Anyway, try out DC buildings some time. You'll be stunned. What people need to remember is that our country is from the beginning purposeful. It's when we lose purpose and instead look to method that we are lost. Here's an example: welfare as a purpose is that no one starve. Welfare as a method is where people use welfare. I see the same in our buildings, one way or another.
The Postmodernist, Foucault or Jameson, would say that these buildings were meant to oppress the people, that they are nothing but silly teleological histography. If they had their way we would tear down all those white men.
Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan:
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles
[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature. (Hobbes, p 444)
You perceive these developments as a loss of objective and a focus on method for its own sake. The movement away from the original American objective has been, however, completed into a logical sense of the word: from Founding Fathers' America to the socialist one. Of course, in reality, that transition is not yet complete, which is why we still have a chance to reverse it. But the objectives have been substituted; new methods serve new objectives.