And in boomtowns like Phoenix and Tampa, developers with an eye more to profit than market realities far surpassed any realistic demand for housing. The result? Rampant foreclosures, thousands of abandoned homes and even streets, and acres of excavated land awaiting stalled-out projects that won’t get built. How do we design and build to accommodate changing economics, family sizes, and employee and student populations? How can we merge online technologies with physical architecture to more directly serve our real-time needs? Data-visualization capabilities can’t solve all the problems, but it’s hard to overestimate the extent to which this information can help us to think about larger systems and their interrelationships, so that we see a building as not just a building but an ecological infrastructure. These challenges are massive; the attitudes responsible for them, deep-seated. Inquiries like de Monchaux’s illustrate that there is intelligent inquiry and actionable theorizing happening about how patterns might be broken, planning might be more flexible and dynamic, and our visions of space and its functions could expand — and, perhaps, contract.