The newly renovated Parsons the New School for Design, like most living things in New York, has become adept at making do with the hand it has been dealt. Specifically, its lot has been to inhabit a dark warren of interlocking chambers in four buildings, very imperfectly conjoined and clustering around a central air shaft.

Since the early 1970s, when Parsons moved to Fifth Avenue and 13th Street from Sutton Place, its architectural circumstances were an object lesson in the meaning of the term “ad hoc.” The problem was not the buildings themselves. Some of them, from the early years of the last century, even possessed a trace of that poetic majesty that architects once tried to impart to all their labors. Rather, the problem was the institutional negligence, tactlessness, even philistine indifference to one’s visual surroundings that — oddly enough — often marks the haunts of people who profess the visual arts.

The first order of business, back then, was to suppress two ornate portals on 13th Street and then, figuratively speaking, to drive a truck through the middle of them, covering in glass the giant hole thus caused and turning it into a drably utilitarian entrance. But due to almost breathtaking maladroitness, that glass did nothing to open up the interiors to the street. In the truest spirit of 1970s institutional drabness, the interiors were given over to the pure functionalism of security offices and garbage dumps, boxed off from the rest of the building and separated from the street by windowless walls. At street level, pedestrians looked in and saw nothing.

Now, after a $19 million makeover, Parsons has been fundamentally reconceived at ground level and the improvements are considerable. In the new 32,800-square-foot Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Lyn Rice Architects has undertaken a task that is both Herculean and largely thankless, in the sense that the four buildings are too discordant to form a single convincing whole. Wisely then, the architects have embraced the divergent styles and clashing floor levels to create a totality that somehow works. If it accomplished nothing else, this plan would constitute an improvement simply by shining a sustained intelligence onto the sort of intolerable conditions that only nearly four decades of thoughtlessness could have called into being in the first place. Simply to rid the place of all those haphazard accumulations, to liberate it and open it up, as Lyn Rice Architects has done, would be an estimable achievement in itself.

As it happens, however, the firm has managed to effect that utilitarian enhancement with considerable style and even wit. The guiding concept of the renovations is the notion of an interior “urban quad,” an idea that presumably owes something to the “vertical campus” that architect William Pedersen memorably created, a few years ago, at Baruch College on Lexington Avenue and 24th Street. At the point where all of the Parsons buildings converge, you look up and see, towering above the glazed ceiling, their brick-clad backsides. There was a time when such a view would have seemed dreary, ugly, and sleazy. But the architects have gauged the temper of the times and have understood that this gritty, hard-bitten vision of Gotham possesses as much poetry for contemporaries as the ornate neoclassicism of the buildings’ exteriors held for New Yorkers 100 years ago.

Within this quad, or contiguous with it, are several discrete architectural pavilions whose general stylistic autonomy enables them all to fit together. Surely there is a dominant style to the place, one of irregularly angular deconstructivism, with few if any curves anywhere. But the materials are divergent: glossy, neon-green metal accents, gray concrete floors, stainless steel ramps. And a swath of yellow poplar bark clads the exterior wall of the Student Orientation Center — the one organic touch in the entire design.

Each of these pavilions occupies a clearly legible box and reads like a riposte to the tasteless carving up of the interior in decades past. Each space, however, has its distinctive character, from the Apollonian calm of the main art gallery to the somber brown woods of the auditorium and the mod splash of glass and green fabric in the archival study room.

For all its originality, however, Parsons’s new quad is very much a product of its time. This fact is apparent above all in the deconstructivist idiom to which I have referred, with shifting floor plans and bold, almost mannered, spatial difficulties embedded into the structure.

LRA shares with many of their contemporaries a clear taste for all that is low-tech and rough-hewn. The ceilings at Parsons are stripped down to show their girders and mechanical core. In a tour de force, the main elevator shaft has been overwhelmed by a metal cage bristling with silver pipes. The affection for this sort of thing was fundamental to the architecture firm SANAA’s recently completed New Museum on the Bowery. But at the New Museum, the cheap materials and cheap workmanship just looked cheap. At Parsons there is, in spite of everything, a palpable sense of grace, taste, and refinement. Better still, students and visitors alike will experience a distinct sense of well-being simply by inhabiting these new spaces. The attainment of that feeling is, or should be, one of the very highest aims of architecture.