Softening the Edges

摘要

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."