Robots and spires

Renaissance architects used stone to express a rediscovered belief in divine proportion, harmony, and the vast logic of the universe. When Brunelleschi hoisted the great ribs of Santa Maria del Fiore’s dome into the Tuscan sky, he proved, if only for a moment, that raw human pursuit could appear to channel the chaotic wishes of unruly gods—physics—to his sole will. And so, from Florence to London, cathedrals were calibrated not merely for sheltered worship but for awe, their proportions tuned to make shape itself seem miraculous. Mason by mason, guild by guild, Europe invested its surplus in ornamentation, because the physical embodiment of the divine was an implicit measure of cost—capital for the soul, compound interest for civilisation. This era endures in our imagination because it aligned aesthetics with meaning, and capital with transcendence—a habit of mind now largely left to the history books.

Fast-forward half a millennium, what God once inspired, the spreadsheet now governs. Le Corbusier’s “machines for living” ^[1] turned form into minimalist .xlsx matter: right angles are easier and cheaper to stamp out than curves, and glass is certainly cheaper than gargoyles. Efficiency triumphed; wonder was written off as an expense. We traded herringbone brickwork for monotony and called it progress, as our structures continue to resemble IKEA filing cabinets. In cities of flesh and weather, they flatten the soul and starve the imagination. Buildings should speak in nature’s dialect—fractals, spirals and asymmetries that invite light and time to play. The longevity of ornamentation is counted in centuries, in contrast to the vast majority modernist works that seem awkward and forced within only a short decade ^[2].

Le Corbusier’s Glass House

St Paul's, London

Maybe robots can save us from the homogeneity of everything. Machines like Tesla’s Optimus—and whatever rivals follow—could drive labour costs down to levels uncomfortably close to the darkest days of slavery. Picture automated workers milling marble, carving oak, or laying intricate brickwork for little more than the cost of poured concrete. Suddenly the usual .xlsx objections—“too slow, too expensive, too risky”—lose their objective bite. The constraint shifts from labour input to the electricity input. A self-learning model fine-tuned on the underlying implementation logic of Gothic tracery or Palladian symmetry, ornamentation will no longer be a casualty of cost.

Ornamentation no more

That said, the Renaissance was powered not only by gold; it was animated by a culture that immortalised mastery. Today, many of our brightest minds arbitrage picosecond price discrepancies in the City, while bins go unemptied and potholes multiply. We have lost our rigour and forgotten that what we build scripts our civic life for centuries; it demands structural robustness. Perhaps for the first time in history, individual dwellings can receive a level of considered ornamentation and detail comparable to the enduring landmarks of the past. Concrete slabs with slightly more appealing cladding may satisfy a budgetary constraint, but their loss of meaning is measured not in pounds; it's felt by those who walk past them every day.

Robotic muscle paired with a renewed vigour for craftsmanship, we can reboot that older belief system of the Renaissance. Picture facades that ripple with shadowy fractals, sun traps tuned of the sun’s arc with precision, spires that once again point beyond the merely rational. Machines handle the monotony; humans curate the structure and the meaning. In the decades ahead, more mechanical skeletons will walk our corridors shoulder to shoulder, the real question won’t be whether we can afford ornamentation—but whether we dare omit it. The most enduring cost in construction isn’t labour or materials; it’s the long debt of uninspired design, compounding quietly across generations. We can still choose to build futures that lift the eye—and the spirit—far beyond the straight line—by the skin of our teeth!

Footnotes