Like the ruins of Rome and Athens, Albany’s Empire State Plaza may attract tourists of the distant future looking for the most dramatic relics of long-faded power.

Drawn up on a napkin by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and faithfully executed by architect Wallace Harrison*, the megaproject—which includes a vast public plaza, four identical office towers, one extra tall tower, a legislative office building, a justice building, a State museum, and a performing arts center known as “The Egg”—is as close as to Brasilia as you’ll find in the United States.

Built over an unglamorous but active neighborhood and not exactly embraced by Albany’s mayor, the $2 billion Empire State Plaza already represented outdated modernist planning ideas by the time it opened in 1976, three years after Rockefeller had left office.