I remember once Kadir saying to me: "Sometimes I get sick of just being around endless estates that cloud your imagination and can make you feel trapped".
Then there's Moonman 157 and Klara Sax, a feminist ideal of Land Art (ambition, work crews, the endless real estate of the west).
New York at the turn of the millennium was passing through a seemingly endless real-estate and capital-markets boom, and it appeared that every other city block was being colonized by condominiums.
Opening with shots of endless council estates and David Cameron's party conference speech on how a life of benefits "must be rubbed out", the voiceover declares: "The war on welfare is well and truly on".
The drive to get to Hsieh's studio in Dongguan, home to some of the world's biggest factories, is a trip through a giant industrial estate, endless rows of factories, dormitories and suppliers, with new motorways whisking company execs from factory to factory.
There's endless complication surrounding estate planning, tax and investment strategy.
The relentlessly optimistic forecasts about subprime mortgages and endless increases in real estate values were the product of the positive-thinking culture.
We had both recently graduated from college, studied art history and wound up living on the top floor of an ancient casa owned by one of those Italian widows who seem to posses endless supplies of real estate.
And they spend endless evenings planning their estates and trying to make ends meet because they are not well enough to support themselves and their new drug habit.
The camera drools over the pricey real estate and the endless array of flashing gadgets wielded by its characters.
