October 3, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 1

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL NEWSLETTER PART 1

WEEK OF OCTOBER 3, 2025

Theme: The Bloom of Public Imagination — Concrete Flowers, Storytelling Silos, and Yellow Libraries

This week at Surjan Super School, our design lens focuses on speculative structures that challenge scale, symbol, and surface. The October 3 Collection blooms with architectural experiments that shift between monumentality and delight—between the heavy and the levitating, between industrial materials and the poetic dreams of childhood. The newsletter moves across five thematic fields: elevated floral infrastructure, silo-turned-archives, crowd choreography, yellow library utopias, and postmodern playgrounds for pink-dressed children. Each image set is a provocation for rethinking public space, soft power, and radical joy.

🌼 FIELD ONE: Pedestrian Petals, Civic Clouds

Imagery: Giant mushroom-like platforms hovering over New York skyline, lined with yellow floral edges

What if infrastructure could bloom? The first set of images in this week’s archive reimagines a forest of elevated circular canopies, where thick red columns hold aloft enormous parasols that become both shelter and symbol. The structures rise from a concrete plaza populated by soft-footed pink figures, echoing the architecture of optimism. Crowned with yellow flowers, these floating walkways are part botanical garden, part airport, part political stage. Under their petals, we find a civic zone that feels light and monumental at once. They suggest a future where infrastructure is not only performative, but performative in the most joyful of ways.

🟨 FIELD TWO: Silos as Memory Machines

Imagery: Vertical cross-sections of concrete grain silos transformed into multi-program archives and public towers

Here, verticality is not just about scale—it is about depth of memory. Former industrial silos on the edge of water are converted into sectioned towers of classrooms, archives, gathering spaces, and museums. Their massive cylindrical geometries become canvases for sliced spatial arrangements, exposing winding stairs, suspended rooms, and multilevel balconies. Yellow overlays—part diagram, part sunlight—highlight moments of human encounter and learning. These drawings propose the silo as a time machine: a compressed vessel for memory, knowledge, and redistributive pedagogy.

🏛 FIELD THREE: Yellow Libraries & Joyful Crowds

Imagery: Extruded libraries with bright yellow surfaces, diagrams filled with children and learners in pink and white clothing, massive stepped entries and cutaways revealing layers of books, stairs, balconies, and zones of reading

This body of work proposes a new typology of public library—half mountain, half inflatable toy. One building has a massive inflatable yellow top, like a balloon about to lift the structure off the ground. Others are bold yellow volumes that interlock like building blocks of a childhood memory. What links them all is the choreography of people: swarms of tiny figures walking up ramps, crowding staircases, climbing yellow escalators, and filling every floor with movement. These libraries are not just institutions of information—they are bodies in motion, a public in dance.

🌲 FIELD FOUR: Botanical Towers & Tree-Supported Futures

Imagery: Architectural trees with structural trunks, engineering blueprints of canopies housing homes or observatories, with sunflowers in the foreground and blue skies above

A new arboreal architecture is growing. These structures fuse natural and artificial systems—tree-like towers with engineered trunks, flared roots, and woven canopies. In some images, enormous trees rise from soft sunflower fields, while others merge scaffolding with bark, glass with leaf. The suggestion: these towers might be part habitat, part greenhouse, part signal tower, each functioning like a biological antenna tuned to the rhythms of a post-climate-crisis Earth. These are speculative shelters and botanical infrastructures. They imagine a future in which we do not build on nature—but with it.

💖 FIELD FIVE: Barbie Brutalism: Pink Dresses, Yellow Flowers, and Concrete Clouds

Imagery: Round columned brutalist pavilions decorated with cartoon-scale yellow daisies, with dozens of children in pink dresses skipping around the base

The closing sequence of this week’s collection is both absurd and utopian. The backdrop: the New York skyline. The foreground: cylindrical concrete buildings wrapped in flower decals and surrounded by children in pink skirts. This is Barbie brutalism—an aesthetic mashup where 1960s modernist megastructures meet gender-play, costume, and pop joy. These are not just buildings. They are characters. They are stages. They are toys scaled up and frozen into architecture. The joy is not just in their surface, but in the choreography they provoke—communities moving in color, movement as pedagogy.

✨ PROMPT FOR STUDENTS:

Design a “Blooming Civic Node”

• Combine one element of heaviness (concrete, steel, infrastructure) with one element of joy (flowers, inflatable materials, color).

• Propose a structure for storytelling, learning, or performance.

• Diagram the movement of children through the space.

• Think of the building as a blooming—over time, across weather, through seasons, or via narrative.

📚 ARCHIVE THEMES

• Public Form as Ornament

• Inflatable Pedagogy

• Architectural Bloom Cycles

• Silo Urbanism

• Pink Parade Infrastructure

• Yellow as Public Color

• Diagrammatic Joy

Next week, we travel into underground archives, amphibious classrooms, and hair-architecture hybrids.

Until then, keep sketching, slicing, and staging your civic fantasies.

—Surjan Super School

(Issue No. 44 — October 3, 2025)