October 17, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 4

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL NEWSLETTER PART 4

WEEK OF OCTOBER 17, 2025

Title: The Architecture of Faces, Frames, and Familiar Futures

This week’s collection explores the strange intersection between the domestic and the monumental, between the human face and the architectural façade. Each image is a study in thresholds — not only of walls and windows but of identities and ideas.

The first series begins with windows wrapped in cedar shingles, each opening framing the skyline of lower Manhattan. These apertures do not merely reveal the city; they recompose it. The repetition of scale, texture, and geometry transforms familiar towers into part of a crafted surface — an architectural skin that breathes. Each window becomes an eye, and each scale of wood a freckle, turning the city itself into a portrait of material intimacy. Architecture becomes a face turned toward the sky.

The second sequence, quiet and austere, is a set of monolithic studies in shadow and ritual. Figures kneel beside limestone structures cut by lines of yellow and red, as if tending to shrines of light. These compositions suggest a pedagogy of patience — learning by observing sunlight. The relationship between figure and form becomes almost devotional. The wall is no longer background but an instrument of revelation, measuring the day through tone, surface, and shadow.

Then comes a surreal procession: a figure in a bright yellow coat walking dogs among mirrored columns, trees reflected infinitely in red and yellow portals. The scene could be a dream or a diagram for serenity — an urban Eden of repetition and care. Here, color acts as both architecture and atmosphere, flattening depth while expanding sensation. The forest and the city blur. The ground becomes a threshold of mirrored memory.

Following this, the bold entrances of concrete buildings painted with giant color fields — red, orange, and gold — appear like gateways to other pedagogical worlds. They are both playful and severe: massive, civic, yet softened by the optimism of hue. These entrances could belong to future schools, archives, or libraries where knowledge is not hidden behind walls but poured across them. Learning, here, becomes spectacle, and form becomes signage for imagination.

The next chapter in the collection shows bright cubic buildings in saturated yellow, punctured by red voids and archways. The figures in front stand like students before enormous models, dwarfed by geometry yet empowered by scale. The world of the Surjan Super School is precisely this: a classroom enlarged to the size of a city, where the act of seeing becomes a lesson in itself.

But the images turn inward too — to the body. The hair-architecture portraits — clouds of red, white, and orange puff forms — become metaphors for thinking as building. Each head is both structure and sky, both personal and monumental. The houses embedded in curls and spheres suggest that our thoughts are habitable architectures, that memory and imagination can be constructed from softness.

And finally, the portraits of figures with bright red house-helmets and wooden model homes held against yellow suits return architecture to identity: the head becomes a foundation, the face a façade, the heart a studio.

These beings are not architects; they are architecture.

They carry the grammar of the built world in their gestures and their dress.

Together, these images propose that the future of architectural education is not in the studio, but in the mirror.

The Surjan Super School teaches through reflection, through color, through scale — where design is a form of becoming.

The city, the wall, the face, the house:

All are frames for the same dream —to dwell inside our own imagination.

— Surjan Super School: The Architecture of Seeing Itself