As always, this year’s Retrospecta strives to reflect a complete picture of the school. More than a mission statement, this is a moving target. The rich array of support courses, electives, exhibitions, and lectures, combined with the core sequence of design studios, generate many diverse discussions among students, faculty, and visiting critics. This year’s editors focused on these dialogues, recognizing their role in energizing and enriching the school’s environment.
To help navigate through this milieu of voices and thoughts, the editors have chosen six themes to highlight. Biomimesis, computational design, digital fabrication, site and landscape, sustainability, and urbanism each represent an area of interest, informing multiple projects and generating intense conversations.
Working within the graphic design, the editors’ themes exist in the margins of the book, creating a book within a book. As you read, we hope you will experience the overlapping, colliding, and knotting of issues that make the Yale School of Architecture the vibrant place that it is. We encourage you to flip through the pages more than once to visit and revisit the diverse arguments, critiques, and provocations that engage the students throughout the year. —Jason Van Nest, Yen-Rong Chen, Mathew Ford