March 28, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 2

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - PART 2

March 28, 2025

This Week in Studio: Pop-Ups, Playgrounds, and Pedagogies

As spring breaks open across our imaginary campuses and speculative landscapes, the Surjan Super School continues to thrive as a space of radical reimagination and architectural delight. Our weekly dispatch brings news from the collective studios, child-led experiments, foamcore provocations, and our ongoing construction of a city where every building tells a story, and every story is told by children.

Let’s explore what the community made possible this week:

🌆 URBAN MAKE-BELIEVE: From Pop-Up Books to Vertical Villages

Caption: Pop-up city models unfold against real city backdrops, creating hybrid skylines where imagination becomes civic form.

Children and adults alike lifted enormous architectural pop-up books into the sky this week, each telling a different version of our Super School’s evolving urban fable. From hedgerow labyrinths sprouting between skyscrapers to marshmallow-pink towers echoing memory and migration, these portable narratives map our collective desire for cities rooted in joy, softness, and surreal complexity.

🧱 MINIATURE REVOLUTIONS: Child-led Model Building Studios

Caption: From rooftop classrooms to rewilded interiors, young designers construct futures from blocks, twigs, foam, and cardboard.

The architecture studio transformed into a playground of intention. Children created multistory school towers clad in pink and lime bark textures, rethinking the interface between the classroom and the wild. The models are speculative, soft, and full of architectural mischief: playgrounds in midair, buildings shaped like toys, and settlements built for empathy and ecosystemic care.

🎨 FACADE FUTURES: A New Kind of Wrapping Paper

Caption: Architectural facades are unwrapped like presents, revealing vibrant windows of unexpected forms and hues.

This week’s workshops explored how facades behave like clothing. Students experimented with fabric-wrapped buildings, temporary skins, and playful window reveals—peeling back ordinary surfaces to expose vibrant new geometries. Windows became giant shapes: triangles, clouds, teardrops, and comic book speech bubbles.

🌸 LANDSCAPE OF LAUGHTER: Pink Fields and Floating Houses

Caption: Houses rise from lavender-pink landscapes, their candy-colored chimneys signaling sites of childhood wonder and planetary care.

Out in the dream-fields of our constructed countryside, architecture students unveiled their inflatable house prototypes. Balancing on stilts above fields of wild grass, these homes look like birthday cakes, yet function like research labs for animal learning, kinship living, and weather-responsive structures. Every building is a lesson in celebration.

🏗️ PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE AS PLAY

Caption: Reclaimed highway underpasses become immersive playfields painted in pixelated yellows and pinks—part video game, part protest.

Taking over the forgotten infrastructural spaces of the city, our teams reimagined underpasses and service voids as festival grounds. Children’s shadows danced across checkerboard surfaces, while students proposed new civic structures based on rhythm, repetition, and resistance. No longer just pathways for cars, these spaces now carry ideas.

🧩 STUDIO PIN-UPS: Final Reviews Begin!

Caption: Models, maps, maquettes, and murmurs: the walls of the Super Studio burst with pastel towers, blue foam masterplans, and collaborative critique.

Final reviews kicked off this week, and the walls are now packed with an abundance of student projects: stacked forests of pink-yellow towers, abstract housing units, and site maps sliced into layers like cakes. Jurors, children, and visitors moved between models and posters, asking not "Is this realistic?" but rather, "Who is this for?" and "How might it grow?"

🐚 THIS WEEK’S QUESTIONS

1. Can architecture be a song?

2. How do buildings age with grace?

3. What do children want to see when they look out the window?

4. What happens if you plant a skyscraper in a field of grass?

Write your answers in a model, a poem, a drawing, or a conversation. Submit by putting it in a box, wrapping it in a color, or leaving it in the pink field by the foam tower.

UPCOMING:

• April 1: Color Explosion Picnic at the roof meadow. Bring your crayons and your questions.

• April 4: Lecture: "Giraffes and Gravity: Tall Stories in Architecture." (Location: The inflatable dome above the river.)

• April 6: Studio review of the ‘Wrapped House’ series—bring your sewn, sliced, and unwrapped prototypes.

Until Next Week: Stay playful, stay speculative. Your buildings don’t need to solve everything. Sometimes they just need to sing.

With joy and construction dust,—The Surjan Super School Newsletter Team 🏗️🦓📐🌈

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

There is a place at the edge of the city—just before logic takes hold and after the last school bell rings—where the buildings rehearse.

They don’t rehearse quietly, like actors whispering lines in the dark. No, here buildings are loud with practice. They try on colors like theater costumes. They rearrange their facades, peel off skin to reveal pinks and yellows beneath. One day they are a soft kindergarten of waving roofs; the next, they stretch into spiraling cylinders of metal and joy.

At the center of this strange rehearsal space is a group of children—not just visitors, but directors. They sit at long tables, surrounded by sunlight and scraps. They cut, glue, test, rethink. Each small model on their tables is a proposition whispered to the city: What if this place were softer? What if we designed it to be loved?

They begin with shapes. A house that mirrors the grass around it. A roof that undulates like a story being told aloud. A window that tilts its head in wonder. Nothing is symmetrical, but everything is balanced—held up by the bold belief that play is the most serious thing in architecture.

The children build beneath zigzagging canopies tucked under highways, where discarded spaces are transformed into giant game boards of pink and yellow. Their laughter becomes a kind of blueprint. Adults pass by and slow down, unsure if what they’re seeing is real or remembered. Did this used to be an abandoned lot? Was that always a maze of mirrored houses?

No one knows how long this place has existed. Some say it grew from a pop-up book, held in the hands of a child wearing a yellow sweater. Others believe the buildings themselves dreamt of becoming toys and simply waited for permission.

The truth is, this is The Place Where Ideas Go to Rehearse.Before they are built.Before they are named.Before they are claimed.

Here, architecture tries itself out. It blushes, it fails, it twirls. And under the gaze of fearless children, it dares to dance again.