Robots and spires

When Brunelleschi hoisted the great ribs of Santa Maria del Fiore’s dome into the Tuscan sky, he proved to the world for a moment, that geometry, grit and raw desire could to bend the laws of physics to human will. The Renaissance treated stone the way Galileo later treated telescopes: as an instrument for discovering deeper truths. And so cathedrals from Florence to London were calibrated not just for shelter but for fantastical awe, their ratios tuned like a Gothic choir chant until proportion itself felt sacred. Mason by mason, guild by guild, Europe invested its surplus in grandeur because beauty, then, was a balance-sheet item: capital for the soul, compound interest for civilisation.

Fast-forward half a millennium and the balance-sheet still reins supreme, but the line items have changed. Le Corbusier’s “machines for living” turned architecture into spreadsheet fodder—right angles cheaper to stamp out than curves, glass cheaper than gargoyles. Efficiency triumphed; wonder was written off. We swapped Brunelleschi’s herringbone brickwork for curtain walls and called it progress, even as our skylines filled with filing cabinets disguised as towers. Grids may be wondrous on a microchip, but in cities of flesh and weather they flatten the imagination. Buildings ought to speak nature’s dialect—fractals, spirals, asymmetries that invite light and time to play—yet we’ve squeezed them into Cartesian cages.

St Paul's Cathedral

The robots are coming. Machines such as Tesla’s Optimus—and whatever rivals follow—could push labour costs down to levels uncomfortably close to those of the darkest chapters in history. Imagine automated workers able to mill marble, carve oak, or lay intricate brickwork for little more than the price of poured concrete. Suddenly the usual objections—“too slow, too expensive, too risky”—lose their bite. The real constraint shifts from wages to the electricity meter. And once a self-learning model grasps the rules behind Gothic tracery or Palladian balance, adding ornament won't be as constrained as it is today.

Rigour of centuries past

With that said, the Renaissance wasn’t powered by gold; it ran on a cultural belief that prized mastery over margin. Today our brightest minds arbitrate picosecond price discrepancies in Canary Wharf while potholes multiply and new housing looks like value-engineered Lego. We’ve mistaken cheapness for efficiency and forgotten that buildings script our civic existence for centuries. A glittering concrete hulk may satisfy this years yield, though its depreciation in meaning is booked off-balance-sheet—by citizens who walk past everyday.

Robotic muscle paired with revived craftsmanship, we could reboot that older belief system. Picture facades that ripple like stone lace, courtyards tuned to the sun’s arc, spires that once again point beyond the reasonably functional. Machines can handle the monotony; humans can curate the meaning. In the decades ahead, as androids walk our corridors shoulder to shoulder, the real question will not be whether we can afford beauty but whether we dare omit it. The heaviest cost in construction is not labour or limestone; it is the long debt of uninspired space, compounding quietly across generations. Hopefully we can choose, while we still can, to build futures that lift the eye—and the spirit—beyond the straight line and balance sheet.