September 1, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL NEWSLETTER

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 1, 2025

Title: VESSELS, VAULTS & VIEWS

“A new city is always under construction—sometimes above us, sometimes inside us.”

🔴 ARCHITECTURE IN A STATE OF EXAGGERATION

This week’s visual archive takes us from buoyant infrastructures to sliced model dreamworlds, each exploring form as both fiction and framework. With domed islands, technicolor floating vessels, and cutaway classrooms hovering midair, the collection shifts between precision and surrealism, fantasy and functionality.

These structures don’t just stand—they perform.

They float, they shelter, they reflect, they dream.

They dare to ask: What if cities could breathe differently?

What if protection looked like a sunset dome?

What if the future of the metropolis grew from its roots, not just its rooftops?

🔧 FEATURED THEMES FROM THE COLLECTION

1. Infrastructural Cathedrals

Vaulted mechanical buildings perched on waterfronts—like spiritual sanctuaries for machinery. Their red interiors pulse with the rhythm of unseen systems. Sections become cinematic cross-sections.🛠 This is architecture that worships utility—but dresses it in ceremony.

2. Floating Story Vessels

Bright yellow and red boats along Chicago’s skyline reinvent the library as a moving archive, a joyful barge of literacy, storytelling, and circulation.🚢 What if the river itself were the curriculum?

3. Urban Forests Take Root

A split Manhattan becomes a biophilic city—trees on stilts lifting entire neighborhoods, Central Park becoming the lungs and spine of the city.🌳 Nature isn’t decoration. It’s urban strategy.

4. Rooftop Aquatic Theatres

Infinity pools nested in monumental portals above the grid. Children play, communities gather, and the city becomes a canvas of sky and splash.💦 Architecture becomes buoyant, porous, collective.

5. Homes as Giant Story Models

Elevated, sectional homes placed in front of oversized blueprints become meta-architecture: a classroom inside a diagram, a family room inside a drawing.🏠 It’s a dollhouse of knowledge, scaled for pedagogical delight.

6. Domes of Climate Memory

Orange and red translucent domes envelop entire portions of New York City—climate shelters? story bubbles? speculative zones of soft protection?🌇 This is urban armor—radiant, transparent, and speculative.

7. Drawing as World-Building

Spherical orthographic maps split cities into hemispheres. These drawings aren’t representational—they’re ritual.📡 The city is a diagram, a ceremony, a spell.

🧠 THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

“Don’t design buildings. Design belief systems.”— Surjan

✏️ PROMPT FOR STUDENTS

ARCHITECTURE AS SOFT INFRASTRUCTURE

Design a speculative vessel, structure, or dome that shelters not just bodies—but stories, feelings, or memories.

• What’s it made of?

• Where does it sit: on land, on water, or in the air?

• What system does it reimagine? Energy? Education? Care?

• How does it protect, reveal, or amplify?

Use bold colors. Embrace section cuts. Diagram with emotion.

Until next week,

Stay tender. Stay architectural.—Surjan🌇🌳🌀✏️

MORE TO COME NEXT WEEK...