Furthermore, the authors note that, despite widespread recognition of cultural change, people continue to cling to styles and forms from other eras. Even in the midst of industrialization, certain anachronistic aesthetic values survive and even flourish. For the authors, the radical novelty of the present social conditions must be accepted as a true departure from the past, and “building-art”, which has lagged behind other cultural activities, must be revolutionized in order to develop in ways which had been, until the emergence of these conditions, impossible. They also sought to show that this pragmatic orientation to modernity is not some import from elsewhere or a philosophical innovation, but rather is a particularly domestic approach rooted in traditional Swedish values of “straightforwardness, moderation, and friendliness".
