Aleksey Polukeyev

"The Big Bang may have been a large cosmic rebound (or "Big Bounce"), in which a contracting universe reaches the maximum density allowed by the quanta, then rebounds and begins to expand. In the case of a black hole, it is just the star rather than the entire universe that bounces, but the physics is similar: at extremely high density the quanta a

Little Fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance

And drink, and sing,

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing…

William Blake

Everything about money and buildings says they are expected to live only a brief time, typically 30 years. Most mortgages go for just 25 or 30 years, and so the asset life comes to match the finance period. Just when you own it, you have to replace it.

Adaptive life re-enters the building when it becomes too cheap for speculation. Turnover refreshes, but it also erases.

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Asimov

The perennial driver of haste is what is called “the time value of money.” To be an attractive investment, a building must earn at a rate greater than the interest paid on its purchase and construction loans. The project has to make money fast. More developers are done in by payments on their loans than by any other cause. This they insist on bliet

Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today

“Form ever follows function” (Louis Sullivan) contra positioned with “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us” (Churchill)

Numbers, techniques, and predictions are useful for suggesting, testing, confirming, and putting discoveries to use. But there is nothing technical about the content of the discoveries. The universe does not revolve around the Earth. All the matter that surrounds us is just made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons. There are one hundred billion

“The initial disequilibrium of the past is the reason the present has traces of the past. The formation of every trace is nothing other than an intermediate step toward equilibrium. If the present has traces of the past, it is due solely to the disequilibrium of that past. It is for this reason that we remember the past and not the future — because