My favourite example of this is a split between Italianate and Gothic forms for civic buildings in Britain in the 19th Century. Narrow and pointy windows signalled indigenous national styles, the Anglican church, tradition, and the Conservative party. Wide and rounded ones an internationalist mercantile outlook, the Enlightenment, Nonconformism in religion, and the Liberal party.

The amusing thing is that to modern eyes most of these grand expensive civic monuments speak much more to the era (definitively Victorian) than the motivations of the people who chose the designers. They have far more in common with each other, to my eyes, than they do with a Tudor mansion or a 1930s public library.