The Great Lakes have a certain look, yes.
New England has a certain look. The Mid-Atlantic cities have a certain look. Industrial cities in the Northeast have a certain look. When these places were built, travel and transport were slow and expensive, and so regional vernaculars proliferated much as they had in the Old World for thousands of years.
When you go South and West, the cities are generally less distinctive because they're newer, and were built after everything started to look like everything else.
Modern suburbs all look the same, whether they're in suburban Chicago, Atlanta or Dallas. Toll Brothers or KB Homes only have so many designs. There are exceptions of course, like Florida's thing for Spanish Revival architecture, but that's deliberate rather than the result of a local vernacular that developed organically.
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." - Isaac Asimov
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