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I live in New York, a city where everybody is moving forward, always building, always adding another floor to the skyline. And somewhere in the middle of all that motion, a thought stopped me. Every building I pass, the offices, the towers, the apartment blocks, they are all the same shape. Square. Rectangular. Flat. One particular form repeated endlessly across a city, across a country, across the whole world.

Then I thought about history. I thought about churches, temples, old civic buildings. None of them looked like this. They were circular, domed, pointed at the top in strange and specific ways. Nothing about them was regular. Nothing about them felt like it came off an assembly line. And once I noticed that difference, I could not stop noticing it. The past built things that looked astonishing. The present builds things that look like nothing at all.

I brought this observation into a conversation, and what came out of it surprised me enough that I wanted to write it down properly, not lose it in the scroll of a chat window.

Why the past built differently

The obvious answer is economics, and that answer turns out to be true, but it is not the whole story. A cathedral in medieval Europe was often the single largest project a community would ever undertake, sometimes stretching across a hundred years and several generations of builders who would never see it finished. Cost per square foot barely entered the conversation because the building was not solving a shelter problem. It was making a claim, about the divine, about a community’s place in the cosmos, about what a people were willing to sacrifice for something larger than themselves. The dome, the spire, the vaulted ceiling, these were structurally difficult to pull off, and that difficulty was the point. Difficulty signaled devotion.

Modern commercial construction is answering a completely different question. How do you shelter the largest number of people, or the largest number of square feet, at the lowest cost, in the shortest time, using a process that can be repeated identically in a hundred other cities. Steel frame construction and the elevator made height cheap for the first time in human history, but they also made the rectangle the most efficient shape available, structurally and financially. Curves cost more to engineer. Irregular forms cost more to heat, cool, and maintain. Once a building became primarily a financial calculation instead of a spiritual or civic statement, the box was always going to win.

The ideology behind the box

But there is more to it than cost, and this is the part that surprised me. Early in the twentieth century, architects like Le Corbusier and the designers of the Bauhaus movement did not just accept the box as a cheaper option. They argued for it as a moral position. Adolf Loos wrote an essay called Ornament and Crime, arguing that decoration on a building was a sign of a primitive or degenerate culture, something a modern civilized society should grow out of. That idea won. It became the dominant taste among the architects and developers shaping our skylines for the next hundred years.

Their stated reasoning was not cynical. Much of it came out of the devastation of two world wars, cities flattened, populations that needed housing fast. Ornament, in their eyes, was a luxury the poor could not afford, and clean, repeatable units could shelter more people, more quickly, more fairly. Whatever you think of the result, the historical record shows idealism and postwar urgency driving the shift, documented in manifestos these architects were proud to publish, not something hidden or conspired.

What nature does instead

Here is where the conversation went somewhere I did not expect. If you look at nature, at trees, rivers, forests, mountains, even the wider structure of stars, moons, and galaxies, almost nothing resembles the shapes we have chosen to build our lives inside of. Nature is complex, branching, spiraling, endlessly varied in scale and form. A tree does not repeat the same module a thousand times identically. It grows into something specific, shaped by light, wind, and time.

There is real research behind why this matters to us. Fractal geometry, the mathematics of patterns that repeat at different scales, shows up constantly in nature, and there is a body of work, including decades of study by the architect Christopher Alexander, on why certain forms feel alive to the human mind while others feel dead. Environmental psychology research has found that people consistently prefer facades with visual complexity, texture, and rhythm over flat, repetitive ones, and that living or working near flat glass box environments correlates with lower reported wellbeing. Our minds evolved around forests and coastlines, not curtain wall glass towers, and something in us still notices the difference.

Does the box trap the imagination

This led to the harder question. Is the sameness only about money, or is there something about a world built entirely from one repeated shape that quiets the mind on purpose. I raised this almost as a conspiracy thought, that regular people surrounded by regular structures might be nudged toward not imagining much at all. A building like a cathedral, or a structure like the Burj Khalifa, makes you look up and start imagining something bigger than the moment you are standing in. A glass box on a commercial street asks nothing of you. It straps you in and lets you pass through without a single thought.

I do not think there is a hidden hand deciding this on purpose, and the history does not support that read. But bureaucracies and markets do not need to conspire to produce sameness. Zoning codes, financing models, insurance requirements, and the pressure to build fast and cheap all push independently toward the same shape, the way water finds the same path downhill without anyone planning the river. Nobody sits in a room and decides the goal is to dull people’s imagination. But the result, mile after mile of identical rectangles, can still produce that flattening effect, intent or no intent.

The Burj Khalifa is the counterexample that proves the point. It exists because someone had the budget and explicitly wanted to provoke wonder, the same feeling a cathedral spire or a Hindu temple tower was built to provoke centuries ago. It proves the box was never inevitable. It is a choice, one that mostly stops getting made once cost and speed take over the decision.

The architect Zaha Hadid belongs in this same conversation. Her buildings, flowing, curved, almost liquid in how they meet the ground, are proof that the tools to break out of the box now exist and are being used. Cheaper computational engineering and parametric design have made forms that would have been structurally impossible or absurdly expensive a century ago into buildings people can actually walk through today. Alongside architects like Frank Gehry, she represents a real and growing pushback against the glass box, evidence that the current sameness is a choice of era, not a permanent limit on what architecture can be.

Where this leaves me

Standing on a New York street, surrounded by glass and steel moving in one direction, I keep coming back to this thought. Nothing in nature repeats itself this plainly, and for most of human history, nothing we built did either. Somewhere in the last hundred years we decided that efficiency and moral simplicity mattered more than wonder, and we built a world that reflects that decision back at us every single day, whether we notice it or not.

I noticed it. That is where this began, a small itch of a feeling walking past another flat facade, wondering why nothing around me made me feel anything. Maybe that itch is worth paying attention to. Maybe the next generation of builders, with cheaper computational tools and a growing pushback against the glass box, will decide that a city should still be allowed to make a person look up.