Is our taste tacky, or is modern architecture yucky?

Is the problem that most Americans are cretins when it comes to architecture?

Or is it that architects keep designing weird and ugly buildings that aren’t pleasant to look at or be inside?

Or is something else causing the disconnect between buildings architects love and buildings Americans love?

Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal reports on a public opinion survey by the American Institute of Architects to pick Americans’ 150 favorite buildings. The results are quite revealing. The most recent structure in the Top 10 was built in 1982 – Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington. (Sure, the list shows the National Cathedral as a 1990 building, but it took 80 years to build.) After that, the most recent was the Jefferson Memorial (No. 4) in 1943, then the Golden Gate Bridge (No. 5, 1937).

It’s hard to avoid the recognition that Americans simply do not embrace much of contemporary architecture, and they feel a lot of affection for Neoclassical national monuments or other century-old monuments and buildings. And, finally, that they like places whose walls carry emotional weight as well as building load.

Asheville’s Biltmore House (1895) came in at No. 8. No. 1 was the Empire State Building.

Maybe the most controversial choice? It’s probably the lavish (some would say egregiously tacky) Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, which ranked No. 22 – ahead of such architects’ faves as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Bear Run, Pa. (1935, No. 29), Chicago’s Sears Tower (1974, No. 42), and Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003, No. 99).