March 28, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 3

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - PART 3

March 28, 2025

🌼 WEEKLY HIGHLIGHTS: PLAYFUL FORMALISM + EXPERIMENTAL CONSTRUCTION

This week, the Surjan Super School has unfolded into a series of dreamy experimental scenes—where the line between architectural education, childhood imagination, and speculative storytelling blurs into joyful contradiction.

🌟 FEATURED SERIES: Pop-Up Pedagogies & Narrative Elevations

Images 1–3📍 Playgrounds in the SkyBright yellow spiral staircases, corrugated aluminum surfaces, and whimsical yellow-pink school façades shape a new vocabulary of playful monumentality in Parisian urban fabric. Students discussed thresholds between domesticity and civic spectacle.

"We wondered what it might mean if rooftops became new streets, and classrooms floated above public parks." —2nd-year Studio

🧒 YOUNG BUILDERS’ STUDIO: Models from Tiny Hands, Big Ideas

Images 4–9📍 Kindergarten Architects at WorkOur youngest studio members reimagined houses, towers, and forests with colored blocks, cardboard forms, and laser-cut parts. The results: city blocks blooming with mini-mazes and haptic facades.

“The pink house has a roof for singing,” said Mila, age 6.“My building is full of doors because everyone should come in!” — Dev, age 5

Caption: Miniature hands construct maximum dreams in a skyline of crayon-colored structures.

🌈 OUTDOOR ARCHITECTURE LAB: Under the Underpass

Images 10–18📍 Beneath the Ziggurat RoofA vibrant reoccupation of infrastructural voids has begun. The underside of a viaduct became a pastel playfield for collective rituals of color and motion. Yellow teeth-like rooflines echoed overhead as children charted their own topographies.

“This roof was never meant to shelter; it was meant to sing.”

Caption: Dancing geometry meets urban delight beneath folded concrete teeth.

🧩 WRAPPINGS & REVEALS: New Fronts for Old Homes

Images 19–27📍 Facade Studies as Everyday MagicFrom vinyl reveals to foam façade experiments, students and artists collaborated on 1:1 mockups that reimagine the typical suburban house through overlays of color, geometry, and spatial mischief.

Caption: Unwrapping the surface of suburbia reveals a vibrant archive of architectural play.

📚 POP-UP CITIES & STORYBOOK URBANISM

Images 28–36📍 Pop-Up Models Become Performative NarrativesStudents presented models as literal pop-up books, opening landscapes of forests and towers between the viewer and the city skyline. Architecture becomes choreography. Books become buildings.

Caption: One unfolds a model and out bursts an entire district of pink skyscrapers and grassy labyrinths.

🏠 DOMESTIC STRANGENESS: Gables, Gaps, and Ghost Reflections

Images 37–45📍 Experimental Residential TypologiesTriangular houses with slivered windows. Floating halves of homes mirrored across impossible lawns. These models bend the domestic typology into new parables of belonging, threshold, and illusion.

Caption: Between reflection and reality, the house forgets where the ground begins.

🏛️ INTERIOR MONUMENTALISM: Massive Softness in Form

Images 46–48📍 The Post-Civic ChamberA monumental interior filled with floating pastel volumes and architectural fragments housed this week’s critical salon. Inside these oversized drums and gentle walls, discussions of architectural memory, gendered space, and future archives took root.

Caption: Where the wall bends softly, the public begins.

🏙️ URBAN ECOLOGIES: Green Stairs + Orange Infrastructures

Images 49–57📍 Urban Grafting Projects in Tokyo & New YorkBright red-orange staircases loop into facades. Vegetation climbs walls in sharp diagonal moves. These infrastructural insertions argue for a gentler yet more assertive insertion of school, library, and play into the density of our cities.

🎭 PINK MAZES + INVERTED FORESTS: Athletic Ecologies

Images 58–66📍 Play within the Maze DomeUnder a scaffold dome, students explored labyrinthine playgrounds and foam cones—a surreal stadium for movement and mystery.

Caption: Children sprint through hedge geometries beneath a ceiling of floating weights.

🌇 VERTICAL VILLAGES IN THE PARK

Images 67–72📍 Central Park as PrototypeA week of aerial experiments imagined stacked, walkable villages made from clustered cubes, nested tree canopies, and hovering honeycomb towers above the Park. We ask: can play, story, and verticality live together?

_Caption: The skyline blooms upward from the grass.*

🏛️ GOLDEN ROOFS & URBAN CROWNS

Images 73–81📍 Historic Monument Detailing SessionsStudents sketched and analyzed New York’s ornate golden domes and sculptural cornices. Some turned their studies into abstracted facades and layered windowscapes.

“We don’t want to preserve the past—we want to wear it differently.”

🌊 WATERFALL INFRASTRUCTURES

Images 82–90📍 Hydraulic Urbanism as SpectacleConcrete roofs turn to waterfalls, cascading over green-pink rooftops into public plazas. Studio discussion focused on surface as threshold and spectacle, erosion as memory.

Caption: The new playground: where rain meets façade.

🖼️ VIEWFINDER EXERCISES

Images 91–99📍 The City as Framed ExperienceUsing a series of custom windows and architectural frames, students photographed, drew, and digitally recontextualized familiar sites. What happens when we reframe our surroundings as curated exhibitions?

FINAL THOUGHT

This week’s work carries the energy of a playground, the politics of public space, and the aesthetics of radical joy. Surjan Super School continues to fold and unfold ideas, cities, and soft futures—one pink, yellow, or mirrored wall at a time.

Next week: Mini-Metropolis models + Floating Classroom assemblies + Chapter 4 of "Architecture as Game"

In solidarity + play,

Surjan Super School Coordination Team

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

“The Place Where Ideas Go to Rehearse”

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.