It’s not just banks. Automation has also changed how people shop, park, fly, and more. In the process, it has reshaped the architecture that contains those experiences—making them more efficient, often, but also putting machines above people.

That first ATM was installed at the Barclays in Enfield, a borough on the northern fringes of London, specifically because it was the only branch with windows situated high enough on the building to accommodate the necessary machinery below. Since then, ATMs have required banks to reconsider other aspects of the building that house them.

A bank once provided a stately architectural procession: a vestibule, followed by a counter staffed by a waiting row of tellers, and perhaps a screened-off area with private offices and a safety deposit chamber. But enter a bank branch today—if you visit one at all—and chances are you’ll be greeted by a waiting row of ATMs. To find an actual human, you’d have to travel deeper into the building, often through another set of doors.

Over the course of a typical bank transaction, customers are unlikely to deal with a person at all. (Data compiled by Bank of America, for example, shows that only 30 percent of deposits there are made with the assistance of a human teller.) And at banks in more remote areas, complicated financial questions that necessitate human contact are often handled remotely. Instead of speaking with someone on-site, the customer uses an ITM—or Interactive Teller Machine, essentially a video conferencing system—to reach an employee at a centralized location. The buildings that house banks are no longer sites for person-to-person interaction. They are places where people come to transact with machines.

“I remember going to a bank and talking to a person,” says architect Greg Lynn, founder of Greg Lynn Form, a studio in Los Angeles focused on how technology facilitates architectural form. “But now everything happens with a portal on the side of a wall. It’s all about speed of transaction and efficiency.”

Banking is not the only industry where this is taking place. Arrive at a hotel and you might find yourself swiping a credit card to check yourself in. Go to a big-box store and you can check yourself out. Park your car at a lot and chances are you’ll feed your money (or more likely, your bank card) into a machine that will supply you with another card that will allow you to exit the lot.

All of this is changing the nature of the structures that people inhabit. “Architecture is losing places where you interact with people,” Lynn tells me. “There is so much desire for a rapid transaction and rapid movement and buildings are changing to accommodate that as well.”

Mariana Pestana, an architect and curator who recently helped organize the design exhibition “The Future Starts Here” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, describes this phenomenon as “post-human architecture”—one in which structures are geared more at generating machine interactions than in bringing human beings together.