Fibreglass porches, panelled garage doors and uPVC sash windows have rarely been celebrated in the hallowed halls of the Royal Institute of British Architects, but then Pablo Bronstein isn’t your usual suspect for an exhibition at the Portland Place pile. “I like to think it’s a bit Christine Hamilton,” says the artist, standing in one of the rooms, wallpapered a buttercup yellow, that he has erected in the RIBA’s gallery.

A white dado rail and cornice skirt the walls of a new suite of rooms, on which his framed drawings hang like cheap prints in a mid-range hotel. “I’ve got the same wallpaper in my bathroom,” he adds, clearly taking great pleasure in foisting his cosy domestic vision on an audience more used to stroking raw concrete.

The drawings are the product of Bronstein’s obsessive survey, carried out over the last six years, into the kind of architecture that is everywhere. Hidden in plain sight on every street in the country, often built without an architect at all, it is what he terms “pseudo-Georgian”: the ubiquitous developer filler of generic boxes clad with stick-on bricks, sash windows and mansard roofs that, since the 1970s, has been used for everything from suburban housing developments to inner-city office blocks. It is so common that it has almost gone without comment, blossoming beneath our collective critical radar.

“We are reflected in the architecture we create,” writes Bronstein in his accompanying book, a sequel to his witty 2008 Guide to Postmodern Architecture in London. “The reality is that we have created much more pseudo-Georgian architecture over the last 30 years than any other kind of building. For most of us, it seems, a cheap yellow-brick facade evokes almost effortlessly a rosy everlasting British prosperity.”

His pen and ink drawings, drafted in a quaint style reminiscent of postcards from National Trust gift shops, depict a world oozing with aspiration. There are humble homes gussied up with pediments and plastic porches, as well as banal commercial apartment blocks with facades arranged in vaguely Georgian proportions. In each case, these knocked-up, off-the-peg buildings are depicted as if they are the finest works of Palladio, in prints framed by heaving ornamented swags and overwrought mouldings.

Marvel at a London Waitrose – “the pearl of Holloway Road”, according to Bronstein’s caption – with a cupola-crowned tower floating above its entrance. That oddly proportioned line of columns, running above the shopfront windows, suggest the architect once glimpsed a photograph of Vicenza, but not for long enough. Or revel in the wonders of Harrods Village in Barnes, whose improvised balconies and garages decorated with vertically laid red bricks give it “an unmistakable whiff of the favela”.

The show could be read as a snobbish parody of the tastes of middle England, but Bronstein is more nuanced. “There’s no moral judgement here,” he says. “The project might have started off from hatred, but it developed into love. I want it to be like a guidebook, encouraging people to look at this stuff more closely.”

The exhibition has a timely Brexit air about it, and it will coincide with a paid-for exhibition upstairs by the young neoclassical architect George Saumarez Smith, but that’s simply a delicious coincidence. Bronstein has been preoccupied with the domestic tastes of the aspiring middle classes ever since he was a child. He was born in Argentina, but when he was small his family moved to suburban Neasden, where he would spend happy weekends fondling the tassels in the Laura Ashley concession at the local Homebase.

By the time he was 15, his bedroom was a chintzy wonderland, its walls lovingly painted with trompe-l’oeil classical columns and adorned with candle sconce features, which he would light when family friends came to visit. “It was basically a setting for me to masturbate in,” the 40-year-old says now, with a schoolboy snigger, “but my parents’ friends always cooed dutifully at the decor.”

He remembers being dumbstruck on first encountering World of Interiors magazine in the 1980s, full of Marie Antoinette-style living rooms, and he recently achieved his lifelong ambition of making the cover of the title with a feature on his own Georgian home in London’s Bethnal Green. “I was more excited than if I’d got the cover of Art Forum,” he says, without a hint of irony.

This lifestyle marketing aspect of the pseudo-Georgian industry is exposed in fascinating detail in the RIBA show, with articles and covers from trade magazines of the 1970s and 80s charting the rise of nostalgia as a byproduct of the backlash against brutalist housing estates. “Be wise, build traditional,” advises Building magazine in 1985, beneath a photograph of a pair of Noddy-box homes on a suburban housing estate. “Georgian elegance in glass fibre,” promises another advert, in which a woman proudly shows off a dreary range of panelled front doors.

Bronstein links the pseudo-Georgian boom with the Thatcherite council house policy of right to buy and the Conservative dream of “a nation of homeowners”, seeing people’s lust for tradition in part as a result of being liberated from the hated concrete council estates. What better symbol of home than a style that evokes a cartoon drawing of a house? As Bronstein notes: “The architecture which corresponds to the purchase of a first house, and possibly the first privately owned house in the recent history of a family, should say ‘house’ loudly, clearly and economically.”

The very sobriety of Georgian architecture, meanwhile, is what has made it so commercially expedient. Flat walls of yellow brick and simple grids of windows mean it can fill any plot of land and allow for endless repetition, while the general flimsiness can be hidden behind signifiers of permanence and solidity. Its easy negotiation of building codes and its suitability to historically sensitive areas has made it indispensable to developers, too, so it’s easy to see why this often shoddily built pastiche rubbish has become so endemic.

It may well be a scourge on our cities, but Bronstein’s drawings – holding up a mirror to our national identity – do make you look again, and even spot occasional glimmers of richness in the tat. You might even end up taking pleasure in noticing how a builder used an artful splurge of mastic in the facade of a block of flats, to suggest the presence of two homes. As Bronstein says: “There is nothing more moving than to find brilliance in unexpected places.”

• Pablo Bronstein: Conservatism, or the Long Reign of Pseudo-Georgian Architecture is at the RIBA, London, until 11 February
• Pseudo-Georgian London by Pablo Bronstein is published by Koenig Books, £15