September 26, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL NEWSLETTER

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 26, 2025

“Draped Histories, Vertical Archives, and Inflated Time Machines”

This week at Surjan Super School, we fold into and unfold from the drapery of architectural memory—where buildings become curtains, columns become classrooms, and cross-sections become timelines. The collection for this week is nothing short of theatrical, diagrammatic, and exuberantly tectonic.

Our September 26 edition presents a visual syllabus across seven thematic explorations—each one a storyboard of architectural speculation. The buildings, sections, elevations, and drawings you’ll see this week invite you to imagine the archive as soft monument, the school as floating machine, and the library as narrative performance.

Let us begin:

① Curtains for the Canon

Gold Lamé, Blue Velvet, and the Draped Archive

This opening series of images reimagines the classical portico as a performative threshold, swaddled in vast gold and blue drapery. These are not curtains to hide a stage—these are curtains AS the stage. Ionic columns stand proudly while monumental buildings appear cloaked, suggesting impermanence and theatricality. Architecture here is costume. Fabric is power. The canon is rewrapped, not erased.

Questions for Students:

• Can a library wear a cape?

• What is hidden behind architectural memory?

• What if the portico wasn’t an entry, but an opening act?

② Architectural Ghosts: Wrapped and Waiting

Homage to Christo, Rebirth of Civic Icons

These next images extend the draped theme into ghostly, neutral tones—white fabric, gray skies, and haunting symmetry. The buildings are massive, silent, and swaddled. They feel like monuments awaiting unveiling, or perhaps already long-forgotten. They reference wrapped Reichstags and memory-architecture, merging erasure with preservation.

Studio Prompt:

Draw the elevation of your favorite childhood school building as if it were wrapped in memory cloth. What texture does nostalgia take?

③ Technical Utopia, Sectioned and Alive

Digital Blueprints + Human Activity = New Spatial Ecologies

We pivot from exterior drapery to interior clarity. These two richly detailed cross-sections explode our understanding of “technical drawing” by adding color, life, and community. Against backdrops of green, blue, and steel drafting sheets, these half-cylinder buildings show schools as bustling machines—braced on red steel legs, filled with libraries, workshops, balconies, studios, trees. This is “section-as-narrative” at its finest.

Vocabulary Highlight:

Pedagogical Infrastructure — a term you’ll need for describing schools that are built not just for learning, but AS learning.

④ Columns That Learn

Baroque Fragments as Floating Classrooms

Two enormous Ionic columns—rendered in matte blue—become the protagonists of the next collage. These architectural fragments no longer support roofs; they support curricula. Carved capitals pierce through sectional floor plans, rising through water. Inside, we see tiny readers, classrooms, study pods, and mini-vaults tucked inside column shafts. This is architectural postmodernism reborn—not as irony, but as inventory.

Studio Challenge:

Design a building whose structure is borrowed from an architectural “orphan”—a column, a dome, a stair, a window. Make that fragment the main character.

⑤ Hyper-Tectonic Section Towers

Vertical Storytelling Machines for Utopian Libraries

A visual symphony in red, pink, orange, yellow, and mint. These towers are machines—but not in the Corbusian sense. Each is a vertical collection of mechanical components, interwoven circulation paths, ducts, tanks, volumes, and reading nooks. Each feels like a catalog of infrastructure—a pipe organ of architectural systems.

They stand tall like cranes on pause. Elevators become index cards. Boilers become children’s bookshelves.

Lecture Companion:

Show students Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, and then these. Ask them: what is the new program of pleasure?

⑥ Houses that Stack Like Stories

Residential Fictions Suspended in Sky Blue

The collection shifts toward domesticity. These homes balance on stilts, staircases, and one another. With white siding and powder blue roofs, they feel suburban—but are elevated into the surreal. They hover over wetlands, above public parks, and in impossible clusters.

They are not just homes; they are structural short stories. Each window is a sentence. Each cantilever is a plot twist.

Imaginary Prompt:

Design a family tree not in diagram form, but in architectural form—build a genealogy as a cluster of interconnected buildings.

⑦ Inflated Knowledge

Pop Architecture as Public Infrastructure

Our final section is playful, precise, and joyful. Huge circular ducts, oversized vents, and plump yellow facades are turned into library vessels floating on water. Inside each sphere: books. Shelves curve with the geometry. Libraries are no longer rectangular—they’re round, huggable, inflatable.

With their diagrammatic linework and block color backdrops, these are architectural cartoons—deliberate and exacting, yet fun. They whisper “Children’s Ark,” “Pop City,” “Superstudio 2025.”

Research Prompt:

Design an inflatable school for one lesson only. It arrives by boat. It disappears by sunset.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This week’s images are not just beautiful—they are blueprints for a new kind of thinking. Architecture is memory and machinery, curtain and column, section and story. These images teach us that to build is also to narrate, archive, cloak, unfold, and reassemble.

What will your architectural voice sound like this week?

Will it whisper through drapery or shout through steel?

—

🟡🟣 Yours in fabric and friction,

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL

“Where Stories Become Structures”

UP NEXT:

→ October 3 Newsletter: “Pink Ducts & Penguin Cities”

→ Studio Workshop: Children's Learning Pods in the Air Above the Hudson

→ Midterm Speculative Diagram Review: Upload by October 1st