Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- The New Museum of Contemporary Art, a pile of six shiny boxes that softly glistens amid the grime of Manhattan's Bowery, isn't a great work of architecture. That seems to have been the point of the design of the building, which opens to the public tomorrow.

``The architecture sets the stage for art,'' director Lisa Phillips explained in an interview. Actually, it almost vanishes entirely.

This wasn't the expected outcome. One reason is that Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based Sejima + Nishizawa/ Sanaa are seen as stars on the rise. The 60,000-square-foot New Museum also has long been anticipated because so many grander museum expansions (the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Dia Art Foundation) have fallen by the wayside.

In their first New York project, Sejima and Nishizawa have avoided stylistic flourishes and sculptural theatricality. The architecture will never overwhelm the contemporary art the museum champions, which can be provisional and tentative.

Those six boxes, wrapped in an aluminum-mesh fabric, step back and to the side as they go up, like novice dancers learning the two-step. The design tidily contrasts with the begrimed Bowery, historically one of New York's most notorious slums.

Now expanding Chinatown collides with gentrifying metal-and- glass condos in the area. Should new development push out the Bowery Mission and the gritty tenements, the museum's pristine profile will lose the minimalist contrast on which it relies too much.

Art as Come-On

The all-glass lobby cannily offers art as a come-on -- in contrast to the utility sinks and delicatessen counters that the surrounding restaurant-equipment wholesalers display on the sidewalk. Even the loading-dock door is glass, proffering cartons as sculpture.

Named for Marcia Tucker, a longtime director who died at a young 66, the lobby presents a high tube of space that opens the full depth of the building, past a curvy partition that defines a shop and beyond cafe chairs nattily woven in colorful tartans, to a gallery behind full-height glass. Metal-mesh panels gauzily diffuse light from inexpensive industrial fixtures -- merely evoking the beauty that a bit more assertiveness might have delivered.

Sanaa has provided three large exhibition spaces on three windowless levels above the lobby. Of varied heights and sizes, they are handsomely proportioned. The building setbacks leave behind slots of roof space that have been fitted with skylights to wash the standard white walls in daylight.

Veils of Glass

Clean lines are a Sanaa signature (veils of glass alone appear to support the firm's recent addition to the Toledo Museum of Art). The building is structurally complex, but Sejima and Nishizawa have buried all that. The beams visible in the ceiling have been obsessively engineered so that they can look the same and have precisely the same spacing -- at great cost and to little aesthetic benefit. Carefully tidied strips of fluorescent lights cast an even, industrial glow.

This kind of lighting, which Phillips called ``European,'' avoids the self-conscious theatricality of spots splashing light within dimly lit rooms. But the smallish, delicately collaged sculptural works on view in the inaugural exhibition (called, aptly, ``Unmonumental'') seem to shrivel in the antiseptic glare.

The architects devoted the upper levels of the museum to education and office spaces as well as a top-floor event room -- the only space that grabs a fascinatingly brutal panorama of Manhattan's Lower East Side.

While the architecture doesn't distract, it somehow also fails to nurture. It made me wish for the way architect David Adjaye shaped single-artist galleries in the just-opened Museum of Contemporary Art Denver to husband the artists' energy.

Stronger Case

In this way, he allows little-known works to make a stronger case for themselves, whether they are provocatively extroverted or mutely self absorbed. Phillips displays the work of 30 sculptors -- too many when the viewers' bond with them isn't strong.

Sanaa's effort is an honest one, but only satisfying if you feel, as many artists and curators do, that art is best served by eliminating the visible hand of the architect. Other contemporary art museums -- most notably Zaha Hadid's Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati -- all but require the artist to engage with the architecture. That's either coercive or at least limiting, but Sanaa has found the other extreme: a deep freeze for art.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg's U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: November 30, 2007 11:14 EST