In architecture, designing and constructing mean implementing a way of thinking with a view to action in an active relation with the changing conditions of the contemporary world. From our position in academia, in terms of our pedagogical practice (the place where Architectural Papers are produced), these conditions are not reflected as a simulacrum, they are investigated as operative possibilities, as hypotheses that explain an ongoing construction of a possible other present. One of the most pervasive conditions of our world has been metaphorically described as the "bursting of the Financial bubble." This metaphor sees the financial system as a bubble that contained within it a putrid gas, nonexistent esources, encased by a light, solid outer particle. This solid particle, this ephemeral casing built on nothing, has frequently, in many places, been the responsibility of architecture, determining both the mass construction of many places and the working conditions of the profession, with its unresolved dialectic between the exceptional (iconic) and the normal (invisible).