What happened in Surfside, Florida this week with the partial collapse of a 12 storey building is a horrible tragedy. My heart goes out to everybody who has been affected. I can't imagine how this must feel. The New York Times is reporting that some 159 people are still unaccounted for, as of last Friday night. At least 4 people have been killed in the incident.

The focus right now is on saving as many human lives as possible. Without a doubt, that is priority number one. But this situation also raises a critically important question: How the hell could this happen in North America? When I saw the terrible news this week, I immediately flipped the article to one of our structural engineers with a note asking basically this.

As many of you know, buildings are typically designed and built with lots of structural redundancies. This is so that these sorts of tragedies can be avoided. It is too early to know exactly what happened here, but there are going to be questions around the building's original design and construction, its maintenance program (saltwater is awful for buildings), and much more.

I am sure that all of this will come out in the fullness of time. And it is important that it does.

A new 50,000 square foot experiential art center (EAC to those in the know), called Superblue, has just opened up in Miami's Allapattah neighborhood. It includes installations by Tokyo-based teamLab, Amsterdam's DRIFT, James Turrell (amazing), as well as many others.

This is noteworthy because experiential art is both fun (and Instagrammable) and because it is another example of the continuing rise of Allapattah. Art, design, and culture are usually pretty good for city building.

At the same time, the New York Times raises an interesting question: "Is this a forward step in the march of modernism or a debasement of art into theme-park entertainment?" Arthur Lubow goes on to say:

The popularity of this genre is driven by contradictory desires, as demonstrated memorably by the line of visitors in 2019 who waited up to six hours for a one-minute stay amid the twinkling lights in Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. Malnourished by their phones and computer screens, people yearn for real-life visceral experiences. And yet they remain stuck in the gravitational pull of virtual reality: The experiences they seek are ones they can record on their phone cameras and post on social media.

I get this logic.

But my own view is that just because something has commercial appeal, it shouldn't mean that the art is any less serious. And just because people want to photograph and share it, doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't appreciating it in the same way as someone just standing around and pondering it.

Perhaps this is a good time to mention that Snap has also just announced the next version of its Spectacles. These ones come with the promise of augmented reality. What is real anymore?

Adam Grant's recent NY Times article about languishing -- the psychological middle state that exists somewhere in between depressed and flourishing -- has been making the rounds online. Perhaps it is because COVID sucks and many of us can relate.

Either way, three points in the article really stood out to me (at least one of which, in my mind, directly ties back to real estate).

Firstly, I found it helpful to hear him describe what flourishing is. In his words, "flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others." This resonates with me. I know that I am at my best when I'm accomplishing things and making progress.

Secondly, he puts forward a possible solution to languishing -- it's the concept of "flow." Flow is when we are absorbed in meaningful and challenging work and where, again in his words, "your sense of time, place and self melts away." This also resonates with me. I am a big fan of a flow (even if I didn't know what it was called).

Thirdly -- and this one is important as we all think about the future of work/office space -- focus is paramount to doing exceptional things! Here's an excerpt that I immediately paused on as I was reading the article:

Fragmented attention is an enemy of engagement and excellence. In a group of 100 people, only two or three will even be capable of driving and memorizing information at the same time without their performance suffering on one or both tasks. Computers may be made for parallel processing, but humans are better off serial processing.

For the rest of Grant's article, click here.