The Nomadic Museum, built in 2005 on Pier 54 beside the Hudson River, was one of the largest structures to rise in Manhattan in recent years. But if you visited the site today, you would find no trace of it. Though comparable in length to St. Peter’s Basilica and the Capitol building, it has vanished completely. A tour de force intended to house an exhibition of Gregory Colbert’s new-age photographs, it was created by the architect Shigeru Ban out of paper pylons and recycled freight containers that have now been disassembled and reconstituted in other parts of the world.

Since then, many New Yorkers have been hoping that Mr. Ban would contribute something a bit more permanent to our urban fabric. And now he is doing just that, in the form of a residential development called Metal Shutter Houses, under construction at 524 W. 19th St., off Tenth Avenue in Chelsea.

In a statement accompanying the promotional material for this project, Mr. Ban declares, “I am only interested in creating something different.” That, of course, is the sort of boilerplate language we have come to expect from creative types over the past century-and-a-half. And yet, it is a fair description of Shigeru Ban’s practice to date. Thus far he has demonstrated an inability to remain within the received conventions of architectural practice. Most notably, he has been a pioneer in what might be called disposable architecture, especially architecture fashioned out of such unlikely materials as cardboard and reinforced paper. His DIY refugee shelters were successfully deployed in response to emergencies in Rwanda, Turkey, and, following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Japan.

If Mr. Ban can excel as a hard-headed functionalist, he also has a pronounced aesthetic streak, evident in his new development in Chelsea. Here, his relentless need to reinvent takes the form of a largely cubic building whose defining feature is a series of metal shutters that reach down and cover up each of the duplex apartments that are stacked four high, with three of them cheek by jowl at each level. Set back from the street-line, on what should be the 10th floor, is a penthouse.

The gimmick here is that this building can appear either as a conventionally rectilinear study in modular modernism — though the modules are gigantic due to their each comprising a duplex — or as a pale, windowless mass, just by flicking a switch. In the latter state, all of the shutters lock into place like the metal plating on the Batmobile, and the outside world is instantly shut out. The result promises to be a thrillingly regimented sequence of modules that read like an enhanced tic-tac-toe board. Seen from an appropriate distance, the metal sheathing of the building is as fine-grained as silk, with sumptuously minute striations rippling across the surface.

Unfortunately, in order to achieve the sheer cubic elegance of the renderings, all of the building’s occupants would have to keep their windows shuttered at the same time. But because that is unlikely to happen, one suspects that the effect Mr. Ban is so proud of is will materialize only in staged demonstrations. You might also ask, from a purely utilitarian perspective, whether there is any need to shutter windows in the first place, especially when these shutters, fully deployed, cover both levels of the duplex to which they belong. Obviously, their point, if the renderings are to be trusted, is to obtain a dazzling visual result. Clearly that is enough for Mr. Ban, and it may be enough for those who eventually purchase these apartments in Chelsea: Rest assured that these condos are not being marketed to buyers who simply need a roof over their heads; rather they are for wealthy aesthetes who wish to feel that they’re participating in the history of architecture.

In terms of the larger formal dimensions of the Metal Shutter Houses, it is significant that Mr. Ban is a native of Japan. His work in general, and this newest offering in specific, largely conform to what we have come to expect from Japanese architecture in recent years: an austere neo-modernism whose overall geometric simplicity, chaste right angles, and perfectly legible planes belie a fanatical attention to detail and an ability to coax poetry out of the subtlest variations in the simplest shapes. You find this aesthetic in Yoshio Taniguchi’s elegant reworking of MoMA, as well as in Fumihiko Maki’s as-yet-unrealized plans for a skyscraper at ground zero. It is also evident in the general contours, if not in the specific details, of SANAA’s New Museum on the Bowery.

At the same time, Mr. Ban is no stranger to New York or to America. He spent many years at Cooper Union under the tutelage of John Hejduk, a man of similarly visionary propensities who felt the need to call into question all the accepted orthodoxies of architecture. The great difference is that the late Hejduk built almost nothing in his 70 years, and when he did, he displayed that drearily predictable inattention to detail that often occurs when theorists descend into practice. Mr. Ban, by contrast, is only 50, which is almost neonatal in the gerontocratic world of international architecture. But of late he has been building in delirious profusion, and now New York is about to receive one of his permanent embellishments. Whatever one might say about its functionality, if it can live up to the renderings, it will be a striking and valuable addition to our cityscape.