The only way humanity could meaningfully claim superiority over other species is if it transcended the very characteristics it shares with them: Mortality, biological need, instinct, and dependence.
Intelligence alone is not a universal metric of supremacy, because it is a metric defined and evaluated only by us. A cat does not recognize human intelligence as superiority; therefore, within its own frame of existence, that hierarchy is irrelevant.
An individual human may be “superior” to an individual cat within a controlled system of resources, but on a species-wide scale, there is no objective framework that establishes human supremacy over life as a whole.
The only metric that holds any form of universal weight is the one imposed by nature itself: Dependence and participation within systems of survival. As a matter of fact, with our harsh corners and closed-off design, we are harming and cutting ourselves off from nature, thus cutting ourselves off from cognitive progress as well.
This would make us an inferior species, as we are the only ones unwilling to accept the bountiful opportunities Earth gives us. Seen through this lens, design cannot be separated from ecology or environment. It must reflect the reality that we are embedded within nature, not positioned above it.
Modern anthropocentric design unintentionally reinforces the illusion of separation, and that illusion limits our ability to evolve cognitively and creatively.
In attempting to construct environments purely for human control, we end up constructing psychological limits that mirror those same constraints internally. We do not stand in opposition to nature, because we are one of its expressions, and our design inevitably reveals whether we understand that or not.
If one chooses to explore the philosophical frameworks and worldviews of fatalism and determinism through a religious lens, we will find a version of the universe where everything that occurs in existence can be interpreted as an expression of a singular underlying will.
If that framework is accepted, then the distinction between God, the universe, and nature begins to dissolve, because all of them describe the same total system from different perspectives. Everything becomes part of one continuous structure: A process unfolding through laws, matter, and existence itself, of which we are not observers, but part of, thus making us, nature, the universe, and God strung together in oneness.
Even without religion, the same conclusion appears in a more material form.
If nature is the system that produces all things, and we are products of that system, then we are not external to it but expressions of it.
Whether framed spiritually as God, materially as nature, or experientially as human life, the underlying structure remains consistent: A continuous process we exist within, not above or apart from.
In that sense, architecture is not merely our interaction with the world, but the world reflecting itself through us in constructed form. This is important because it reinforces a central claim of this series: That the path to higher forms of thinking is not separation from the world, but deeper alignment with it. To design spaces that connect rather than isolate is, in a sense, to design closer to the logic of the system we are already part of.
These ideas, or ideas similar to them, are already beginning to surface in modern thinking in subtle ways.
I recently came across a metaphor in an interview with Kanye West that stayed with me, not because it was literal, but because it pointed toward something larger about how we think of space, creativity, and constraint.
Since birth, we move through containers. We begin in a curved, spherical space, which is the womb, and yet the moment we exit it, we are placed into our first box: The hospital room. Then the crib. Then houses designed for function, classrooms, office cubicles, quite literally named after enclosure.
Rooms within rooms, corners within corners, structures built around repetition and control. And finally, in death, we return to a final box: the coffin, placed back into the Earth, which itself is curved, spherical, and planetary.
Between these two spherical conditions lies an entire life of boxes. So it raises a simple question: If our existence is framed almost entirely within enclosure, what does it actually mean to “think outside the box?” And why is “thinking outside the box” so encouraged and necessary as we grow up hearing it if the environment to enable it isn’t there, and the opposite sorts of environments are?
Maybe the saying itself is to allude to the fact that all around us are boxes, so we must transcend it. But if it is such common knowledge, then why are we still making boxes and living in them? You’d expect some progress and elimination of boxes, no? Surely, instead of trying very hard to think outside the box, it would be easier to not be in the box to begin with?
A more abstract claim that often circulates in philosophical or spiritual discourse is that curves and openness resemble something like a “natural” or even “divine” design language. This is not a claim that can be proven in a strict scientific sense, and it is not necessary for the argument to function that way. But as a metaphor, it becomes difficult to ignore when placed against the broader philosophical framework already established in this essay.
The Earth is curved. The moon is curved. The sun is curved. Atomic and orbital structures are fundamentally circular or cyclical in motion. Even where nature produces edges or fractures, they exist within a wider system that is fluid, continuous, and self-balancing.
It is not that nature avoids corners entirely, but that its dominant language is not rigid segmentation. It is flow, orbit, and return. And if architecture is, even indirectly, a reflection of how we understand reality, then the question becomes less about whether we can build in straight lines, and more about whether a life spent inside predominantly enclosed, segmented environments shapes the way we think, imagine, and create.
To connect with nature, we must design like nature, and think like nature. And it’s pretty clear nature loves to think in circumferences.
Shapneel Shahaj is an architecture enthusiast.
