I see it most obviously on college campuses.
Some time between the early 1930s and the late 1940s, Americans went from building strong, beautiful buildings of stone and slate on the exterior, with wood finishings and interiors, to ugly cement / steel boxes with nondescript and ugly interiors.
It is like a switch was flipped. No doubt the ideology and morality of the country began to flip at that time as well.
Ugly buildings are easier and cheaper to build and don't require as much skilled labor. Also, there are government buildings intentionally ugly to keep people away... to make citizens uncomfortable if they come close.
I was with a friend years ago and he was showing me a new downtown government building and asked what I thought of it. Since I knew he had been in on the design I tried to think of something nice to say and hemmed and hawed for a while - then he said, "You think it's ugly don't you?" And I said, 'yes but I'm sure other people will like it'. Then he went through a check list of all the things done to make people uncomfortable to come close to the building - even including the extreme up-lighting against the stark structure that would cast long shadows on the wall of a person walking on the sidewalk.
There's actually an 'art' to creating buildings that make people uncomfortable...