October 3, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter - PART 2

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL NEWSLETTER PART 2

WEEK OF OCTOBER 3, 2025

Theme: “From Floating Flora to Towering Typologies”

A continuation of botanical logic and vibrant architectural elevation

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A Garden in the Sky Becomes a Curriculum

In Part 2 of this week’s Surjan Super School newsletter, the foliage rises. This issue continues our exploration of plant-life as infrastructure, treehouses as pedagogy, and modular towers as vertical storytelling. What began earlier this week with pop-flower ports and inflatable learning domes expands upward into forests held aloft, spiraling staircases that caress clouds, and root-like stilts that elevate tree dwellings into sky gardens.

We ask:What happens when architecture grows rather than builds?Can stairs be a form of soft protest?And what if every treehouse was not just for a child—but for a curriculum?

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01. Tree Canopy Academies

(Image Row 1: Red + Green Stair Terraces)

The red-and-green scaffolding nestled within thick canopies presents a vision of schools that embrace the forest. Here, the tree is not the context—it is the collaborator. Students climb through a canopy of classrooms stitched into the hillside, each level offering a different curriculum, from botany labs to storytelling nests. The turquoise sky backdrop frames the project not as a building but as a seasonal phenomenon—like flowering or migration.

🟢 Keyword: Canopy Curriculum🔺 Studio Prompt: Design a building whose mass is determined by the density of leaves in mid-summer.

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02. Observation as Ritual

(Image Row 2: Red Tower + Cloud, Stair Tower + Pines)

In these scenes, architecture becomes a ritual act of looking. The red towers pierce the blue sky like exclamation marks. One stands with arched openings and a cloud overhead, the other concealed behind vertical pines. These are temples of perspective—watchtowers for imagination, staircases of wonder. The world below is still, while the towers gesture toward the sky’s slow movement.

🌥️ Keyword: Architectural Ascension📐 Studio Prompt: Draft a vertical storytelling tower that honors a daily ceremony—sunrise, rainwatching, dusk-reading.

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03. Woodland Classrooms in Gathering Formation

(Image Row 3: Red-Coated Children + Stick Architecture)

Hundreds of children in red jackets gather before surreal structures that resemble wooden crowns. These are not treehouses. They are forested amphitheaters—branch-thickened dwellings raised on slim poles, merging architecture and arboreal memory. Children wait outside in silence, as if about to enter a sacred story. The walls speak in bark patterns, the windows are circular, peering like owls.

🌲 Keyword: Nest-Hall Hybrid👁️ Studio Prompt: Imagine a school assembly building designed for winter storytelling in the woods. Use no symmetry.

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04. Petal Platforms Above the City

(Reappearing from Part 1: Mushroom Clouds + Floral Platforms)

Revisiting the petal-topped platforms from earlier this week, these mushroom-like civic forums become new ground for educational infrastructure. Now we see them reframed by the surrounding towers. Are they floating playgrounds? Libraries for pollinators? Terraces for tree-bound classrooms?

🌼 Keyword: Civic Petal Roof📚 Studio Prompt: Merge library programming with a botanical greenhouse above a high-density urban site.

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05. The Cyclist’s Forest Campus

(Image Rows 4 & 5: Cylindrical Forest Modules + Red Tree Canopies)

In a more rhythmic register, forests of stilts lift buildings above bicycle lanes. The architecture is part-circus, part-eco-village. The tree trunks are painted coral-red, or rendered as pale diagrams—dreamlike trunks that support a world of curved, striped cylinders. Circulation systems—staircases, bike ramps, spiral ascents—are performative: education through movement, rhythm, and breath.

🚲 Keyword: Pedal Pedagogy📎 Studio Prompt: Design a school campus entirely accessible by bike, without ground-level hallways.

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06. Vertical Dioramas of Memory

(Image Rows 6–8: Triptych Landscapes + Tower Typologies)

This newsletter concludes with a taxonomic study of architecture-as-memory devices. Each vertical volume is a typology of collective experience: memorial towers shaped like bookshelves, stacked family homes, modular housing, sky-farms, elevated forests. One series imagines buildings as masks. Another proposes a triptych of red, white, and yellow modular bodies—each tower a character, each elevation a sentence.

📏 Keyword: Elevational Biography🎓 Studio Prompt: Create a character study of five towers. Each must contain a library, a dwelling, and an observation space.

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Closing Note

In this edition, architecture no longer distinguishes itself from the landscape—it becomes its interpreter. Towers grow like trees. Schools wear their foliage like language. Stairs and ramps are not circulatory—they are narrative arcs.

From canopy classrooms to cloud-side towers, the Surjan Super School challenges students to reimagine not only what we build—but how we climb toward knowledge.

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To all Super Students: Sketch higher. Archive louder. Teach through the branches.

📦 – Surjan Super School Team