Last week, 20 years after the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center opened its doors, the Empire State Development Corporation published its dreams for a proposed renovation and expansion. This newest avatar, to be completed by 2010, promises to be a considerable improvement over what we see today – a dark and surly monolith whose cubic mass deflects any trace of human warmth.The new structure will expand the center up to 40th Street, while increasing its interior to from 700,000 square feet to 1.3 million in Phase 1 and 1.7 million in Phase 2. There are also plans for a major new hotel across the street.

But for New Yorkers, the most important change will be the way the center behaves in the context of our urban landscape. Designed by the recently deceased James Ingo Freed, the old Javits Center’s practical and aesthetic inadequacies were apparent from the day it opened. Spatially illegible, it has no clear entrances, and those that do exist are so diminutive they look like back doors. Its dark glass is faintly repulsive, while its huge and uninflected length denies the human eye any means of gauging its scale.

Worse still, what is likely the largest single building on the island of Manhattan is accessible to the public only along its eastern facade. Both laterally and to the west, facing the Hudson, it seems to rebuke the urban circumstances into which it has been set, as though its greatest ambition were to block our access to the waterfront that we have come to rediscover only in recent years. Add to this that once you have crossed the breadth of Eleventh Avenue – something few pedestrians can do with without a shudder of apprehension – you descend into the building along a paltry road that is indistinguishable from a loading platform.

All told, Freed’s Javits Center could stand as an object lesson in how not to integrate a building into its urban fabric. Indeed, it is so much a lodestar of bad planning that, if one were blindly to invert each part of its exterior, the result would almost certainly be good.

If the renderings are to be believed, the new structure, designed by Richard Rogers with the local firms of Fox & Fowle and A. Epstein & Sons International, will form a dramatic contrast to what we see today: a sun-bedabbled, tree-lined concourse brimming with happy pedestrians as they stroll along Eleventh Avenue. But before such visions become a reality, the designers will have their work cut out for them. Absent some very ingenious maneuvers,the massive autoroutes of the West Side Highway and Eleventh Avenue would seem to doom this stretch of the city to the status of an eternal freeway.

Then again, if planning could make a success, against all odds, of the tiny park in Columbus Circle, surrounded as it is by traffic, perhaps anything is possible. And the recent completion of the highly accomplished Hudson River Ferry Terminal, across the street from the Javits Center on Twelfth Avenue, strongly suggests that a new sense of design and visual tact is starting to infiltrate the far West Side.

Whatever the contributions of the two other firms involved, the new and admittedly very preliminary renderings for the Javits Center seem of a piece with Mr. Rogers’s work in Europe and Asia. Mr. Rogers is not the sort of architect to fashion iconic buildings, if by “iconicity,” a concept much discussed in design circles these days, is meant the ability to create dazzlingly irregular and stridently original forms. In this he is very different from Frank Gehry or his compatriot and fellow knight Norman Foster, whose sinuous structures are unparalleled and often unforgettable.

No, Mr. Rogers’s originality consists in his use of a vocabulary that he has inherited and then developed into a signature variation. This vocabulary is evident both in his latest plan for the Javits Center and in one of his earliest projects, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he and Renzo Piano completed 30 years ago. In both, Mr. Rogers hovers somewhere between the angular language of Modernism and the theatrics of International Postmodernism at the point where it makes common cause with a specifically British pre-modernism.The idiom he invokes is usually that of the industrial past, whose erewhile functionalism has been reduced to a pompous, decorative idiom that nevertheless preserves something of its original force.

Into this potentially severe style descends, at regular intervals along the Javits facade, an entirely unanticipated splash of magenta that recalls not only the palette of the Centre Pompidou, but that of the Brighton Pavilion, designed some 200 years ago. In both, we find a robust use of color that is not generally associated with the British, but that has marked their visual culture at every step from the 18th-century interiors of Robert Adam all the way to the abstract splotches of contemporary painters such as Howard Hodgkin.

It is too early to say if the modular portamento of Mr. Rogers’s Javits Center facade will prove tedious. On the basis of the renderings, the ultra-thin linearity of its pylons, interacting visually with the gridded curtain wall behind them, would seem to form a finespun web whose insubstantiality recalls a similar quality in the Salisbury Cathedral, one the renowned art historian Nikolaus Pevsner considered the essence of Englishness.

Although the cantilevered roof of the facade along Eleventh Avenue also has precedents in Mr. Rogers’s earlier practice, it may have a very different genesis. Oddly, poignantly, it recalls the plans by Kohn Pedersen Fox for that ill-fated West Side Stadium that was supposed to rise up on what will now be the southward expansion of the new Javits Center.