We took a first look at New York City's gigantic, spiky blue smog-eating wendy pavilion, and at the Dwell on Design Show in LA this week we spotted the Casa Bubble House, a round, transparent pod made of recycled material that can be used like a tent.
It only put the house bubble on hold and prepared (by way of ridiculously low interest rates) the great inflation of 2003 to 2005.
The entire firm came around to believing the great mortgage bubble was a house of cards ready to collapse, based on delinquencies, no-doc loans, fraud, and more.
Whether or not the house-price bubble bursts this time around, the north-south house-price differential is already shrinking.
Our reason for suspecting that a house-price bubble has developed in the six countries listed in the first paragraph is that in all of them house prices are close to record levels in relation to both rents and average incomes.
ECONOMIST: The higher they climb, the further they will fall
Spain has what looks like a house-price bubble, and so does Britain and, arguably, Ireland.
But when it comes to the biggest house-price bubble in history, theory does not get you very far.
There are three reasons why a house-price bubble might cause more harm on bursting than a stockmarket bubble.
Consumer spending could, however, weaken even if the house-price bubble does not burst.
Philip Rees, professor of population geography at Leeds University, says that during the last southern house-price bubble in the late 1980s, there was net immigration to the north.
Much of the weakness, particularly in Spain, is down to struggling firms in property and finance, which suggests that the credit crunch and the deflating house-price bubble are taking a broader toll.
In America, where we also identified a potential house-price bubble, the 12-month rate of growth in home prices slowed to 5.6% in the year to the second quarter, the slowest rate of increase since 1999.
ECONOMIST: The higher they climb, the further they will fall
In just a few chapters, he outlines the forces that brought the world to the brink of a bust: a house-price bubble boosted by runaway mortgage lending in the rich world, particularly America, a lightly regulated global financial system that found ever-more creative ways to speculate on rising house prices, and macroeconomic policymaking that was far too laid back about the dangers posed by asset-price bubbles.
ECONOMIST: The reasons for the crisis and how to stop it happening again
Presidents have been known to say that they feel stifled governing from the environs of the Rose Garden, meaning that they believe they have to get out from the bubble that is life in the White House if they want to maintain a feel for America and Americans.
Shilling talked of the housing bubble that is collapsing before our eyes: House prices shot up 2.5 times between 1995 and 2005, peaked in October 2005 and now, two years later, have started to fall.
Although there may be a bubble in luxury housing, especially in Shanghai, house prices nationwide rose by only 4% on average last year.
The first thing Ms. Bower saw when she visited the building was "the large white bubble" located on Second Avenue, a "muck house" used to store rock bored out for subway tunnels.
The figures are based on the Nationwide's own mortgage data, and show less of a bubble in the capital than Land Registry figures released on Wednesday which indicated house prices in London had risen by 7% in the year to the end of October.
BBC: Mortgage funds to rise significantly, Bank of England says
In the last great debt bubble in the U.S. that peaked in 1929, the average household could not afford a house and had to put down 50% and get a 5-year balloon mortgage.
FORBES: Greatest Real Estate Bubble In Modern History Not Done Bursting
Unfortunately, the bubble burst soon after, and Kaufman was unable to obtain the construction financing necessary to develop the intended spec house.
In a coffee house in Ankawa, Erbil's Christian quarter, Barcelona fan Mustapha Ergushi puffs on a hubble-bubble as he muses on the explanation for this strange infatuation.
BBC: Barca or Real? Iraqi Kurdistan's big football faultline
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