[georgesimon]

I think, in structural engineering terms, it refers to old natural stone wall [0] construction methods. Some bridges around me are made like this, and they're over a thousand years old.

But I agree that it's not a good adjective because I had the exact same first thought. Both "natural" and "stonewall" would be better, and they're not great names either.

[0]https://duckduckgo.com/?q=natural%20stone%20walls&ko=-1&iax=...

[treflop]

Masonry just refers to working with bricks. It's old as time but we still make stuff out of bricks and you can still be a mason today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry

[georgesimon]

It seems your are saying it is only relates to bricks? But it's not, it's any stone, cut or formed.

[mewpmewp2]

I associate masonry with the old ages, since this is one of the technologies you research in Civ games and back then I think people did have stones in non-standardized shapes and were just trying to fit things together. I'm not native English speaker, so I first heard this term from the games.

[georgesimon]

Yes, it has that association in English.

[rezonant]

There's no gravity here, so the comparison makes no sense. In walls masonry construction produces sheer lines horizontally, an axis gravity is not bearing upon. This feels like taking the metaphor just a tad too literally.

[georgesimon]

I didn't think so, of you look at old stone walls, there's an absence of continuous horizontal or vertical patterns. (However the discussion was a fork, about wall building, so it was quite literal)

[HPsquared]

Surely they would not build like this. You want to avoid vertical shear planes.

[ryanblakeley]

"Dry stack" is another term for that, a stone wall without mortar.

In my opinion, thinking of this as a grid is misguided. It's barely different than flex columns. I would want to be able to have some objects take up more width than one column, or not have clean columns at all. Like "space filling" and "mosaic".

[georgesimon]

I don't think of dry stone walls as masonry myself. I actually think that's the distinction between masonry and not-masonry!

But anyway, I think the second last section on the link, the part that addresses the wrongness of the name, would align with your opinion.