May 02, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 1

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - Part 1

May 02, 2025

Theme: Between the Drawing and the Dome

This week’s visual field notes from the Surjan Super School expand across thresholds of architectural narrative, speculative model, and inflatable couture. We take you through a modular journey of spatial dreamwork — from yellow-tinted studio sanctuaries to surreal habitats for penguins thriving in pastel-tropical climates. Each image vibrates with a spirit of experimentation, play, and pedagogical mischief. Here are this week’s highlights:

✳️ Section One: Drawings That Breathe

“Models in the Making, Drawings as Landscapes” Architectural models rise like pavilions of thought atop brightly colored planimetric landscapes. This week’s studios reconsider drawings not as static artifacts but as living, breathing substrates upon which architecture is tested and performed.

Captions:

1. Glass ghost structure hovers over topographic renderings of heat, water, and time.

2. Three-part model sequence unfurls like a stage set—each room detailed with micro-conditions of ritual and rest.

3. Curved shells and terraced volumes sit gently on pink-inked site studies, bending form into fiction.

✳️ Section Two: ArchiBox Dioramas

“Framed Futures: Micro-Cities for Memory” An entire city fits within the confines of a box. These wall-mounted architectural vignettes serve as speculative memory palaces, echoing a child’s dollhouse reimagined through the lens of civic dreaming and infrastructural poetics.

Captions: 4. Housing blocks stacked like toy fragments, with split levels and yellow voids between them.5. Wavy housing lineaments curve across a wooden frame: a study in softness and density.6. From pink to parchment, the city disassembles into narrative parts—each neighborhood a chapter.

✳️ Section Three: Inflatable House Headwear

“Portable Architecture as Fashion Language” Where does structure end and clothing begin? Our speculative studio asks what happens when homes become hats. Inflatable headgear in the shape of homes and pavilions turns protection into couture, and domesticity into a wearable concept.

Captions: 7. A balloon-house sits gently atop white hair—a visor of architecture-as-vision.8. Giant pink-and-gold eyes peer through domed spectacles. Vision and shelter merge.9. A yellow roof becomes a bonnet of domestic surveillance, worn with grace and poise.

✳️ Section Four: Topographic Model Landscapes

“The Hill Talks Back: Carving Terrain into Pedagogy” This week, students carved models into wooden substrates like archaeologists of architectural futures. Terrains are no longer passive — they become agents of resistance, flow, and logic. Designs spring up like dialogues between hill and structure.

Captions: 10. Soft plywood strata rise and fall beneath modular homes—space as an unfolding of slope.11. The topography flows around a courtyard — erosion becomes an aesthetic force.12. Terraced platforms stretch along curves of sediment — architecture as riverbank.

✳️ Section Five: Studio as Light Machine

“Circular Windows, Color Fields, and Daylight as Material” Studio spaces across Surjan Super School now resemble scenographic chambers of potential. Porthole windows puncture curved walls; yellow shelving frames books and future blueprints. Each studio glows in soft sunlight like a stage awaiting action.

Captions: 13. Circular light frames the center of the space—a clockless chamber of timeless making.14. Green shelves echo foliage outside—studio as sanctuary.15. Sunlight on yellow shelves becomes a pedagogical tool—teaching by shadow.

✳️ Section Six: Imagined Rooms, Speculative Sections

“Urban Theatre of the Absurd: Monumental Fragments” Pink clouds and neon yellow voids weave through vast cross-sections of imagined cities. These are not simply buildings—they are cultural operating systems, arenas for storytelling, and zones of reflective transformation.

Captions: 16. A room with pink sky and yellow floor: joy as architectural dimension.17. Massive atrium frames sky and scale: a floating court of mythic proportions.18. Perspective deepens into portal: from rendered space to real emotion.

✳️ Section Seven: Penguin Habitats in Pastel Ecologies

“Queering the Biome: Penguin Cities in Pink” In the final section, modular architectures host penguins in lush, dreamlike tropical climates. These images are about more than playful dislocation—they critique anthropocentrism, invite multispecies cohabitation, and imagine the ark not as escape, but embrace.

Captions: 19. Penguins walk beneath yellow overhangs, framed by light and shade.20. Stacked gardens, open sky, and animal agency: an inclusive model of habitat.21. A city designed for quiet, for gathering, for waddling with joy.

🌀Closing Thought:

The week’s visual research invites us to dwell in ambiguity, to hold softness in structure, and to treat architecture not merely as enclosure, but as expression. From inflatable helmets to penguin promenades, the Surjan Super School continues to be a space of radical, radiant pluralism. May we always build toward brightness.

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

“The Modelmaker’s Utopia”

From the visual archives of Surjan Super Studio Collection 01

At the edge of the city, hidden behind a sunlit corridor of round windows and fluorescent green bookshelves, lived an architect named Ori, whose models weren’t blueprints—they were time capsules of imagined futures. Ori believed cities should not be planned; they should be played with—as one would with dolls or inflatable creatures, until a dream felt right.

Each morning, Ori would glide through a yellow hallway that gleamed like sunlight made solid, into a studio where architectural models floated above glowing construction drawings. Walls shimmered in optimistic gradients of pink, yellow, and lemon-lime. Here, children’s laughter echoed through translucent modules shaped like clouds and domes. Penguins roamed freely through shaded courtyards, weaving between modular pink-and-yellow housing blocks. The animals weren’t residents—they were reminders that joy should migrate, not be caged.

Ori’s favorite models were mounted inside shadow boxes. Each one was a small, surreal neighborhood: a hill of stacked miniatures with bent roofs and wiggling facades. From these came Ori’s dream project—The Inflatable City of Reversible Gravity, where buildings could be folded into suitcases, worn like fashion, or grown from the walls of homes like coral.

In this city, children wore houses as hats. They floated between zones of care, laughter, and contemplation. The city was not divided by class or ownership, but by emotion. Neighborhoods weren’t named by street grid or zip code—but by how they made you feel: The Block of Imagined Affection, The District of Soft Thinking, The Alley of Perpetual Spring.

Ori’s work became so influential that the mayor of the city invited her to build a real prototype downtown. But Ori declined. “The real city doesn’t need building,” she said. “It needs believing.” So, she filled the plaza with giant rolling pastel homes, pink pneumatic towers, and golden floating cows.

One night, during an unusually fragrant storm, the models came to life. The penguins took up council in the learning chambers. The yellow corridors extended endlessly, growing like vines through office buildings and playgrounds. The cardboard blocks turned real. The rooftop grasses uncurled, pink and feathery.

And from every window of this living model city, Ori’s voice whispered to all:

Architecture is a story we tell the future. Tell it with softness. Tell it with flight.

Captions from Surjan Super Studio Collection 01:

1. [Top row images] – Architectural models hover over vibrant yellow-and-pink construction drawings, suggesting design as both map and memory.

2. [Shadowbox city models] – Framed modular utopias in pastel palettes represent emotional districts rather than urban typologies.

3. [Inflatable architecture-wear] – Wearable homes and domestic couture blur the line between fashion and civic shelter.

4. [Wooden terrain models] – Contour-rich landscapes cradle abstract residences, evoking a digital-natural harmony.

5. [Studio interiors] – Round windowed workshops burst with light, chartreuse shelving, and blue drafting tables—laboratories for playful worldbuilding.

6. [Concept section perspectives] – Interior voids are saturated in lemon and fuchsia, revealing intimate urban interiors in hyperreal clarity.

7. [Axonometric cityscapes] – Stretched, mirrored, and dissected city grids propose a new urban poetics of folding and reversing spatial norms.

8. [Penguin city] – Modular habitats for penguins in pink-yellow subtropics suggest cross-species empathy in urban design.