March 07, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER March 07, 2025

Farms in the Sky: Reimagining Urban Agriculture

This week at Surjan Super School, we explored radical new ways to integrate agriculture into the urban fabric. Our latest investigations focus on vertical barns, rooftop pastures, and floating farmlands that question conventional hierarchies between rural and urban spaces. These architectural interventions blur the boundaries between nature and city life, envisioning a future where food production, biodiversity, and high-density urbanity coexist.

Highlights from the Week:

• Sheep Among the Skyscrapers Red barns sit atop high-rise buildings, creating serene pastures amidst the Manhattan skyline. These surreal interventions introduce rural nostalgia into hyper-urban landscapes, questioning ideas of sustainability and ecological balance.

• The Hippos of Midtown Hippos and other unexpected species find their way onto floating green roofs, creating utopian ecosystems that challenge our expectations of city wildlife.

• Vertical Farming and High-Tech Agrarianism Fields of color-coded crops and high-rise greenhouses emerge in new typologies of farming skyscrapers. These hybrid structures balance agriculture, housing, and ecological restoration.

• Hay Bale Brutalism Experimental haystack-like towers redefine materiality and environmental consciousness, proposing modular, biodegradable buildings that shift with the seasons.

• Living Architecture & Bio-Fabrication Architectural forms merge with nature as buildings are grown, not built. Grass-covered facades, plant-suit hybrids, and bio-integrated design propose alternative futures where humans and the environment become one.

• Modular Circular Living New housing prototypes based on adaptable, prefabricated circular modules are tested in real-time construction environments, pushing the limits of flexible dwelling.

Surjan Super School Lecture Series Update

Our most recent lecture at the University of Tennessee was a resounding success! The discussion on future rural-urban hybrids and gravity-defying ecological systems sparked meaningful conversations on the role of architecture in reshaping planetary futures. Thank you to everyone who attended!

Upcoming Events & Announcements

• March 15: Special panel on "Architecture & The Post-Natural World: How Cities Can Regrow Themselves."

• March 22: Student showcase on speculative architectural interventions in urban food systems.

• March 28: Release of the Surjan Super School publication: The Sky Barn Manifesto.

Stay inspired and keep pushing the limits of design!

Surjan Super School Team