As New York University has grown in recent years, and frenetically gobbled up space to keep some semblance of pace with that growth, a dilemma has emerged: How to forge the visual identity every university craves?

When NYU began in the 1830s, in a single, large building on the southeast corner of Washington Square East and Waverly Place, the Collegiate Gothic style of Alexander Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town’s design provided NYU with a powerful image, and proved enormously influential in American campus design until well into the 20th century. (That building was replaced in the 1890s by the site’s present edifice, called Silver Center.)

In the 1890s, NYU took part in the great competition among New York universities to create splendid campuses uptown. Columbia constructed its campus in Morningside Heights, and City College raised its in Hamilton Heights. NYU built its University Heights campus in the Bronx, which now serves the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College. But when NYU first added its Bronx campus, a project overseen by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White, it provided the university once again with a powerful image.

NYU no longer had access to that image following the sale of the campus to the City of New York in the 1970s. It was a time of flagging fortunes for NYU and the very real possibility that the university might not survive its fiscal malaise, which paralleled that of the city as a whole.

By the mid-1980s, however, NYU had regained its footing and much more, and entered into a transitional period. From being a very large, commuter-oriented school with several renowned graduate departments, NYU sought to go to the next level, and become a residential and research institution with aspirations to be one of the world’s leading universities.

During this transitional phase, NYU hired Helpern Architects to work out a master plan for the Washington Square campus. The firm, founded in 1971 by David Paul Helpern, did many things for NYU, but one stands out to me as one of the cleverest bits of urban design of its time in New York: The Helpern firm created a sense of place for NYU by visually opening up the ground floors of the university’s funkily diverse lot of buildings, otherwise seemingly impossible to pull together into a coherent whole. (I have taught at NYU for several years, but am considering this from the perspective of a pedestrian, someone who would not have access to NYU building interiors.)

Mr. Helpern told me, “As we looked at the ground floors, we saw they weren’t doing what they should do.” At the Main Building (now Silver Center), on Washington Square East at Waverly Place, for example, administrative offices occupied ground-floor space, and a dark film had been placed over the windows.

What Helpern Architects did was to remove all the visual encumbrances and to place activity-filled spaces, such as student lounges, on the ground floor. The architects did the same for Shimkin Hall, on West 4th Street at Washington Square East, and for a new building of the firm’s design, the Kaufman Management Center, housing the Stern School of Business.

Helpern Architects worked for NYU from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and NYU continues to follow the Helpern program of street-level transparency. Most people walking around the Washington Square area may not at first realize why they know when they are in the NYU precinct, but they definitely do know. It’s the continuous sense of activity at street level.

The idea seems to me to have more than a little in common with what the Helpern firm did in one of its most celebrated commissions, the Congo Gorilla Forest at the Bronx Zoo, where the viewer experiences a powerful visual intimacy with the gorilla habitat.

At the northeast corner of Washington Place and Mercer Street stands one of the several late-19th-century loft buildings now occupied by NYU. This particularly handsome, strong-piered, six-story building from 1890-91 now houses the department of philosophy, for which the architect Steven Holl has fashioned a fascinating new interior. The sidewalk pedestrian sees, thanks to the Helpern plan, the ground-floor portion of the new interior.

We can see that Mr. Holl has created a bright, airy space ornamented with profusely perforated white walls and panels, white-painted distressed brick walls, and smooth, whitewashed walls. Some of the perforated panels angle as in a German Expressionist stage set, and felicitously coexist with the original cast-iron columns (painted white, of course) and blond wood floors and benches.

Here three things come together: a designated landmark building with a beautifully preserved exterior and a surprising number of original interior details; the Helpern firm’s idea of visually opening up the big ground-floor windows so that the passerby has an intimate connection with the space within, and an interior design that uses avant-garde forms to achieve a splendidly flowing, almost dancing, effect.

If NYU, amid its jumble of spaces, seeks a visual identity, this is the way to do it.

fmorrone@nysun.com