GSD Student Publications

“We were born in the war.” With this striking sentence, FOCUS, the student journal of the Architectural Association, opened its very first issue in 1938. That sense of urgency captures what often compels students to start publications of their own —to extend their voices beyond their academic requirements. Since its founding in 1936, students at the GSD have produced more than twenty different student publications. They have varied widely: some ran for a single issue while others grew to nearly one hundred; some took the form of print journals, online platforms, or single-page broadsheet printouts. The content has ranged from deep engagement with our design disciplines to playful accounts of student life. And their purposes have been just as diverse —sometimes joyful, sometimes resistant, always imaginative.

However ephemeral they may seem at first, student publications carve out a vital space for expression. How does each generation interpret its own sense of urgency and purpose? What drives students to document their experiences, ideas and hopes for the future? Student publications are significant intellectual contributions that reflect both the evolving landscape of inquiry of our schools and the broader disciplines to which we are devoted. At the GSD, with its distinctly international student body, student publications also serve as platforms that create and foster dialogue across cultures and perspectives. The student publications they imagine and create while at GSD continue to inspire a lifetime of research, scholarship, and practice —work through which GSD prepares them to carry forward its mission to “make a resilient, just, and beautiful world.”

In our digital age of rapid information flow, it is worth pausing to reconsider the significance of the written word. The purpose of this narrative is twofold: first, to outline the trajectory of student publications at GSD, situating them within the broader framework of the School and in relation to the academic departments, intellectual currents, and individuals with which they were affiliated; and second, to provide a basis for further analysis of their underlying orientation, objectives, and impact, with the understanding that they may also serve as an inspiration for the emergence of new GSD student publications. History is inherently forward-looking, and this brief history may begin to address the gap in student publications within the historiography of design schools —a gap that has rarely been examined.