When Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), designed by German architect Josef Paul Kleihues in accord with his theory of “poetic rationalism,” opened in 1996, its 151,000 square-foot interior—distinguished by barrel vaulted galleries around an atrium—was well received. But critical reaction to its exterior—a five-story symmetrical composition clad in a relentless grid of cast aluminum and limestone panels—was decidedly negative. Blair Kamin, writing in the Chicago Tribune, dismissed it as “a cold, colorless culture palace.” Stanley Tigerman called it “an embarrassment.”

MCA’s unyielding geometry was the last gasp of neo-rationalism, a stripped down classical language that had flourished in the postmodern 70s and 80s. Just one year after MCA’s completion, the opening of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao heralded the hegemony of a very different style.