To understand why Hadid pushes back, it helps to recall how strongly the twentieth century embraced the rectangle. Modernist architecture often favored orthogonal plans, standardized modules, and repeatable forms, ideas associated with efficiency and clarity; Le Corbusier’s *Toward an Architecture* (1923) argues for rational order and the “machine” logic of building. The grid became a visual promise that society itself could be made coherent.
Yet as the grid spread, so did its compromises. Rectangular planning can simplify construction and navigation, but it can also flatten local identity, ignore topography, and privilege what’s easy to measure over what’s meaningful to inhabit. Hadid’s sentence arrives as a corrective: what looks orderly on paper may feel blunt against the complexity of real places. [...]
