From design to content to distribution, POOL's digital content and print edition are produced entirely in-house by an editorial team of 10 graduate students. As students of UCLA's Master of Architecture program, POOL both reflects and challenges the culture of the institution. UCLA has become a program in which experimental thought, theory, and innovative design reformulates the way in which design, theoretical discourse, and technology interact to influence contemporary culture. The work presented in POOL, Issue 3: Party attempts to instrumentalize the aspirational and its often oblique effects: a deconstruction of moods extravagant, prescribed, or contingent and, in particular, their very real modes of production. Rave or riot, gathering or gala—can we use the party to recuperate an architecture of those affective moments, once passed, we are prone to forget?

POOL is the student magazine of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. The publication is driven by an interest in an expanding definition of architectural work that, in a culture of high volume content exchange, considers curation as a primary form of cultural production. POOL is a site for this type of work, experimenting with the interface between its three primary platforms: digital, print, and public programs. Events and ongoing digital publication act not only as productive indicators of relevant themes, but also feed into an annual print edition. POOL aspires to reach new audiences, seeing the separation of fields into hermeneutic discourses as unproductive, and strives instead for the inclusion of new and unexpected audiences through the incorporation of media unconventional to architectural discourse.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Architecture and Urban Design's department is a champion of ideas and their articulate expression. Faculty teach students to engage the world around them, to see ideas as productive forms of response, and to leverage design and writing as expressions of newly curated perspectives. These ideas are grounded in a critical engagement with the history and theory of architecture and the future contingencies of contemporary culture. Through rigorous inquiry, we interrogate contemporary urban issues and propose possible futures with equal measures of expertise, optimism, and vision.