September 5, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL NEWSLETTER

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 5, 2025

Title: SYSTEMS OF EXAGGERATION

“Architecture is no longer neutral—it’s neon, inflated, alphabetized, and in the clouds.”

🧱 NEW COLLECTION DROP: ARCHITECTURE AS SYSTEM, SYMBOL & SURFACE

This week’s imagery reveals an electrifying shift in the Surjan Super School archive—from expressive facades to full-scale conceptual environments where color becomes code, ducts become dwellings, and letters become buildings.

At the core of this drop is an ongoing provocation:

What if infrastructure was a love language?

What if typology wasn’t a category, but a costume?

These works defy the separation between architecture, graphic design, fashion, and narrative. Instead, they build bridges—bright, fantastical, impossible bridges.

🔻 HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE COLLECTION

1. The Monumental Utility

Towering industrial forms (cooling towers, silos, ducts) are reimagined as cultural landmarks, classrooms, archives, and observation decks. Often adorned in red, orange, and yellow—these structures glow with an intensity usually reserved for emergency signage or sunsets.🛠 These are not power plants. They are cathedrals of infrastructure.

2. Duct Cities Above Manhattan

High in the sky, metallic ducts snake into entire neighborhoods—floating, reflective, labyrinthine. Interiors are visible. Furniture lives inside the bends. These are vertical housing experiments that repurpose HVAC as habitat.💡 Utility becomes domestic. Steel becomes soft.

3. Alphabet Sections

Letters become buildings. Buildings become alphabets. Each typographic form contains detailed sectional programs—schools, offices, homes—all wrapped in a singular formal logic. The human face appears, grounding each letter in identity and emotion.🔠 Language is a floorplan. Architecture is legible.

4. Towers in the Clouds

Massive cloud-engulfed towers slice through the sky, traversed by pink bridges and vertical interiors of crystalline complexity. They are equal parts scaffold, temple, and dream.🌥 Where the program is softness. Where clouds are structure.

5. Bubble Garments as Floor Plan Couture

Figures wear translucent bubbles filled with plans, sections, and notations. Architecture literally worn on the body. Each outfit is both fashion and drawing—an ephemeral wearable archive.👗 What if your studio project could be worn to a party?

6. Red Icons on Yellow Planes

Hyper-saturated red cultural buildings stand proud on flat yellow fields. Their diagrammatic clarity becomes a new kind of monumentality. They’re not explained—they’re experienced.🟥 Form doesn’t whisper. It declares.

📘 READING RECOMMENDATION

“Toward an Architectural Alphabet”

Revisit Superstudio, Archigram, and Hans Hollein through the lens of graphic obsession, typography as infrastructure, and the politics of color coding.

✏️ PROMPT FOR STUDENTS

DESIGN YOUR OWN ARCHITECTURAL LETTER.

• Pick a letter of the alphabet.

• Turn it into a building section.

• Fill it with spaces, functions, and people.

• Add color to code emotion or energy.

• Think: What does “L” look like as a library?

• Or “Q” as a queer bathhouse in the sky?

Use graphic overlays. Inject personality. Let the typography be your topology.

Until next week,Build bravely. Diagram wildly. Dress architecturally.

—Surjan🔻🌥📐💛

MORE TO COME NEXT WEEK...