Kronfuss had to try twice. In 1912 the governor rejected his first proposal, a neocolonial design judged out of step with an Argentina hungry for progress. So Kronfuss returned with a neoclassical building, all columns and symmetry, and this time it was accepted. The site mattered as much as the style: a prominent corner beside what is now Plaza España, in the newly fashionable Nueva Córdoba neighborhood, where the city was reinventing itself. Only a small portion of Kronfuss's full vision was ever built. Even so, the structure announced an ambition rare for its time - that a provincial capital in the Argentine interior deserved a temple to art as fine as any in the capital.

The museum did not become the Caraffa until 1950, when it took the name of Emilio Caraffa - a painter who had shaped art in Córdoba long before. Born in Catamarca in 1862, Caraffa settled in the city in 1896 and founded its Provincial Academy of Fine Arts. He began as a landscape painter and turned, after 1900, toward post-impressionism, a style largely ignored by Argentine collectors that he helped bring into view. When the province first organized a painting and sculpture gallery in 1911, it was Caraffa, then directing the academy, who was entrusted with the task. Naming the museum after him decades later closed a circle: the institution honored the man who had helped teach the city to see.

The collection grew the patient way, painting by painting, donation by donation. It began with a single landscape bought in 1910, kept at first in a government office. Over the following decades the museum acquired works by the great figures of Córdoba and Argentine art - Fernando Fader, Emilio Pettoruti, Juan Carlos Castagnino, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, the sculptor Pablo Curatella Manes - alongside lithographs by Pablo Picasso and paintings by Francisco Goya and the Japanese-French master Tsuguharu Foujita. Today nine exhibition halls hold the result, supported by a restoration workshop, the provincial art archive, and a library named for Deodoro Roca, the writer who became the museum's first director in the building's quiet opening year.

A century in, the old building could no longer hold its own ambitions. Fragmented rooms, awkward ceilings, and a difficult entrance hindered the simple act of moving through the galleries. So between 2006 and 2008 the architects GGMPU and Lucio Morini reimagined the museum, more than tripling its usable space. Rather than erase Kronfuss's work, they wrapped and connected it. A new structure of metal and glass - sheeted in panels that shift between transparency and opacity - threads the old buildings together while letting each keep its character. A street-level square became the new entrance, finally solving the access problem, with a café and art library opening onto it. The neoclassical temple now sits inside a luminous modern frame, old stone and new glass in continuous conversation.