Lucy Williams’s dainty relief collages of mid-20th century architectural settings offer a cute set of conundrums. The finesse of her delivery is at once endearing and alienating – an appropriate mixed blessing for an artist who looks to yesterday’s utopianism for her motifs.

Ms. Williams (b. 1972) culls vintage architectural magazines for images of spanking new postwar buildings and interiors, which she lovingly recreates in bas-relief. These are worked in a variety of papers, cards, corrugated plastic, foam-board, acetate, balsa wood, wool tapestry, and needlepoint, and encapsulated in Plexiglas boxes. Her technique has the efficient refinement of architectural models.

The architectural projects she depicts include luxury private residences, hotels, gas stations, public housing, and swimming pools. One dwelling looks very much like a variant of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Il., with its sheer horizontality confronting an abundance of foliage, lovingly re-created, leaf by leaf, in Ms. Williams’s collage. But in general she veers away from signature buildings in favor of more generic civic and commercial designs. The architecture celebrated is a generation removed from such mentors as the Bauhaus or le Corbusier; here, instead, is Modernism in its period of ubiquity and proliferation.

Like much of the architecture of that period, Ms.Williams’s works seem to be selling not just individual projects so much as a whole ideology. The chirpy, upbeat quality of her clean whites, assertive primary colors, and jolly pastels conveys a notion that fresh design is a harbinger of a brave new world. Far from lived-in and weathered, Ms. Williams’s pristine structures are shown in a highly idealized, sanitized state.As reliefs, they come out from the wall to greet us, while preserving their pictorial, illustrational aloofness. With their clean colors and precise lines, they exist as if in the mind’s eye of their architect, free from such grubby realities as human usage, let-down materials, pollution, decay.

“Flags” (2006) shows the interior of an Olympic swimming pool, with stadium seating receding in space. Not only does Ms.Williams give us, within a span of 33 inches, every buoy on its rope, every gold light fixture up in the rafters, the flags of individual countries in the distance, and the hand rails receding to the vanishing point; she also manages to convey with fastidious precision results on the scoreboard, and reflections in the pool.

In “Frankfurt Airport” (2006), a turbulent gray sky, conveyed in fabric, rhymes with the gleaming new terminal; a needlepoint delineates and textures the clouds. “The Glass-Walled House in Summer” (2005) shows that no shortcut is even considered in the conveyance of dense foliage. But this is not a photo-realist treatment of foliage so much as a stage-set evocation, a nonreductive idealization of nature.

The nutty perfectionism of Ms. Williams’s technique suggests wholehearted emotional investment in the refined elegance it depicts. She enters the spirit not just of the architectural design of a bygone period but the illustrational techniques that were used to sell it.

The viewer who, like me, has a soft spot for the architecture depicted can enjoy the serial patterns, serene color, and geometric precision of these reliefs without having to worry about people living or working cheek-byjowl in drafty, leaking buildings with paper-thin walls. The irony is external to Ms. Williams’s handling, implicit in what we know or suspect will have happened to these developments in the half century since they were built. The cinematic title of the show – “The Day the Earth Stood Still” – also evokes a sense of doom and suspicion about Modernist architecture, a sense that utopia can easily flip into dystopia. (The title of her first show with McKee, two years ago, was “Stranger than Paradise”).

Ms. Williams’s precisionist touch, which denies any expressivity to the hand, is the most perplexing and suggestive aspect of her work. Her pristine materials have none of the inherent poetry or humor of found materials in traditional collage. She insists on clean, spare, efficient delivery of information. Yet she will make mind-boggling efforts to achieve illustrational accuracy, rather than resorting to schematic representations – which, in a way, would make as much sense of the aesthetic she is dealing with.

The artistic investigation of cool, clinical modernist design environments has precedents in Ms.Williams’s native Britain. Patrick Caulfield’s quasi-ironic Pop purism, Ivor Abrahams’s sculptural evocation of tamed nature in synthetic materials, and Julian Opie’s neo-conceptual play with signage all come to mind.

But the sheer labor-intensity of Ms. Williams’s technique sets her apart. She represents a commitment to craft at odds with the quick, cheap, functionalist aesthetic she celebrates. The viewer’s head must spin trying to reconcile the skill and patience that goes into the facture of works that are neither expressive nor, in formal terms, pictorially ingenious. Is Ms.Williams a Zen adept or a one-woman alienated proletariat?

Until May 6 (745 Fifth Avenue, between 57th and 58th Streets, 212-688-5951).