  Human beings prefer ordered complexity and not randomness in their
environment, a result of our perceptual system evolving to interpret natural
forms. We also recognize monotonously repeating forms as unnatural. Although
widespread in today's built environment, such forms generate reactions ranging
from boredom to unease. Christopher Alexander has introduced rules for
generating forms adapted to natural geometries, which show structured variation
with multiple symmetries in a hierarchy of scales. It turns out to be
impossible to generate monotonously repeating forms by following those rules.
As it is highly probable that traditional artifacts, buildings, and cities were
created instinctively using a version of the same rules, this is the reason we
never find monotonously repeating forms in traditional cultures.
