The Brutalist style of architecture that ruled the 1960s and ’70s and was relegated to the dustbin of history in the ’80s now rises again, bolder than ever, at the new Baryshnikov Arts Center on 37th Street, just east of Tenth Avenue.

The meteorological circumstances in which I first saw the building were perfectly suited to this style. Dark and stormy nights will do for Gothic cathedrals and English manors, but the appropriate climate for Brutalism is that dank grayness of an urban winter’s afternoon. It is the sort of weather, and this is the sort of building, that make you think of infrastructure and the West Side Highway. On this day, the grayness of the air matched the grayness of the building’s concrete mass – and both colluded to oppress the soul with a sense of hopelessness.

But not all Brutalist buildings are equal. Though concrete – whose bare essence more or less defines this style – is rarely a pleasing medium, there are some occasions where it can be deployed to elegant effect. The beauty of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute cannot be divorced from the concrete in which it was conceived, a concrete that almost attains the status of marble. By contrast, there is something paltry about the material presence of concrete in the Economist Plaza in London, designed by the inventors of the style, Peter and Alison Smithson; you can feel the leaks and the mildew even when they are not really there.

The Baryshnikov center uses concrete with some flair. A glazed atrium, rising through much of the building’s six stories, but not its two-story-setback, occupies the center of the facade and is flanked by two sullen masses of concrete. Inside, this atrium possesses all the vertiginous insistence of a Piranesian prison, a sense that extends to the three theaters and four studios that it houses.

Here, as in most other applications of the Brutalist style, the architect, John Averitt, lays claim to an aggressive honesty, an honesty so honest as to seem almost dishonest,in the sense that its selffelicitating lack of ornament and its denuded charmlessness may just be a big act.For the first time in the history of architecture, Brutalism appears as a period style, and as such, despite its invoking the ultra-serious, ultra-modern ’70s, it becomes almost ornamental.

As for Mikhail Baryshnikov and the other dancers who will use the space, I suppose their point is to show that they are too serious, too dedicated to their art to consent to the fripperies of pleasing details. One is here to work, the architecture proclaims.This is a factory of dance. All snowflakes and sugar plums will be shown the door!

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The scaffolding has finally come down from most of the Metropolitan Museum’s facade, and the place has not looked this good in living memory. As it majestically unfolds from Richard Morris Hunt’s centerpiece through McKim, Mead, and White’s wings to their noble pavilions, the Met gleams like the sort of sunlit classical vision that you see in dreams, the sort that fired the mind of Thomas Cole when he painted the central panel of his “Course of Empire” series.

One of the reasons it looks so spacious and so splendid, aside from its just having been thoroughly cleaned, is that it is no longer fraught with all those banners that have obstructed the facade for well over a generation. I never realized how intrusive they were until now, when I see the building liberated from them. Though the final decisions have not been made, the museum intends in the future to have far smaller and more discreet banners that will fit horizontally into the cartouches on the facade and vertically between its paired, giant-order columns. At the same time, a pair of ledges that were once concealed behind the banners will soon be supplied with elegant metal grills.

Now that the facade is looking so good, the time has come for the Met to renovate that great expanse of steps leading up to the entrance. While the steps are a great improvement over the tiny entrance that Hunt provided for what was, in his day, a far smaller museum, their unadorned brown granite does not sort well, chromatically or stylistically, with the rest of the facade. (And it is downright perilous when wet.) What you want here are classical steps, hewn from some pink and pearl stone, graced with nosings, and rounded off at the ends.

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The Guggenheim, too, has undergone a face-lift and has never looked quite so good.The directors have finally freed the facade of all that pseudo-Corbusian white paint that flaked from the moment it was first applied. In its place, at ground level, is a textured undercoat, a mottled, greenish gray surface that is far more expressive of the building itself. As for the building’s famous drum, it has been expanded by a carapace of wood that surrounds it so totally that you see nothing underneath. I can only hope that the building remains in this condition, and that it will not revert, as some are now saying, to the form it had before.

jgardner@nysun.com