One of the hilarious things about doing what we do is that we spend a lot of time around incredibly insane luxury. We have lurked in multi-million-dollar houses, taken hard-hat tours of multi-zillion-dollar developments, and been the happy recipients of tote bags advertising everything from the New Museum to, today, Dellis Cay. We’ve always stepped back a bit from it, realized that we’re there simply to observe and not to participate, accepted that we’re welcomed not for our charms (alone) but rather our momentary affiliation. We’ve tried to remain as removed as we can while forming those relationships so necessary to getting the writing-about-architecture done, and we’ve always tried to keep at least one eyebrow raised. This isn’t to say that we come in all judgey and jazz. Just that we try to be, you know, aware.

Which is why we have been continually intrigued by the now-solid relationship between Storefront for Art & Architecture, the counter-culture downtown pizza-slice of a gallery and obvious Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven, and the Dellis Cay development. To be fair, Dellis Cay—a private island being developed by the equally mysterious Dr. Cem Kinay (who we could well imagine having a PhD in Awesome) is off the charts insane full of good architecture. Or, it will be, once the buildings by Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Piero Lissoni, Kengo Kuma, Carl Ettensperger, and today’s star Shigeru Ban, are built.

We checked out Kuma’s spa for Mandarin Oriental a few months ago. At Storefront. It was cool. Lots of water. Nice design. And then, today, we heard Shigeru Ban speak about his villas—one called S, the other H—at the Japan Society. With Joseph Grima. Who runs Storefront. Which makes us wonder. What’s in it for Dellis Cay? And what’s really in it for Storefront?

Today’s launch was a microcosm of the bubble we’ve been in, a reminder of the almost-weekly lunch launches we were attending back in the heady days of 2006 and ‘07. We ran into Cliff Pearson and beloved Canadian Tim McKeough, and we compared tote bags and previous junkets, wondered how much of this was just the tail end of an unstoppable monolith, and how much a moment of optimism we desperately need right now. With gigantic projects like Vegas’ CityCenter and Echelon slowing or closing down, it’s unclear what the sense of developing another group of luxury villas is right now. What’s funny is that it’s Ban, anointed the “accidental environmentalist” by the New York Times, a guy who makes architecture out of cast-off paper tubes. Someone in the audience asked if Dr. Kinay might just prototype Ban’s movable villas and license them to be constructed all over the world. Kinay laughed, but it’s a reasonable question. If the construction of Ban’s villas doesn’t take all that much of an investment—and with the beach villa’s reclaimed barge of a floor, we’re sure it’s more reasonable than many—then the point is largely in name and location. A Turks & Caicos private island is baller, don’t get us wrong. But something about this thoughtful architect’s involvement, and this thoughtful gallery’s implied and actual support, makes us wonder if we’re missing something. Help us out with our All the President’s Men question today. We’ll follow that money. All the way to the beach.