Robots and spires

Renaissance architects once used stone to express a rediscovered logic of the divine. When Brunelleschi lifted the ribs of Santa Maria del Fiore’s dome into the Tuscan sky, he proved that raw human ingenuity could momentarily command the laws of physics themselves. From Florence to London, cathedrals were not simply shelters for worship; they were instruments of awe. Their geometry turned belief into structure, their ornament into theology. Mason by mason, Europe poured its surplus into beauty, treating craftsmanship as capital for the soul. The age endures in our imagination because it aligned meaning with proportion and faith with form—a harmony our own age has mislaid.

Half a millennium later, what God once inspired, the spreadsheet 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 a non-essential. We traded herringbone brickwork for repetition and called it progress. The modern skyline, with its prefabricated façades and neutral palettes, resembles an IKEA catalogue of filing cabinets. In cities of flesh and weather, such buildings flatten the soul and starve the imagination. Architecture should speak in nature’s dialect—fractals, spirals and asymmetries that invite light and time to play. Ornamentation endures for centuries; the majority of modernist works age poorly within a decade ^[2].

Le Corbusier’s Glass House

Perhaps robots can rescue us from the homogeneity of everything. Machines such as Tesla’s Optimus—and whatever rivals follow—may drive labour costs down to levels uncomfortably reminiscent of the pre-industrial age. Picture automated workers milling marble, carving oak or laying intricate brickwork for little more than the price of poured concrete. The standard .xlsx objections—“too slow, too expensive, too risky”—lose their sting. Constraint shifts from labour input to electricity supply. A self-learning model trained on the implementation logic of Gothic tracery or Palladian symmetry could make ornament no longer a casualty of cost.

St Paul's, London

The Renaissance was animated by a culture that sanctified mastery. Today, many of our brightest minds arbitrage micro-seconds in the City while bins overflow and potholes deepen. We have lost our rigour and forgotten that what we build scripts civic life for centuries. Buildings demand structural, moral and aesthetic robustness. For the first time in history, individual homes could receive a level of ornament once reserved for cathedrals—if we choose to reclaim that ambition. A concrete slab with slightly nicer cladding may satisfy a budgetary constraint, but its deficit is spiritual, paid daily by those who walk past it.

Ornamentation no more

Robotic muscle, paired with a renewed vigour for craftsmanship, could revive that older belief system of the Renaissance. Imagine façades rippling with fractal shadows, sun-traps calibrated to the arc of the day, columns standing to attention holding heavy things, spires once again pointing beyond the rational. Envision machines managing the monotony; humans restoring the meaning. In the decades ahead, as mechanical skeletons labour beside us, the question will hopefully not be one of affordability or blind blandness—but whether we dare omit meaning from our constructions.

The greatest cost in construction is not labour or materials, It's the long debt of uninspired design—interest accruing quietly across generations. We can still choose to build forms that lift the eye and the spirit far beyond the straight line—if only by the skin of our teeth.

Footnotes