April 04, 2025 - Surjan Super School Weekly Newsletter

SURJAN SUPER SCHOOL WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

April 04, 2025

“Where Color Is the Curriculum and Geometry Tells the Stories”

Dear Friends of Surjan Super School,

Welcome to our April 04 issue of the Surjan Super Studio Collection. This week, we turn our attention to stripes, cylinders, circular portals, and vibrant thresholds—architectural expressions that propose a world re-enchanted through rhythm, repetition, and color.

Our archive continues its role not only as a collection of forms but as a kaleidoscope of pedagogical possibility. Below is a curated journey through this week’s collection of architectural scenes, pop-up pedagogies, and urban dreamscapes.

🟥 STRIPE RITUALS & COLOR TUNING

Caption: “Learning to Listen to Buildings by Dressing Like Them”

This first suite features bold vertical and horizontal bands of color. Students perform informal rituals of mimicry—dressing in sweaters that match their architectural surroundings. It is a lesson in noticing, in merging with urban surfaces, and in aligning the human form with the rhythms of the built environment.

🔴 THE RED BOX DISTRICT

Caption: “Warehouses of Emotion Disguised as Storage Spaces”

Minimal red forms stand monolithic against pale blue skies—each one an imagined archive of affect, holding emotional memories filed by color and volume. These industrial architectures aren’t mere containers but sacred enclosures for the moods of the city.

🟡 CIRCULAR DOORS & YELLOW PORTALS

Caption: “Openings That Refuse to be Rectangular”

This circular typology is more than just a playful pivot—it is a refusal of right-angled entry into reality. Whether flush or recessed, opening inward or out, these portals suggest a future of buildings that offer spherical welcome, soft logic, and moonlike rotations.

🟦 URBAN VIEWS THROUGH GEOMETRIC WINDOWS

Caption: “Framing the Skyline as Pedagogy”

Views of New York through carefully carved windows feel like paintings hung in a temporal museum. Whether triangular, curved, or rectangular, these apertures frame more than the skyline—they frame the student's position within it, reminding them that architecture is the act of both shaping and seeing.

🧱 PATTERNED FAÇADES & MODERNIST GENEALOGIES

Caption: “Where Windows Compose the Music of the City”

A wall of windows becomes a mural of modular repetitions. Each apartment is a stanza; each floor a verse. These façades serve as pixelated archives of dwelling, revealing urban diversity through pattern language.

🔧 DUCTWORK AS TYPOGRAPHY

Caption: “The Alphabet of Air”

In a surreal classroom, the HVAC system speaks in typographic forms. Letters emerge in aluminum—O, S, G. Are these ducts? Or coded messages? The infrastructure becomes communicative, speculative, and strangely poetic.

🏙️ MODELS HELD TO THE SKY

Caption: “The Students Who Lift Cities Like Offerings”

In this sequence, young architects raise colorful building models toward the skyline as if offering them to the real city beyond. It’s a metaphor of speculative power: children shaping futures, models merging with their imagined counterparts, miniature cities dreaming of scale.

🏛️ ARCHITECTURE WITH ATTITUDE

Caption: “Buildings with Bounce, Tilt, and Sass”

From bulbous yellow overhangs to playful zigzagging gables, these structures animate their environments with postures of joy and mischief. These aren’t just buildings—they’re characters in the city’s theatrical play.

🟢 FLOATING GREEN PYRAMIDS

Caption: “Agricultural Altitudes and the Sky-Farmed Future”

Triangular greenhouses perched atop platforms gesture toward a future where farming floats above urban life. These moments fuse ecology, elevation, and spiritual geometry—a quiet proposal for coexistence and renewal.

🪟 WINDOWS AS FRAMES FOR LIFE

Caption: “Each Opening a Pause, a Poem, a Portal”

A gallery of window typologies closes this week’s archive. Shuttered, slatted, extruded, or recessed—they are visual haikus, revealing interior rituals or trees blooming outside. These framed scenes remind us: the most radical acts of architecture often happen at the edge between inside and out.

📝 Closing ReflectionIn this week’s image story, architecture teaches not through doctrine, but through form, play, mimicry, and performance. Buildings are not static—they listen, respond, participate. Surjan Super School continues to ask: What if every building could be a teacher?

We’ll see you again next week with more worlds to build, hold, and dream into being.

In community,

Surjan

Architectural Storyteller | Keeper of the Super Studio Collection

STORYTIME WITH SURJAN

“The Yellow Portal District”

In a far corner of a not-so-distant city stood a cluster of curious yellow doors—perfect circles embedded in concrete walls like celestial bodies nestled in brutalist constellations. The neighborhood was known by many names—most called it the Yellow Portal District, though officially it was listed in urban records as Zone C-11, Subsection Y.

Every portal had a secret.

By day, the doors shimmered with warm gloss and innocent geometry, appearing as playful design experiments. But locals—especially the children—knew better. These weren’t doors. They were selectors. Depending on the time of day, the length of your shadow, or the rhythm of your footsteps, each yellow disk revealed a different destination.

Entry One: A half-open door under late morning sun led to a garden of rooftop citrus trees swaying above a skyline of concrete slabs. The wind carried the scent of lemons and wet leaves.

Entry Two: A door with a hollow circle punched through its center offered passage into the city’s labyrinthine ductwork—silver tunnels weaving through walls like chrome intestines. Inside, whispers of old stories echoed: tales told by the architecture itself, looped eternally on duct-air currents.

Entry Three: One portal never opened outward, only inward—inviting visitors to a space within the wall itself, a cylindrical chamber painted the color of yolk, where ideas came unannounced, and time ticked in soft clunks.

People tried mapping the network. Cartographers failed. Artists interpreted. Children, however, navigated it with instinct and giggles. The district’s rules bent toward joy. Elevation didn’t matter, and gravity—like schedule—was optional.

The buildings surrounding the yellow portals were patchwork mosaics of eras. Some were brutalist slabs clad with layers of painted stories. Others were slick postmodern towers camouflaged in surrealist skins: rubber ducts pretending to be signage, apartment facades painted like wrapping paper. And in one corner of the district, a model-maker sat atop a tall rooftop, holding scale buildings over their head. Not to compare. To dream. Each model mirrored what might be built next.

Late one evening, a new portal appeared.

It was half-shuttered with a perfect circular lens—perhaps a telescope or an eye. Nobody knew how it had arrived. When the district’s unofficial historian, an eleven-year-old named Jojo, peered through, they saw not the city, but a school. Not a regular one—but a super school. Floating. Modular. Breathing. Colored in segments of joy.

A voice spoke from the other side.

“You’re ready,” it said. “Come build with us.”

And Jojo stepped through.

Caption Ideas for Archive Use:

Circular doors aren't round by accident. Each one is a keyhole for time-shifting architectures.
Ductwork is the language of buildings whispering to themselves.
Models held against skyline = dreams in their earliest stages of belief.
Yellow isn't a color here. It's a signal.
Some portals open to gardens, others to diagrams of buildings not yet imagined.
Geometry is not decoration—it is declaration.
When the building smiles back, you're already inside it.