Popular modernism?
@vpostrel made the wise point to me that modernism is more popular in California and Chicago than it is in Europe (and perhaps the East Coast of the US). No doubt this helps explain the transatlantic aesthetics divide.
One reason will be that modernist buildings are more premium in the US. The UK, for example, was so poor after the Second World War for decades, and there was in relative terms so little private building, that the vast majority of postwar modernism was cheap, shoddy, low quality social housing, plus public buildings, often either utilitarian or aggressively experimental.
In California there are a great many premium modernist private houses, meaning that the style is both a higher quality on average and has more associations with prestige, status, and wealth.
Here is a rarer British example of premium postwar modernism — The Priory in the Cator Estate in Blackheath. The standard of the materials and details is obvious. A lot of our normal associations with postwar modernism fall away.
There are still obvious features that strike most people as wrong (the horizontal windows, uPVC, the raw simple sills and lack of a cornice), but by and large I’d expect a significant minority and maybe even a majority of survey respondents to say that they like this.