March 21, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 2

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - PART 2

March 21, 2025

Radical Softness in Architectural Futures

This week, Surjan Super School investigates the intersection of urbanism, ecology, and speculative materiality through a new collection of architectural explorations. We examine biophilic infrastructures, hybrid landscapes, and the adaptability of space through inflatable, floating, and ephemeral design methodologies.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL COLLECTION

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1. The New Timber Citadel: A Soft Brutalism

What if brutalism embraced softness, permeability, and lightness? These timber-wrapped forms challenge the stereotype of massiveness in civic architecture. Here, woven wooden facades, semi-open structures, and playful geometric crowns invite light, movement, and the unpredictability of weather into urban space.

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2. The Reflective Commons: Architecture Meets Sky and Water

These mirrored water courtyards create an unstable, ephemeral public space, shifting between land and water with the seasons. By integrating bold chromatic interventions, the urban groundscape becomes both an art piece and a participatory environment, blurring the line between architecture and performance.

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3. Energy, Industry, and Play: Post-Industrial Color Fields

These works explore how industrial relics—cooling towers, reactors, and energy plants—can be reimagined not as symbols of extraction, but as new grounds for ecological play and social interaction. Floating platforms in fluorescent pinks and oranges propose a radical softness to industrial infrastructure, transforming energy landscapes into sites of communal gathering.

CIRCULARITY & MONUMENTALITY IN LIBRARIES

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4. The Circle Library: Framing Knowledge Through Form

A new typology for libraries as immersive, continuous spaces emerges in these circular reading rooms. Instead of the linearity of traditional knowledge systems, these designs embrace loops, voids, and infinite visual perspectives, inviting a rethinking of how knowledge is accessed, stored, and shared.

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5. Gravity-Resistant Libraries: Elevated Structures for Floating Archives

What if libraries weren’t bound to the earth? These floating, cantilevered reading spaces redefine the library as an elevated public space, detached from the landscape yet deeply embedded in the spatial memory of water, reflection, and openness.

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6. The Library as Monument: Knowledge Towers in the Wild

Libraries are not just containers of books—they are monuments to memory and curiosity. These massive concrete-and-yellow towers propose an alternative to urban density, situating knowledge in wild landscapes, open-air archives, and non-linear circulation paths.

FROM QUARRIES TO PUBLIC SPACES: EXCAVATED ARCHITECTURE

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7. The Carved City: Excavation as an Architectural Language

These quarry-based urban forms invert traditional architectural thinking—instead of building up, they carve into landscapes, creating civic forums, theaters, and water-retaining social spaces directly from the earth.

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8. The Softness of Stone: Quarry Pools and Reflective Grounds

In this exploration, quarries become more than sites of extraction—they are slow landscapes of transformation, where people gather for rituals of play, learning, and reflection. These spaces show how stone-cut voids can be repurposed into urban commons.

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9. Inflatable Geometries in the Quarry Theater

What happens when soft, temporary forms invade ancient and permanent structures? This experiment in inflatable yellow forms shows how monumental quarries can be repopulated with joyful interventions—a space once defined by labor becomes a site of communal performance.

SPECULATIVE FUTURES: ANIMAL ARCHITECTURE & NEW URBAN ECOLOGIES

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10. The Giraffe Commons: Biophilic Architecture in the City

These surreal images propose a vision of an urban future where giraffes inhabit architectural space. Whether climbing woven structures or merging with bridge infrastructure, these hybrid spaces suggest that the city is no longer solely for humans, but for all species.

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11. Elephant Infrastructures: Housing on the Move

What if housing was mobile, alive, and organic? These elephant-shaped residential towers propose a living architecture, where habitat and movement are interconnected. Here, buildings are not static forms, but adaptable, roaming entities within a greater eco-system of shelter and migration.

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12. The Wildlife Atrium: A Museum Where Humans Observe Themselves

This zebra-filled interior atrium reverses traditional exhibition design. Instead of humans observing animals, animals observe humans. The curved, soft geometries of these museum interiors redefine the spatial hierarchy between human and non-human subjects.

UPCOMING EVENTS

📅 April 5, 2025 – Lecture: Architecture for More-Than-Human WorldsJoin us for a discussion on the radical expansion of architecture beyond human-centric design, featuring hybrid ecologies, non-human infrastructures, and speculative bio-urbanism.

📅 April 15, 2025 – Exhibition Opening: Inhabiting the Soft MonumentA new show explores how massive, monumental structures can be softened through textile skins, ephemeral materials, and participatory design.

JOIN THE MOVEMENT!

Thank you for being part of Surjan Super School, where gravity is optional, nature is a collaborator, and architecture is an open-ended question.

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🔆 The future is soft, the future is shared! 🔆

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

In a city crafted by architects who dreamed without boundaries, stood a fantastical landscape where pastel-hued towers touched the sky and whimsical buildings hovered lightly above reflective lakes. This was the city of Zephyra, where each structure told stories whispered in concrete, glass, and vibrant color, stories born from the imaginations of generations.

At the city's edge stood a pavilion of softly curving wooden spires, beneath which people walked serenely carrying bright umbrellas, reflecting the structures' colors. Nearby, pink and yellow roofs peaked like gentle waves atop slender columns, sheltering playful gatherings that splashed joyfully in shallow waters beneath them.

Across a mirrored lake, majestic cooling towers painted a serene backdrop. Their soft, billowing clouds of steam whispered secrets into the sky, casting elegant reflections onto pools segmented by vibrant geometric patterns. Here, the inhabitants strolled leisurely, moving through spaces as colorful as their dreams.

Libraries with vast, circular windows opened portals into endless realms of knowledge. Their sculptural forms stood tall and commanding, yet inviting and gentle. The soft curves and sharp angles of these structures challenged convention, encouraging contemplation and creativity within their peaceful interiors filled with endless shelves of stories waiting to be told.

Further along, great concrete forms rose dramatically above the earth—gravity-defying structures painted in bold shades of yellow and accented with whimsical shapes and voids. People wandered in awe beneath buildings that balanced precariously, yet confidently, defying expectation and delighting the imagination.

Playfulness continued in elevated plazas crowned with flowering gardens, their vibrant pink and yellow blooms extending from concrete petals. These whimsical islands of tranquility offered respite and inspiration to visitors who marveled at their organic yet surreal form.

Near iconic bridges, giraffes congregated upon straw-clad platforms, craning their graceful necks toward towers decorated with patterns reminiscent of their own striking coats. Elsewhere, immense elephants sculpted from lush greenery gently carried small pastel homes on their backs, forming villages that slowly traversed the city, delighting all who encountered them.

Inside glass-roofed atriums, zebras roamed through indoor gardens, grazing peacefully among reeds and pools, while overhead floated bubble-like capsules that sheltered cozy nooks for contemplation or imaginative play. Each corner of this city was thoughtfully curated, merging whimsy with wonder, inviting exploration, interaction, and dreaming.

This was Surjan’s city—a place where architecture told stories, where every building was a chapter, and every visitor an author. Here, reality softened and expanded, becoming a boundless canvas for imagination and joyful creation.