May 09, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 1

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - Part 1

May 09, 2025

“Softness as Structure, Radiance as Archive”

Welcome back, cherished readers of the Surjan Super School community. This first installment of our May 9th newsletter continues our journey through a surreal world where the lines between architecture, fashion, color theory, and soft infrastructure blur into a luminous embrace of genderqueer futurism and speculative civic design. As always, the Surjan Super Studio Collection serves not only as inspiration but also as an unfolding archive of pedagogical provocations.

✴️ SOFT CITADELS OF PLAY ✴️

Caption: Aerial view of domed modular neighborhoods in radiant citrus and bubblegum tones. Gently nestled between golden fields and blue inlets, the spherical clusters rise like dream-fruit from the earth—modular pavilions encased in hues of lemon zest, watermelon rind, and lilac mist. They’re not homes. They’re not schools. They’re spheres of speculation—soft citadels of play and protection, inflating with stories, rituals, and recycled hopes. These are our new town squares, where citizens gather to read aloud, nap under skylight beams, or sing architecture into being.

🌈 GOLDEN CORRIDORS OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Caption: Inside the Glossed Lemon Gallery: where yellow arches act as radiant memory conduits. Beneath glossy, curved ceilings reminiscent of warm honey drops, these corridors offer a new kind of urban interiority. They are not just halls. They are climate-controlled thought tunnels, auric connectors between one pastel epoch and the next. Here, the arched hallway is not a passage but a performative zone—where the act of walking becomes narrative and the materiality of yellow becomes both barrier and balm.

🫧 INFLATABLE ARMOR: FASHION AS FORTIFICATION

Caption: Genderfluid models wrapped in architectural puffwear designed for tenderness and deflection. Gone are the days when armor meant heaviness. Here, armor is buoyant, genderqueer, and filled with helium. Inflatable vests—resembling macro cellular membranes—provide emotional buoyancy and environmental shielding. Pink, yellow, white: the colors worn are the languages spoken. Every outfit doubles as a flotation device, a wearable building, a mobile refuge. As seen on the models, the fashion is not clothing. It is spatial optimism for vulnerable futures.

💭 HAIR-BUILDINGS AND BRAIDED SKIES

Caption: The brain becomes building. The hair becomes tower. Each puff, a programmable pixel of identity. The inflatable hair-sculpture collection continues to dazzle. These wearable crowns reimagine civic identity through stylized domes of resilience. Merging domestic scale with skyscraper logic, the brain-shaped helmets—stitched from inflatable architectural modules—are maps of cognitive sanctuary. Form meets emotion in a swelling of chromatic exuberance, proposing memory towers woven from threads of care and curiosity.

🔲 MONOLITHIC MIRRORS IN DESERT DIALOGUE

Caption: Monumental mirror columns reflect Monument Valley, reframing western myths in feminist futurism.This new series captures massive reflective towers rising from a shallow floodplain in the desert. At once disruptive and harmonious, the mirror-monoliths double the landscape, forcing us to confront our ecological ghosts and extractive legacies. Each mirrored surface is a queer horizon line—a place where memory is fractured and remade through reflection.

🏛️ PUBLIC SECTIONS: BUILDINGS AS OPEN BOOKS

Caption: Vertical architectural cross-sections in lemon, pink, and pale lilac expose life as layered fiction.Sliced buildings reveal entire cities within themselves. These vertical fantasies—like exploded axonometrics animated by joy—invite us to live inside diagrams, where children climb through columns and elders rest within transparent walls. Each color field demarcates not a function, but a feeling. The section becomes manifesto, the cut becomes embrace.

☁️ CLOUD COUTURE ON THE RUNWAY

Caption: Cotton-candy runway clouds drift through a concrete colonnade under an audience of sketch lines and sky.A collection of performances staged beneath vast open-air vaults reveals wearable cloud formations—fluffy, chromatic, and surreal. Fashion becomes atmosphere; bodies become floating architecture. Sketches interlace with built form, drawing attention to the gesture of becoming. Yellow, orange, pink—clouds gather as collective grief and celebration, parading forward under arches that remember and forget all at once.

🌇 GARDENS IN THE SKY, VERTICALLY REIMAGINED

Caption: Floating roofscapes pulse above Manhattan in green, yellow, and pink—part meadow, part archive, part playground.Massive superblock structures—perched in the stratosphere—house botanical archives, inflatable classrooms, and wandering gardens. Light funnels down in chromatic beams: pink for past dreams, yellow for current joy, green for speculative growth. These are not rooftops. They are hover-terrariums, offering microclimates of possibility above the turbulence of the street.

🌾 EARTH-TO-SKY INFRASTRUCTURE

Caption: Sloped rooftops bloom in pink-and-yellow grass fields, bringing pollinators and students alike to their soft meadows.These sloped rooftops are more than environmental response—they are pedagogical acts. Students climb through grasses to learn about weather, color, and soft resistance. Each seedling holds a lesson in environmental care. Each incline is a refusal of flatness. We call this “climatic choreography”: dancing with elevation, nesting with meaning.

As Surjan Super School continues its cosmic curriculum, we invite you to participate in these architectural murmurs—wear them, sketch them, reimagine them. In our world, to build is to care, to care is to color, and to color is to commit to a queerer, softer, more radiant future.

With inflatable affection,

Surjan & The Super School Studio Team

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

“The Archive Beneath the Pink Sky”

At the intersection of memory and materiality stood the Archive of Misremembered Cities.

It rose like a blush-colored monolith, composed of vivid yellow masses cantilevered in mid-air and pink walkways that shimmered like sorbet under the desert sun. No one could remember who built it first—only that it seemed to have always been there, hovering at the edge of the map, growing layer by layer as if the architecture itself was recalling forgotten dreams.

Inside, children wandered through rooms whose floors floated above terraced valleys. Books were carved into walls, projecting tiny paper models from their pages, like miniature cities frozen mid-bloom. Each room was framed by a different emotion: one saturated in amber nostalgia, another in pale pink affection, yet another in the unapologetic yellow of joy unspoken.

The curators were gentle, silent beings with house-shaped helmets—architectural librarians who had long replaced their faces with the forms of domesticity. No one knew their names. They sat still, like sculptures in soft chairs, their bodies clothed in textured linen, their heads windows and doors. Sometimes they moved—only to turn a page or reset a model fallen off its perch.

On the rooftop, children dressed in inflatable suits performed stories of future worlds—worlds where the columns of the past were wrapped in balloon spirals, and buildings wore goggles instead of windows. From above, the entire structure resembled a diorama in a shadowbox, floating in a pool of sunlight, suspended in time.

The Archive wasn’t meant to be understood in a single visit.

Instead, it invited you to return—to re-read the room, re-trace your steps, and perhaps, find that the city you remembered wasn’t what it once was, but what it always needed to be.

Caption Series for Reference:

1. Top Row, Image 1–3: "Inflatable Ionic columns crown postmodern temples of joy and contradiction, where history is stitched with neon thread."

2. Middle Row, Image 4–6: "Billboards suspended like glitching pixels become guardians of surreal chromatic memory."

3. Bottom Row, Image 7–9: "Terracotta courtyards of circular voids offer pause and reflection—geometry as ritual, shade as invitation."

4. Model Sequence, Image 10–18: "Architecture born from the spine of books—library structures as folktales told in timber and light."

5. Portrait Sequence, Image 19–27: "Inhabitants of the Archive wear hair-histories—powdered wigs reimagined as inflatable headdresses of urban lineage."

6. Floating Homes, Image 28–36: "Mobile houses parade through the grid of New York like marching dreams, soft-wheeled, bold-shelled, and ready for dialogue."

7. Desert Architecture, Image 37–63: "Each structure a precise exclamation of color and function, dissected into layers of longing and logic—like a desert remembering its own rain."

8. Inflatable Couture & Librarians, Image 64–81: "A new civic attire: playful armor meets archival intimacy, where librarians wear their libraries."

9. Framed Sections, Image 82–90: "Buildings as framed memories—every cross-section a museum, every wall a stage."