Seeking the City: Visionaries on the Margins

The 96th annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) starts today in Houston, TX, and continues for the next three days. Chances are good that you're not there. Neither am I. However, the conference proceedings — a tome titled Seeking the City: Visionaries on the Margins — is available. Now. To anybody. All 976 pages. Free. There's a lot here to be interested in... from "Traveling Professions: How Local Contingencies Complicate Globalizing Tendencies in the Standardization of Architectural Practice" (which not a few of us probably think is a good thing), to "Freeze / Thaw: A Menacing Line and Humble Resistance," by way of "Architecture and the Cinematic Window: Hitchcock's Rear Window and the Fantasy Frame." I haven't read it all. I think I can safely say that I'm not going to. But I've been happily picking and choosing my way through this big collection of unexpectedly diverse five- to ten-page papers, and it seems like there's going to be something rewarding, or at least sort of interesting, for just about everyone.