> In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive.

Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.

This is the Anamosa state prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamosa_State_Penitentiary#/me...

This is Anamosa middle school: https://www.anamosa.k12.ia.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG...

> Not remotely cost effective.

This is the main building of the Ontario college of art and design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCAD_University#/media/File:OC...

Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get.

The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/

Most people prefer traditional architecture