May 09, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 2
- SURJAN
- May 8, 2025
- 4 min read
SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER - Part 2
May 09, 2025
"Inflated Utopias and the Architecture of Exaggerated Joy"
Welcome to Part 2 of this week's journey into the speculative corridors and balloon-skinned dreams of Surjan Super School. This edition explores the swelling boundaries between architecture and fashion, infrastructure and theater, and gravity and humor. We continue our chronicle of a bright yellow and bubblegum pink world where softness is strength, and public space is imagined as a wearable future.
CAPTIONS & COLLECTIONS
Inflated Identity Helmets From wearable headgear to architectural facades, these images imagine helmets that merge inflatable geometry with couture detailing. Each pink and yellow protuberance acts as both armor and expression — a soft defiance of rigid identity norms.
Modular Inflatable Façades Bubble-wrapped structures expand into the urban fabric. The repeating cellular elements suggest livable modules, reconfigurable and buoyant, challenging the orthodoxy of curtain walls and traditional cladding systems.
Floating Golden Pavilion Suspended atop delicate legs, this metallic golden structure levitates over a skirt of pleated pink. Programmed as a floating civic center, this pavilion challenges our understanding of monumental weight by being gloriously light.
Blueprints for a New Softness A series of plans and axonometrics overlay classic blueprint form with playful coloring. Candyland towers and inflatable dwellings blur engineering with whimsy, turning the draftsperson's sheet into a storybook.
Balloon-Techture on Stilts Half-constructed and suspended over cities, these oversized architectural models reveal their insides. Giant segments are assembled like toy parts by cranes, proposing a futuristic construction system both modular and metaphoric.
Pyramids of Air and Color The series of vibrant pyramid-section towers suggests a new typology — the inflated ziggurat. Each cross-section reveals stacked programs floating atop one another in cinematic pink and gold, like cinematic scrolls of surreal urban life.
Vertical Slices of Joy These bright, diagrammatic sections feel like comic book pages for utopian megastructures. Packed with ducts, pools, community gardens, and dwellings, each layer is a slice of imagination, rendered in primary joy.
Soft Assembly Towers Petal-stacked and stem-supported, the structures nod to botanical morphologies. They suggest a vertical forest of programming, blooming upwards in anti-gravitational bursts. Architecture, here, grows.
Urban Platforms of Delight Large cantilevered yellow arms extend from sheer towers over the city. These dramatic projections suggest public balconies for future cities: places of joy, gathering, and possibly inflatable performance.
Pink & Yellow Infrastructural Villages Bridging systems, pneumatic networks, and playful ducting connect to cheerful public buildings. The plans and elevations read like playground blueprints: social infrastructures with cheerful flows.
Vertical Gardens of the Future Cross-sections and model studies propose new hybrid residential towers — part villa, part infrastructure, part ziggurat. The soft palette continues — a diorama of civic optimism.
Inflated Columns & Post-Column Orders The final images suggest a surreal post-classical world: Ionic columns redrawn in inflatable foam, ringed with hot pink filigree or translucent polyurethane. A new soft order rises.
Final Note This week's collection offers a vision of the future as playful, light, reconfigurable, and bright — a counterweight to the historical gravitas of heavy material traditions. Architecture, like identity, is a costume we get to remake.
Until Part 3, keep dreaming loud.– Surjan & The Super School Studio
STORYTIME WITH SURJAN
Title: The Soft Shell Society
In a future city where architecture had outgrown the tyranny of stone and steel, people lived in structures that pulsed with air and intention. Gravity was negotiable, color was command, and form was an evolving dialect between self-expression and civic infrastructure.
The city’s most vibrant neighborhood was known as the Pneuma Quadrant, a place where the walls swelled like cheeks full of laughter and buildings breathed through translucent, inflated skins. Here, fashion and architecture were one and the same: protective, performative, and outrageously optimistic.
Citizens wore headgear that mimicked their favorite buildings. These weren’t just aesthetic declarations, but civic interfaces. The helmets were bright pink and banana yellow, padded with inflatable lobes that allowed the wearer to send messages to the structures around them—like blowing a kiss or raising a wall. You didn’t tap on your phone in Pneuma Quadrant; you gestured in 3D with your whole body, and your house responded in kind.
One such citizen, Ari, had designed their own helmet after the famed Petal Block, a modular apartment complex with units that looked like oversized bubble wrap kissed by a Pantone catalog. Each pod was a suite, each suite was a statement. Ari’s helmet had six petal-lobes and a central node: they called it Vocal Bloom. When Ari turned their head to the east, the helmet inflated their street-side canopy; when they leaned west, it dimmed their windows into a dreamy mauve. Architecture had become choreography.
But it wasn’t all spectacle. Beneath the whimsical swells and cartoonish surfaces, the buildings were soft sanctuaries for those once erased by the hard lines of legacy cities. Pneuma was a place for the queer, the neurodivergent, the dreamers of alternate realities. No doors slammed here—only zippers zipped. No ceilings pressed downward—only membranes lifted upward.
On the day of the Equinox Festival, Ari and their neighbors all tilted their heads to the sky in unison, their helmets synchronizing with the facades of their homes. A cascade of inflatable petals bloomed from every window, creating a collective canopy that rippled over the street like a living kite.
They didn’t just live in their homes.
They wore them.
And their city wore them back.
Comments