Comment by walrus01

> I've always wondered why we haven't seen a broad architectural movement returning to highly ornate decorative facades

If you follow trends in USA single family detached home construction, the trend is rather the opposite direction. Extreme rises in inflation generally, price of vehicles, construction materials are sending house builders down paths of using the cheapest, shoddiest possible materials and then slapping a veneer of normalcy on top of it. The amount of MDF and oriented strand board in use is greater than it's ever been. Now they're going back to aluminum wiring, copper clad aluminum cat5e cable, and similar. You should see the horrific results of a framing inspection (pre-drywall) done by a professional, neutral and diligent inspector in the average single family home tract development these days.

Modern "Architecture" has taken the trends of the mid-late 1990s McManson to its ultimate extreme of building "luxury" housing that is in reality anything but. Just good enough to sell, then the shoddiness in construction and maintenance becomes somebody else's problem.