Architect and planner Daniel Burnham instructed us to think big, but bigness is a surprisingly tricky business. A single vision, applied across many acres, is usually deadening, and recent attempts to dress up single buildings with multiple facades (and Meijer stores are only the oddest looking of the bunch, and not really atypical) often results in a Disneyfied artificiality that would be quaint if we didn't have to live with it.
Richard Layman has some thoughts. For myself, it's partly a problem of matching developer size to land costs. If land costs too much, development as a whole is squeezed out. If land costs too little, it's easy to build into bigness. Of course, the regulations that control how and where and what we build play a huge role, too.
One useful innovation, to my mind, was what was done in Fall Creek Place, in Indianapolis. FCP won the American Planning Association's Smart Growth award in 2003, and they did it, in part, by being very careful with how people got paid. They split the project's responsibilities up, so that the developer worked with many different architects to create a portfolio of house plans, ranging in size but fit to the historical character of the existing neighborhood. (Which neighborhood, incidentally, was 80% vacant at the start of the project, due to 30 years of aggressive demolition.) The developer connected homebuyers with architects, but was only paid a flat fee based on lots sold. Which means that they didn't have an incentive to upsize the homebuyers.
The neighborhood looks great now--I visited in 2004, and again in 2006, and while you can tell a lot of it is new, it has that hard to articulate balance between being stylistically consistent without deadening conformity that we look for in our great older neighborhoods. The best part, though, is that it's affordable--half of the homes are for low to middle income families. It's also transit accessible and pedestrian friendly. (It would almost have to be--it was built using all of the lot lines from the original platting in the 1940s or so.)
So, while we should make no little plans, maybe sometimes we want to make little buildings.