Bil Ehrlich, a young Harvard-trained architect, bought and gutted a derelict five-floor Manhattan town house and created, behind its old cast-iron facade, a huge white alterna-house. But it seems downright laughable today that the house might have once been seen to be cold and impersonal. [...]

Few destinations have benefited from modern tourism quite like Bali, Indonesia. It makes them so sad: hundreds if not thousands of years of cultural evolution undone by a few decades of modern, Western-style development, much of it of the globalized luxury persuasion.