Janik and Toulmin's book Wittgenstein's Vienna deliberately ranges all over, it brings a whole host of intellectual threads together, arts, sciences, politics, journalism - from the pre-WWI period into an intimidating, but also rather heady and overpowering, mix. Though not the heart of the book, their concluding chapters are the easiest to quote.
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.This fits into a broader point about the twentieth century focus on establishing academic guilds.
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[.]I should probably take a step back. Janik and Toulmin's first point, well before this quote, is that the intellectual environment of pre-war Vienna was extremely intertwined, eg with Wittgenstein learning piano from Schonberg. They also continually argue that the political and broader social settlement of late Hapsburg Vienna was deliberately static, in a brittle way, that meant public forms were disconnected from everyday problems. The point here is that, freed from these constraints, and with the opportunity to reshape society at large that arose in the post-war period, the first reaction of the intellectuals was to create new social orthodoxies to contain experimentation. (There are echoes here with the late Ming sketched by Ray Huang in 1587: A Year of No Significance.) There are feedback loops here that seem familiar from smaller scales and shorter time periods in business and software. As Bertrand Meyer wrote in Object Oriented Software Construction:
... 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".
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