March 14, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 2

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER – MARCH 14, 2025 - PART 2

Imaginary Landscapes and Architectural Futures

Miniature Worlds: Prototyping the Future of Housing

Students this week explored small-scale architectural models as speculative futures for housing. The models, crafted in soft pastel hues and punctuated with vibrant red-orange trees, reflect a synthesis of nature and architecture. These conceptual dwellings reimagine domestic space through modularity, translucency, and organic integration. (See images 1-3.)

Knitted Architecture: The Intersection of Fashion and the Built Environment

Our studio experiments in wearable architecture continue with a new series of sculptural sweaters. These garments take inspiration from Gothic cathedrals, transforming knitted fibers into highly articulated spatial elements. By wearing architecture, we question boundaries between personal and public space, movement and structure. (See images 4-6.)

Floating Libraries and Cloud-Like Institutions

In our ongoing investigation into gravity-free educational spaces, students have proposed a hovering knowledge hub. This structure, balancing between digital and physical realms, acts as a space for discourse, learning, and play. The floating yellow and pink towers blur the line between functional infrastructure and dream-like urban insertions. (See images 7-9.)

Architectural Storytelling: Pop-Up Books as Urban Narratives

How do we capture the essence of a city in a book? Our architecture students explored storytelling through the lens of kinetic paper models. These intricate fold-outs depict entire neighborhoods, creating interactive representations of urban memory and transformation. (See images 10-12.)

Nature’s Infiltration: Billboards as Ecological Windows

Surjan Super School challenges the urban landscape through the implementation of ‘green billboards.’ These large-scale interventions transform advertising spaces into portals for ecological consciousness. Whether reflecting rural farmland, overgrown moss, or natural habitats, these images force us to reconsider the role of nature in the urban skyline. (See images 13-15.)

The City as a Canvas: Animal Portraits on Skyscrapers

A new student-led initiative explores large-scale projections of wildlife on building facades. From herds of elephants to cascading butterflies, these architectural interventions question themes of migration, extinction, and cohabitation. The city itself becomes an evolving narrative of biodiversity. (See images 16-18.)

Botanical Megastructures: Vertical Gardens on the Skyline

Taking inspiration from the natural world, a new wave of conceptual skyscrapers integrates lush floral facades. These towering installations infuse dense urban areas with vibrant greenery, inviting passersby to pause and reflect on the relationship between nature and human-made environments. (See images 19-21.)

Color Play: New Visions for Public Space

Students experiment with hyper-colorful urban interventions, reimagining plazas, parks, and educational spaces as playful environments for social interaction. The dynamic use of yellow and pink surfaces creates a sensory experience that invites movement, wonder, and engagement with the built world. (See images 22-24.)

Surjan Super School is an accredited institution of the Gravity Free Institute of Architects (GFIA), ensuring that our speculative, experimental, and boundary-pushing methodologies continue to shape the future of design education.

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

In the gentle quiet of the city's edge, where architecture dreamed softly in pastel colors and quiet textures, stood a curious collection known as the Gravity less Archive. Conceived by the imaginative minds of the Surjan Super School, it was a place where gravity and logic bent to the dreams of architecture and storytelling. Here, a series of small, charming architectural fragments in muted greens, bright yellows, and playful oranges and pinks rested lightly as if carved from soap or delicately folded paper—each piece a whisper of a once-grand building from an unknown corner of the world.

At the heart of this whimsical archive lived the Story keepers, custodians of these architectural memories, who dressed in sunny yellows to match their surroundings. They carried books that, when opened, blossomed into magical pop-up scenes of tiny worlds—some filled with intricate urban forests, others bustling towns, or serene natural landscapes. Children from all around would gather, their eyes wide with wonder as they turned the pages, transforming flat sheets into rich, three-dimensional dreamscapes.

Outside, the archive stretched into fanciful forms—towers of soft curves in candy-like colors that gently defied conventional geometry, an architecture inspired by imagination itself rather than utility. People wandered between structures that resembled giant pastel crayons or whimsical popsicles, the scale playfully exaggerated to emphasize the surreal experience of inhabiting an idea.

In the heart of Manhattan, this storytelling center took root in the air above the city. Gigantic floral murals bloomed on glass towers, bringing splashes of vibrant life and softness against the steel-and-glass skyline. Meanwhile, lower structures painted in bold yellows and gentle pinks appeared as if dipped in sweet icing. At street level, surreal columns of rounded, glossy color punctuated the spaces, turning the architecture itself into interactive elements of storytelling, inviting passersby to linger and engage with their surroundings in delightfully unexpected ways.

Inside, children played within a world of vivid reflections—floors covered in glossy yellow that mirrored back their laughter. The entire space transformed into a playful yet serene sanctuary, where boundaries between indoors and outdoors, real and imaginary, history and fantasy, blurred joyfully. Here, in this whimsical archive, architecture became not just shelter or monument but a living story, endlessly retold through the limitless imagination of children, unconstrained by gravity, free to explore a boundless realm of creativity and memory.