I'm touring apartments in New York, and just about every new-build has the same soulless aesthetic: flat walls, white paint, no cornices, no ornamentation... just a room in a box. One real estate agent said to me: "If you want something with character, you're gonna have to stick to pre-war buildings." Look, I'm all for some efficiency gains, but we've created a world where new things are soulless things, and that's not how a society as modern as ours should function. Intuitively, you'd think that a wealthier society would build more beautiful things, but not ours.