Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, & Evan Jones, Floating with Buoyant Ecologies of Collaboration and Solidarity, 2021. Digital photograph. Courtesy POOL, Los Angeles
Founded in 2015, POOL is the student publication of the Department of Architecture & Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. POOL 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 and contends that the syllabus, the archive, and the aggregator are all valid forms of architectural work and are encouraged in our publication. Furthermore, POOL seeks experimentation with interfaces between its three primary platforms: event, digital, and print. Events and ongoing digital publication act not only as productive indicators of relevant themes but also feed into an annual print edition. Following the success of the first seven issues—Table, Rules, Party, Nostalgia, Simulation, Plant, and Float—the eighth issue, Residue was released summer 2023.
POOL is curated by a dedicated team of student volunteers from UCLA's Architecture and Urban Design Graduate Program. From design to content to distribution, POOL's digital content and print editions are produced entirely in-house by an editorial team of ten to fifteen graduate students. POOL takes advantage of our position within the institution to both reflect and challenge UCLA’s culture, notable for its ability to reformulate the ways in which design, theoretical discourse, and technology interact.
POOL is the student magazine of the Department of Architecture & Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. POOL is driven by an interest in an expanding definition of architectural work that considers curation as an important form of cultural production. Following this, we contend that the syllabus, the archive, and the aggregator are all valid forms of architectural work that we welcome and encourage in our publication. POOL is a site of this type of work, experimenting with the interface between its three primary platforms: event, digital, and print. Events and an ongoing digital publication act not only as productive indicators of relevant themes but also feed into an annual print edition. POOL sees 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. Founded 2015.