At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

Louis and did odd jobs in New York.  
Gravagnuolo Benedetto (1995).  204.

In this and many other essays he contributed to the elaboration of a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture. He was influential in European Modern architecture and in his essay Ornament and Crime he abandoned the aesthetic principles of the Vienna Secession.