Retrospecta, issue 44

From Yale School of Architecture:

Retrospecta is the annual journal of student work at the Yale School of Architecture. Part historical record, part monograph, Retrospecta seeks to capture and record the current life of the school. Documenting one academic year, each issue contains exemplary work from both the design studios and support courses. The daily activities of the school, including lectures, symposia, exhibitions, and studio reviews, are also highlighted through numerous candid photographs and quotations. The journal is edited by students and published by the school.

Beside Normal-Grotesk FSL (used with its alternative schoolbook a), mainly Lector FSL is used throughout the entire publication – for headlines as well as for the text. Volume 44 covers the activities of the 2020–21 academic year. It’s distributed by Actar D:

This year’s vicissitudes of curricular hybridity forced upon us a necessary reorientation of the medium we communicate and design with, and a renegotiation of the space we inhabit while we work. Our methods and our material worlds were pushed through the lens of remoteness, and so too were the ideas that followed. As a publication that stands to react and reflect upon the beats of the previous year, two moves were absolutely critical in order to address this fulcrum of architectural education: a virtual extension of Retrospecta, increasing the autonomy and authorship of the student work in a year where projects were developed through incredibly diverse and idiosyncratic means; and a smaller book size that emphasizes a reappraisal of the physical act of reading, a more critical format lending to internal cross-content dialogue, and an heightened importance of the book as an artifact. This volume of Retrospecta sets out to reclaim the solace of solitude by renewing a lost intimacy between story, student, and school, revisiting the reader’s relationship to the book as a physical object.