Ok and the newer buildings that actually pay a good architect are impressive that add to the beauty of a city as well.
If you live in a city in the US that is just strip malls it's depressing
I used to live in Berkeley. More recently, I lived in South Park, San Diego. Both places have beautiful homes. I would _love_ to be able to build an American Craftsman style home where I live now (Ireland) but it would most likely be deemed "out of character" with the surroundings and refused planning.
http://s3-media3.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/8VGRjHKhUkzpKVPCdeX9X...
Grand Central station in Los Angeles holds its own too http://kmetros.net/wp-content/uploads/galleries/post-95/full...
(Edit - the above was supposed to refer to Union Station in LA, not GCS in NYC.)
Even among modern architecture, there's something to be said for the aspiration, even if not the reality. There's a beauty in the colorful, low-slung storefronts in Ocean Beach, near San Diego. https://goo.gl/maps/tSaHPChSjLo Of course, I could do without the cars and parking lots. Maybe I'm biased by my history but dingy burger joints and head shops near the beach evoke a sense of relaxation I don't get much of in European cities.
Old brick buildings can be really depressing when they're not kept up. And Europe has plenty of unattractive housing projects (https://goo.gl/maps/KLRXsCrck8s )
Here's a ghastly shopping centre near my home in Dublin http://cf.broadsheet.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Phibsboro...
Maybe Europe's advantage was having more time to accumulate buildings, so over time the ugly ones got torn down. Of course, why don't we have more Native American architecture? A nomadic lifestyle combined with materials that generally degrade over centuries? (Notwithstanding that, of course, there may be Native American architects doing interesting work today. I don't know)
But really it's because fewer European cities have been destroyed by car-centric design. Those which have are about as ugly as US suburbia, but I struggle to think of too many examples. Outer neighborhoods of Dublin and Stuttgart come to mind.
Galway is pretty terrible, if you're talking about Ireland, and some of the former industrial heartland of England is pretty bad too (Coventry in particular)
Brick dominates the UK, but the architecture in the continent in general is much more varied and interesting (see Paris, Rome, Prague, Cracow as examples).