To my taste, public architectural design jumped off a cliff into the pit of absurdity and defiant ugliness in the 60's and has never recovered. If you want a commercial building you get a glass box. If you want a government building you get some kind of hideous monster.

Interestingly, I've often noticed that the ugliest building on a University campus is usually the School of Architecture! At Yale, that was definitely the case. The School of Architecture inhabits the only public building ever actually built of the "brutalist" school of design. The name they gave their own design movement says it all.