2017 Fall Conference Proceedings

The Remote is both a tangible and imaginary space that lures us from our hectic lives and contested contexts into other, more distant worlds. Few terrains embody this sirens’ call more than the American Desert whose majestic and beguiling frontiers were described by Reyner Banham as an evocative combination of “elation and bewilderment.” The Fall 2017 ACSA Conference, Crossings between the Proximate and Remote, embraces these observations and welcomes an expansion and meditation on them. We, as architects and artists, are increasingly compelled to cross the boundaries of our disciplinary practices with other practices, perceptions and realities. As such, the Conference purposefully alludes to Cormac McCarthy’s writings about this landscape, which like Judd’s work, unexpectedly link bodies of knowledge and experience into a virtuoso artistic synthesis.