POOL is the student magazine of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles, founded in 2015. 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. Following this, the editors contend that the syllabus, the archive, and the aggregator are all valid forms of architectural work that are welcomed and encouraged in the publication. POOL is a site of this type of work, experimenting with interface 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. 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.

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 10-15 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.

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.