During the twentieth century though, a number of now renowned architects visited Japan including Frank Lloyd Wright, Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Neutra and Antonin Raymond. These architects, among others, played significant roles in bringing the Japanese influence to Western modernism. Influence from the Far East was not new in America at this time. During the eighteenth and a large part of the nineteenth centuries, a taste for Chinese art and architecture existed and often resulted in a "superficial copying". The Japanese influence was different however. The modernist context, and the time leading up to it, meant that architects were more concerned with "the problem of building, rather than in the art of ornamenting". The simplicity of Japanese dwellings contrasted the oft-esteemed excessive decoration of the West. The influence of Japanese design was thus not so much that it was directly copied but rather, "the west discovered the quality of space in traditional Japanese architecture through a filter of western architectural values".