March 28, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 1
- SURJAN
- Mar 27
- 5 min read
SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - Part 1
March 28, 2025
Dear Super Studio Community,
As we step fully into spring, the Surjan Super School continues its unfolding as a site of playful provocation, radical architectural modeling, and speculative pedagogy. This week’s collection documents the expanding vocabularies of material, memory, myth, and megaform—each stitched into the making of our collective super-narrative. Below you will find curated highlights from the recent student experiments and studio provocations.
🌸 DOMESTICITY AS FICTION: FLOATING ROOFS & HOVERING CHIMNEYS
Images 1–6 (Top Rows)
Our youngest studio members have been constructing elevated domestic myths, in which homes hover just above vibrant pink meadows, supported by impossibly thin columns. These dwellings—rendered with delightful roof-scapes and candy-colored verticals—propose a soft defiance of gravity.
Caption Highlights:
"Chimneys first, house second."
"Veranda as theater—every child becomes audience and actor."
"Elevations in dialogue with the wild bloom."
🌳 INDOOR FORESTS & WOODEN GOTHIC MESHES
Images 7–9
Architecture as language of branches—interior structures explore how material expression of the forest can be rendered inside institutions. These new wood assemblies frame thresholds, nest volumes, and invite animal-scale wandering.
Caption Highlights:
"A cathedral without religion: the interspecies promenade begins."
"What if columns were cousins?"
🎨 STRUCTURAL COLOR: FROM BRUTALISM TO BALLET
Images 10–21
A powerful resurgence of geometric form softened by pastel tone dominates this week's entries. Brutalist foundations meet playful envelopes—ribbons of pink, yellow, and white slide over heavy concrete. We’ve seen institutions reimagined as playgrounds, with gymnasiums turned theaters, schools turned museums, and libraries turned puzzle-boxes.
Caption Highlights:
"Concrete never forgot it was once soft clay."
"Gothic becomes jelly."
✏️ DRAWN CONSTRUCTIONS: SECTION AS STORY
Images 22–30
Students are advancing analog detailing with speculative drawing. Rendered sections in colored pencil reveal the cross-pollination of timber tectonics and 1970s public architecture. Narratives embedded in elevation—each line stitched with program, performance, and possible futures.
Caption Highlights:
"Roof meets sky like a secret."
"Section cuts reveal lessons hidden between staircases and sky gardens."
🛸 LEVITATING PUBLICS
Images 31–36
Speculative renderings propose public structures that levitate above the city. These floating plazas—held aloft by muscular pink stems or inflatable columns—form a new layer of urban life. Here, the school continues to ask: can we lift stories off the ground?
Caption Highlights:
"Weightlessness as a civic right."
"Architecture hovers to make space for what’s beneath."
🪵 TIMBER AS TIMEKEEPER
Images 37–45
From digital to hand-cut, timber remains our studio’s tactile heartbeat. Students model wooden settlements nestled in topography, or design clustered towers carved from landscape. Village-scale investigations hold tightly to the ground, whispering to forgotten histories.
Caption Highlights:
"Each building a story, each grain a sentence."
"Site plans as lullabies."
🌱 MAZE CITY
Images 46–54
New experiments in urban patterning bring vegetation and volume together—maze towers rise in Midtown Manhattan, while district plans propose a choreography between hedged boundaries and solid facades. From above, the city reads as a text in green and beige.
Caption Highlights:
"Can a building be grown from a puzzle?"
"The forest returns—but with a floor plan."
🧱 BOXED ARCHITECTURES: TECTONICS AS TOYS
Images 55–63
Miniature models presented in boxes propose a new genre: architectural gifting. Wrapped in cardboard, surrounded by documentation, each model is a portal to a reimagined campus or archive. They are pedagogical seeds, ready to be unwrapped by future generations.
Caption Highlights:
"To unbox a building is to unbox a story."
"Architecture in giftwrap: the joyful seriousness of play."
🌀 WHAT’S NEXT?
Next week, the studio will delve deeper into “AFTER THE STORM” conditions—floating habitats, inflatable archives, and storytelling suspended in air. Expect balloons, clouds, domes, and dreams. Please upload your material by Tuesday at noon, and remember to annotate every submission with your narrative caption.
Closing Thought:
"If architecture is the memory of gravity, what happens when we forget it?"—Surjan Super School Manifesto Draft No. 12
With care and curiosity,
Surjan
Curator of the Super School, Keeper of Safe Archives, Enthusiast of Umbrellas in Sunshine
STORYTIME WITH SURJAN
“The House With the Two Chimneys”
In a pink-and-gold field where the flowers bloomed all year and the wind sang lullabies, there stood a peculiar little house. It had two oversized chimneys painted the yellow of lemon sherbet, a roof that hovered like a hat above the pink walls, and a porch that floated on the scent of wild thyme. It was the kind of house children would draw if they had never been told what a house was supposed to look like.
This house was not built for shelter. It was built for listening.
Children gathered there every morning to listen to stories whispered from the past. Not read from books, but broadcast from the very materials themselves—timbers recycled from the trunks of long-forgotten ships, nails melted down from cathedral bells, pastel cladding blended from chalk collected by monks and mashed with candy dye.
A storyteller named Luma lived inside the house. They wore overalls the color of moss and a shirt that shimmered like sunflower petals. Every story Luma told began the same way:
"Once, not far from here, and not long from now..."
On Wednesdays, Luma brought the children into the neighboring structure—what looked like a building but was, in truth, a nest made of wood. The beams twisted and tangled in orchestrated chaos, like tree roots doing ballet. It was a room without walls, only thresholds, where whispers could echo into meaning.
The children called it “The Listening Forest.”
One day, a child named Kio asked Luma, “Who built these?”
Luma paused, then smiled. “You did. You just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
From then on, the children began building. Small houses with steep roofs and chimney hats. Bridges held aloft by invisible laughter. Even towers made of green cubes that rearranged themselves at night. They weren’t following plans—they were drawing dreams with scissors and glue, foam and thread.
They laid their models out across the floor like a new world unfolding.
And in their dreams, the buildings sang back to them.
Captions Inspired by the Images:
Floating chimney-roof house in a pink lavender field. A space for breath, shade, and secrets told by flowers.
Children on a platform, backed by distant mountains. No stage needed when the story is held by the horizon.
Vertical pink and yellow towers with balconies. Observation decks for the curious-hearted.
Timber nest architecture indoors . Architecture made from verbs instead of nouns: to twist, to lean, to hug.
Concrete brutalist towers with jagged rooflines. Like dinosaur spines or fortress crowns, the rooftops carry the weight of memory.
Yellow mushroom-like canopies supported by columns.From above: a forest canopy. From below: shelter for stormless days.
Modular playgrounds and pastel-colored rooftops.An education not of content, but of color, rhythm, and breath.
Children working on architectural models in sunlit studios.Each model a question. Each question a world.
Drawings of wildly imaginative structural sections.Where axonometric views become fairy tales in wood, brass, and breath.
Lush mazes made of buildings and hedges hovering over New York.The city re-seeded: a canopy garden from the next century.
Models of tiny villages made from wood scraps.Every cluster of blocks a story of people who love to live near.
Cubic structures floating above urban buildings.Impossible geometry made possible by belief.
White models with cavernous voids and smooth contours. As if clouds had been cut with care and filled with purpose.
Children, again and again, building, building, building.
The future has small hands and large imaginations.
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