But isn't it weird that there aren't more copy-and-paste condo buildings? Maybe not even in the same city—you don't want a Brasilia[1]. But, once you've gotten an architect to design a large building, why not get N times the materials, and then build the same building in as many cities as are compatible with the building codes it was designed under?
I found many cities in China in particular look very similar to one another in a not great way because of similar architectural choices including copy paste buildings, which apparently the government has noticed—I can't find the article about it but the central government is making moves to get Chinese cities to stop being built in exactly the same way/destroy and replace too much of their historic buildings with culturally diverse architecture.
Not to say we shouldn't do what you're saying, but if we do it we should probably do it in a way that doesn't make all our cities too generic.
Regarding the article, pre-fabricated buildings have been a thing for decades. For example in my area Quadrant Homes contracts out framing to a local builder that assembles interior and exterior walls in a factory on a gantry and then ships the entire wall package out to the house to be assembled.
Ugly as sin, but they're cheap housing.
edit: I'll go farther than this. My own house is over 100 years old, in a "bungalow neighborhood" of Minneapolis. Most of the houses were built over a period of a few decades, with more or less the same design. There's a T structure, leading to three sections on the first floor. The entrance is a living/dining area separated by an arch, on the other side of the back wall is the kitchen, and on the other side of the interior side wall is a hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. They're all like this. And these were built by hand, with the most sophisticated factory parts being two-by-fours and hinges. They might have a porch, or an extension (my house has a back extension built in the 1950s), and the attic might be finished into a single room, or even expanded into multiple rooms with a large dormer. Many/most have been modified over the years. But the basic form? Consistent as a pup tent.
These things are the result of available technology. The bungalows are a product of factory-made nails, which made balloon frame construction viable. In the South, you'll find shotgun shacks, which are what happens when you build a bungalow but don't need or want a basement.
This is nothing new. My neighborhood might look varigaeted, but it's not.
The sort of copy-paste condos you see all in one place are still a single development project by a single property developer. They're all signed off on as one job-lot, and then the materials are allocated to build all of them, a pool of workers are hired and reused between all the projects (where they might be working on condo #14 one day, and then condo #26 the next), etc. Maybe some more are added a few years later, and maybe those are across town—but this is still the same ongoing "project", by the same architect, the same construction firm, under the umbrella of the same sign-off from the same urban planners and engineers.
Whereas, what doesn't seem to exist, is a sort of approach to architecture that resembles software engineering. One where "a building blueprint" is like "a software library": a reusable thing, sold or shared between different companies, or maybe even open-sourced. A world where your first condo project, as a developer, might involve constructing a building to a blueprint that existed long before your company did, even a blueprint your rival firms are also using.
In such a world, you'd expect the components that go into such "common blueprints" to become standardized. You'd see a separation-of-concerns where these components get prefabricated not by the development company's contractors (as part of a "house in a box" or "condo in a box", the way you see today) but as part of an ecosystem of parts that enable these separate development-companies working off the same plans to work more quickly/efficiently. You'd have the Apples of the construction world buying full kitchen-assemblies or pre-plumbed-and-electrified-and-insulated-walls or whatever from the Samsungs of the construction world.
There is a stigma to owning them in lots of places though.
There is a ton of prefabrication in construction already. There are also large libraries of shared details.
Most of the bits that are not already prefabricated are the bits that don't have simple interfaces. Either to each other or to their surrounding environment.
Build all the plumbing into those walls.
Build all the wiring into those walls.
Build all the windows and doors and other openings into those walls.
Then try to put those walls together in a way that connects all the plumbing and all the wiring.
Now, let's look at the real world, at least here in the US.
Yes, there is a national electrical code that covers many parts that aspect, but lots of other codes vary on a city by city or even neighborhood by neighborhood basis. And your HOA can have some of their own codes that you're also required to honor.
How can you have a single central location that can build all those prefab walls according to all those different codes, and have them all pre-approved?
Your service life is also going to take a hit due to having a lot more of the most unreliable aspects in construction - a joint.
But if it's just the problem of connecting various kinds of pre-built conduit in lego-like walls, yes it would be a hard problem but it seems solvable in itself. Especially, you don't to have just fixed pieces. rather you can have pieces whose routining "logic" is adjustable after that fact (switch the flow of pipes from an internal panel of the wall). And you could have an app for verifying a given arrangement could work, before you ordered your "lego" set.
Is there no "one best way" that is compatible with all local codes?