March 21, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 1

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - Part 1

March 21, 2025

Expanding the Archive: New Visions for Post-Gravity Urbanism

This week, we dive into hybrid ecologies, floating architectures, and speculative urbanism that rethink the relationship between the built environment and non-human life. As Surjan Super School continues to develop its architectural collection, we focus on suspended habitats, inflatable ecosystems, and architectures of coexistence.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL COLLECTION

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1. Floating Ecologies: The Sky-High Habitat

What if architecture was not bound by the ground? These new elevated structures, resembling organic nests and hovering capsules, create alternative living environments for both humans and animals. The hanging wooden latticework provides a permeable, ever-shifting skyline. Meanwhile, soft capsule-like dwellings recall modular living units adapted for evolving climatic conditions.

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2. Hydro-Urbanism: Wildlife in the Architectural Commons

Public space is reimagined as a shared habitat, dissolving the boundary between the human-built world and the natural ecosystem. These water-based urban spaces integrate natural elements like floating wetlands, migratory animal pathways, and bio-reactive facades. Here, zebras move freely beneath an indoor sky, while flamingos populate liquid plazas, merging architectural spectacle with ecological immersion.

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3. Towering Biomes: Verticality and the Non-Human City

Instead of merely housing people, these towers become multi-species sanctuaries, integrating pollinators, birds, and microclimates within their facades. The soft gradient textile wrapping these structures mimics the behavior of butterfly wings, shifting in response to environmental conditions. This work suggests that future skyscrapers could be less about density and more about atmospheric interaction.

RETHINKING INFRASTRUCTURE: FROM SILOS TO SKY GARDENS

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4. The Playful Civic Tower: Softness Meets Infrastructure

Our new series investigates the infrastructural sublime, where silos, cooling towers, and industrial relics are adapted into inhabitable playgrounds. These cylindrical structures become public viewing decks, nature observatories, and open-air educational spaces. The integration of soft, bulbous forms on rigid towers reflects an evolving architectural language: one that is equal parts industrial and whimsical.

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5. Animal Urbanism: Coexistence in the Built Environment

What happens when sheep, deer, and other wildlife become part of the urban commons? These brutalist stilted housing structures elevate living spaces, leaving the ground open for shared human-animal interaction. The result is an architecture that engages in the rewilding of the city, suggesting an alternative future where architecture adapts to the rhythms of nature.

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6. Housing for a New Era: The Suspended Domesticity

As gravity loses its architectural monopoly, housing is reimagined as suspended, kinetic, and adaptable. These modular dwellings hover over wetlands and forests, forming multi-tiered floating villages. The delicate balance of pastel rooftops, greenery, and lattice-wrapped foundations makes these homes neither fully grounded nor fully airborne—an architecture of liminality.

STUDIO SPOTLIGHT: SOFTNESS & STRUCTURE IN ARCHITECTURAL REPRESENTATION

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7. Rethinking the Archive: Tactile Architectural Models

As part of an ongoing investigation into material representation, these studies explore softened tectonics, porous layering, and three-dimensional storytelling in model-making. Display panels exhibit cylindrical voids, stacked modularity, and red pleated forms, challenging how architectural models engage with texture and depth.

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8. The Textile Facade: History Woven into Architecture

Our latest textile-infused facades propose a fusion of softness and solidity. From woven timber skins to fabric-like structured exteriors, these models investigate how material articulation affects spatial perception. This technique applies to both wearable architecture (as seen in our sculptural garment series) and full-scale urban facades.

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9. The Miniature City: Metaphoric Housing Concepts

In this collection, folding architectural geometries question the permanence of dwelling. These paper-based studies form temporary, mobile, and foldable shelters, proposing housing as an ephemeral yet adaptable act.

UPCOMING EVENTS

📅 April 2, 2025 – Panel: Floating Cities and the Post-Human Commons Join us for a live conversation on inflatable ecologies, atmospheric urbanism, and weightless public space.

📅 April 12, 2025 – Exhibition Opening: The Vertical Commons A new gallery showcase explores non-human infrastructures, sky-housing, and gravity-resistant urbanism.

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

In the vibrant metropolis known as Architopia, architecture lived, breathed, and danced alongside the city's inhabitants. Beneath expansive glass canopies, zebras calmly roamed in luminous atriums, their striped coats mirroring the geometric beauty of the structural beams overhead. Above them hovered whimsical capsules in pastel hues, soft and inviting, offering playful spaces for people to dream, rest, and explore.

At Architopia’s heart stood towering structures that defied the weight of gravity itself—immense buildings painted in gradients of gentle colors, adorned with intricate patterns of butterflies. These buildings seemed alive, their façades shifting subtly with the day's passing hours, embodying transformation and renewal.

In lush parks surrounded by still waters, fantastical towers rose like blossoms—giant blooms of yellow and pink, held aloft on slender stalks. Beneath their gentle shade, playful animals congregated: pink deer grazing serenely, graceful flamingos wading leisurely, all part of a living tableau that enchanted visitors with its surreal harmony.

Further on, large sculptural silos loomed, bold and striking, their forms commanding and protective. They were the keepers of stories, their sturdy walls sheltering generations of knowledge within their cavernous halls. Visitors wandered through pathways and bridges that connected these strongholds, feeling secure in the timeless embrace of these monumental guardians.

In quieter corners of the city, delicate towers floated gently above reflective lakes, their pastel façades glowing softly at sunset. Birds fluttered around them, mingling seamlessly with the city’s joyful harmony. Each floating building was a poetic ode to imagination, a reminder that architecture could rise above mere function into realms of enchantment.

At street level, delightful geometric installations welcomed sheep to graze amidst reflective pools of pastel tiles. This playful dialogue between architecture and nature brought peaceful coexistence, reminding city dwellers of simplicity and serenity.

Throughout Architopia, exhibitions showcased meticulous models of every fantastical structure, documenting each architectural wonder in miniature. Walls held intricate arrays of folded, sculpted forms, bridging imagination and reality, past and future.

Citizens of Architopia dressed in garments mirroring their beloved buildings, detailed textures echoing facades of classic and modern structures alike, showcasing pride and unity with their environment. Each citizen was a walking testament to the city's commitment to architectural storytelling, a fusion of human creativity and architectural dreams.

Thus, Architopia thrived, a city not bound by gravity or convention, but by the boundless possibilities of imagination, forever inviting its inhabitants to live within the poetry of built dreams.