The principles of architectural design, as Loos himself taught them, were entirely open to the future. The architect could not prescribe in advance the future forms of life or forms of culture; changes in those external forms would call for new creative responses from the architect himself[...] In his buildings, Loos's concentration on "functional necessities" at conce led to the elimination of that meaningless detail and decoration that had been a feature, both of conventional bourgeois Viennese architecture, and of its art nouveau successor. Stylistically, as a result, Loos's principles imposed on his designs a radical simplification, involving the sacrifice of all nonessentials; yet in his work, as in his theory, style remained the servant of use.

It was the generation that followed Loos and built upon his work that created the modern style in architecture, as such - that is, that took the first products of Loos's technical simplification and stylized them, so producing the familiar concrete-and-glass slabs or shoe boxes to which the name "modern architecture" became attached from the late 1920s on.

In architecture as in music, then, the technical innovations worked out before 1914 by the "critical" generation of Schonberg and Loos were formalized in the 1920s and 1930s, so becoming the basis for a compulsory antidecorative style which eventually became as conventional as the overdecorative style which it displaced. [...] In each case, novel techniques [...] were first introduced in order to deal with artistic or intellectural problems left over from the late nineteenth century - so having the status of interesting and legitimate new _means_ - only to acquire after a few years the status of _ends_, through becoming the stock in trade of a newly professionalized school of modern poets, abstract artists or philosophical analysts. In this way, the professionalization of culture bred a new race of functionaries who have been ready to impose a novel orthodoxy, based on the idolization of new abstract techniques and structures[.]

... just as inevitable is the well-known three-step sequence of reactions that meets the introduction of a new methodological principle: (1) "it's trivial"; (2) "it cannot work"; (3) "that's how I did it all along anyway".