Riegl wrote the "Stilfragen" while employed as director of the textile department at what was then the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie (today the Museum für angewandte Kunst) in Vienna. His primary intention was to argue that it was possible to write a continuous history of ornament. This position is argued in explicit opposition to that of the "technical-materialist" school, according to which "all art forms were always the direct products of materials and techniques" and that ornamental "motifs originated spontaneously throughout the world at a number of different locations." Riegl associates this view with the followers of Gottfried Semper, who had advanced a related argument in his "Der Stil in den technischen Künsten; oder praktischer Ästhetik" ("Style in the technical arts; or practical aesthetics", 1878-79). However, Riegl consistently disassociates Semper's followers from Semper himself, writing that