Here is a good WSJ piece on that question. Excerpt:
For example, members of the fine arts commission in 2020 recommended that the Fed use more marble to better match the original buildings. The Fed had initially proposed using more glass in an effort to represent the Fed’s transparency, according to the commission’s meeting minutes. The Fed amended the design to incorporate more marble.
To be clear, I am fine with an unabashedly elitist approach to designing or redesigning a central bank building, at least provided one’s domestic politics is able to sustain such a thing. I am glad for instance that the Cleveland Fed is quite a nice building, and I wish more DC architecture were of comparable quality, noting that these days we are not very good at constructing Beaux Arts buildings, and for DC modernist styles do not always fit the surroundings very well, thus creating a broader dilemma.
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