Much ornamental elements of the building need to cross through the parts of the wall that performs environmentally. (Keeps the building, warm, cool, dry, comfortable, inside an energy budget).
Many of these criteria are code driven. For instance. You cannot by energy code build a cast in place concrete wall where the interior and exterior faces are part of that wall. Having said that, buildings like City Hall, Rudolph's Gov Center Service Building, and everything at the Christian Science Center are impossible to build under today's code.
Love a deep set window in a brick wall. Not unless you have tons of money to spend. Love those granite sills? Sure you can have those as long as they are thermally detached from the back-up wall.
Today's requirement for comfort and durability make elements that add richness to a project hard to do, thus expensive. This is exactly why we see so many buildings like Zinc that try to have visual richness by having multiple panel colors, or the Suffolk U buildings that adds visual interest by creating fake depth, or why staggered windows are almost a given. They happen because these are the architectural tool at hand that give the best visual bank for the given buck.
It is simply a direct expression of our values. We value comfort and low operation costs way more than we value architectural richness or urban connections.
As a designer, I am interested in how the criteria and values of a client/owner/project drive these choices and it is always a wild and often surprising ride to see what story the building has to tell. A good designer tries to be honest with these values and does not try to bend and twist them to some uncomfortable form. Unfortunately we see way to often an attempt to meet all the requirements, but add on some scrim of nostalgia, or aesthetic desire that is counter to the other criteria of the project. What you then get is the proverbial "awkward mess". Do a search for that term on AB and you will likely see my name next to it ... and you will likely understand better when architectural values are misaligned.
Sorry for the long post. I often try to have these types of explanations in Private Messages so I don't make peoples eyes start to bleed.
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