@augustus @sim @Ricotta I was about to say autistic, but some kind of heretic (protestant) is also a plausible explanation :P

all of history until like 5 minutes ago, all over the planet everything was decorated, painted, sculpted in some way, then a bunch of autistic cultists somehow took over the architecture schools and inflicted ugliness and misery on everyone (high modernism did more evil than ugly buildings and lifeless depressing plazas, but they're the most visible traces of it)