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Modernists adopted Loos's moralistic argument as well as Sullivan's maxim.

In 1908, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos wrote an allegorical essay titled " Ornament and Crime" in reaction to the elaborate ornament used by the Vienna Secession architects. Debate on the functionality of ornamentation

Sullivan's assistant Frank Lloyd Wright adopted and professed the same principle in a slightly different form-perhaps because shaking off the old styles gave them more freedom and latitude. Thus, "form follows function", as opposed to "form follows precedent". If the shape of the building was not going to be chosen out of the old pattern book, something had to determine form, and according to Sullivan it was going to be the purpose of the building. Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in late 19th-century Chicago at a moment in which technology, taste and economic forces converged and made it necessary to break with established styles. It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies, in a twinkling. Where function does not change, form does not change. Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. For Sullivan this was distilled wisdom, an aesthetic credo, the single "rule that shall permit of no exception". Sullivan actually wrote "form ever follows function", but the simpler and less emphatic phrase is more widely remembered. In 1896, Sullivan coined the phrase in an article titled The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, though he later attributed the core idea to the Roman architect, engineer, and author Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who first asserted in his book De architectura that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas - that is, it must be solid, useful, and beautiful. Sullivan was Greenough's much younger compatriot and admired rationalist thinkers such as Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, as well as Greenough himself. In 1947, a selection of his essays was published as Form and Function: Remarks on Art by Horatio Greenough. Greenough's writings were for a long time largely forgotten, and were rediscovered only in the 1930s. The maxim is often incorrectly attributed to the sculptor Horatio Greenough (1805–1852), whose thinking mostly predates the later functionalist approach to architecture. The architect Louis Sullivan coined the maxim, which resumes Viollet-le-Duc's théories : a rationally designed structure may not necessarily be beautiful but no building can be beautiful that does not have a rationally designed structure.