Hiding "artificial" things isn't universal in the west. From the 1950s, plastic was very much in style. It's a backlash starting in the 90s against some excess

Hiding "artificial" things isn't universal in the west. From the 1950s, plastic was very much in style. It's a backlash starting in the 90s against some excesses (pollution, traffic, Tschernobyl) that saw a rising appreciation for the "natural". That had benefits such as the environmental movement and liveable cities. But it can, again, be misunderstood. The naturalistic fallacy that is not trusting vaccines because "ingredients") is also one of way it manifests, although it's almost entirely on the political right because culture war forces are stronger. It's the third time in a row the right has frankensteined a putatively left-wing concept, after Christianity and Postmodernism. For architecture, the Bauhaus' form-follows-function ideas are still the starting point. They carry some economic policy ideas as well, from the times after WW2 when housing needed to be rebuild and any ornamental excess was seen as resources that were wasted while people were starving and homeless. Thus came the high-rises (in both east and west Europe). This idea of "wastefulness" endures. If you rebuild something old, you will be wasteful in that you recreate structures and use materials and maybe methods that have long been superseded. You might also find yourself defending rather outdated ideas of class difference trying to explain why ceiling heights go down as you go up the floors, with the 1st floor "bel êtage" having 15' ceilings and the top floor's servant quarters barely more than half that. The stucco decoration on a facade used to show that you were rich, because these were elaborately hand-crafted in-place at the time. Now, they are stamped in a factory and glued on. They are tacky because it is false signalling.