For some, architecture has a unique ability to transpose fantasies into reality. And if you were an urbane heterosexual male in the last half of the 20th century, there weren’t many better fantasy generators than Playboy. In its pages, this debonair lifestyle was told and sold through Modern architecture and design: swinging glass and steel bachelor pads as naked of ornament as female models were of clothing. Playboy published articles on titans such as Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as iconoclastic oddballs such as Buckminster Fuller and Ant Farm.

Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979 puts this history on display at the Elmhurst Art Museum in suburban Chicago. In the magazine’s pages, Modernism became an aesthetic platform for a sexually-liberated lifestyle. Says exhibition curator and Princeton architecture professor Beatriz Colomina, “You couldn’t have sex, apparently, in a traditional home.”