tooth, and city dwellers wrapped in weatherproofed candy-couture. Architecture meets identity through wearable shelters. Each headpiece evokes a monument: a rotunda of care, a roofline of resistance, a dome of delight.

📸 Top Right Grid Caption: Neo-Baroque Columns Gone Pop: Postmodern frosting blends with ionic geometry to form column capitals that belong in both cathedrals and candy shops.

📸 Middle Row, Center Image Caption: Bubble Twins: Two residents model genderqueer inflatable headpieces—a pink house and a yellow roof—symbolizing domesticity worn as armor and pride.

📸 Bottom Left Image Caption: Hairtecture Pavilion: Yellow hair as umbrella, pink dome as refuge. A person walks confidently through sunlight, sheltering imagination itself.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

In this edition, we blur the seams between structural necessity and performative architecture. Whether it’s ducts that dance, towers that bloom, or wigs that house dreams, Surjan Super School reminds us that infrastructure can be tender, joyful, and radically inclusive. We design for a future where civic infrastructure is fabulous, and your building might just be your outfit.

With affection from the rooftops,

Surjan & the Super School Studio💛🏗️🌈

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

The Rooftop Beacons of the Duct Queens

Set in a future New York City where fashion, infrastructure, and rooftop utopias fuse into surrealist civic expression.

In the year 2135, the skyline of New York shimmered with architectural wigs, each rooftop structure styled like monumental headpieces worn by the Duct Queens—an avant-garde guild of genderqueer civic dreamers who ruled not by decree, but by design. The old city had fractured under the weight of logic and ego; what rose in its place was a soft revolution of pastel towers, pneumatic palaces, and columned candyfloss cathedrals—each a co-authored autobiography of queerness, history, and hope.

The Duct Queens, each clad in inflatable fashion grown from memory foam and radiant polymers, lived at the summit of these buildings—part lighthouse, part runway, part data-collecting observatory. Their homes were never just homes. They were infrastructure. Public monument. Private identity. Studio and sanctuary.

Each Duct Queen wore their architecture proudly atop their heads: one crowned with a yellow-roofed cottage encased in curling pink rollers; another bore a transparent cornucopia of inflatable grapes fused with air filtration systems. These weren’t costumes—they were living blueprints, interfacing with the rooftop ecosystems they governed. The colors weren’t for beauty alone—they conducted solar channels, filtered urban air, and coded access to story vaults embedded deep within the columns.

But their greatest work was hidden in plain sight: the Symphonic Duct Network. It threaded across rooftops and dove through buildings like a nest of colossal, candy-colored intestines. Some called it plumbing. Others, prophecy. When wind passed through the ducts, they sang. Messages—musical, mechanical, ethereal—flowed through pink bends and yellow valves, reminding the citizens below that the city was still alive, still becoming.

Children played in the thermal shadows of inflatable pipes, chasing condensation trails like blessings. Architects in training climbed the spiral systems, tracing routes from ductwork to dreams. Elders gathered beneath polychromatic corinthian columns, their scrolls and leaves infused with stories of lost battles, won rights, chosen families.

Above it all, the Duct Queens whispered to the city like parents to a child at bedtime.

“You are allowed to grow in directions never charted. You are allowed to wear your infrastructure proudly. You are allowed to be many things at once.”

And so, New York became a city not of towers, but of tales.

From the Rooftops of Surjan Super School:

CAPTIONS

1. Upper Left Grid – Rooftop cluster of air-filtering residential towers, topped with inflatable pink observatories and lemon-yellow civic libraries.

2. Middle Hair Fashion Row – Genderqueer architectural historians don wigs made of housing models to present their dissertation-defiles on “Form as Identity.”

3. Center Duct System Close-ups – Detail of colorful HVAC choreography across elevated civic plazas—performance, utility, and dream-circulation in one.

4. Lower Urban Arteries – An underbelly of vibrant ducts twists through domestic frames. Neon veins of the future: heating, cooling, singing, connecting.

5. Bottom Column Set – Postmodern Ionic and Corinthian columns wrapped in soft candy hues, coded to archive LGBTQIA+ oral histories by tonal vibration.

6. Final Row (Umbrella Hair) – Weatherproof, architectural wigs double as personal rain canopies. Residents walk, sculpt, and resist beneath their domed crowns.