Most architects, even the best, have one formal idea that dominates their practice throughout the decades of their career. Richard Meier is enfeoffed to the purity of steel, glass, and right angles. Frank Gehry favors the aesthetic potential of earthquakes. Just about everything by Santiago Calatrava, whether a bridge in Bilbao or a transit hub in Lower Manhattan, tends to look suspiciously like a heron in flight.

Steven Holl, who at 58 is one of the best known and most respected contemporary architects, would make all our lives easier if he found a single dominant motif or attitude or material and stuck to it. But this he refuses to do; in fact, such programmatic inconstancy is the one constant of his career. He can employ an almost uncorrupted concrete modernism in one house, and a vernacular wood frame in another. His designs develop out of the specific sites into which they are set, rather than being imposed on the sites, as is the habit of most other architects, whatever they say to the contrary. He has tried his hand at most everything, and in each genre he has brought originality and a poetic temperament to his task.

Mr. Holl imparts a unique personality to each of his projects. There is almost always a slightly playful, even ironic self-effacement to them, as though they were shrugging their shoulders at their own haplessness. Even in his institutional buildings, he neither seeks nor attains grandeur, but rather a pleasant functionalism tied to an intuitive and ad hoc sense of design that is one-off and, in many cases, quietly unforgettable.

All of this is borne out in the first project (other than interiors) that his firm has brought to completion in New York City, the central section of Higgins Hall at the School for Architecture on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus. This project, which was officially opened last Thursday, consists of a new and spacious central section that replaces the masonry building that burned to the ground in 1994. At the same time, it connects the two 19th-century brick buildings that flank it such that, taken together, the three structures form an H-shaped footprint.

The new three-story, 27,000 square foot building, whose project architect was Timothy Bade, is clad in a pale skin fashioned from structural glass planks with translucent white insulation. Clearly, there was no attempt here to create a unified aesthetic among the three buildings. Yet, strange to say, the facade’s largely monolithic expanse of pale glass does not seem to jar with its neighbors, and in fact, another kind of harmony, or coexistence, is achieved. It is not quite clear, given the strident disparity in styles, how it was accomplished.

Like most creative sorts, Mr. Holl dislikes labels, especially when applied to him. And it is said that he is especially resistant to the term Deconstructivism. But it is quite out of the question that Higgins Hall would have assumed its present form without the syncopations and planned irregularities that are enshrined in this style. The facade itself is a case in point. The central section, above the entrance, is a flattened, two-dimensional collage of boxes that achieves three dimensions only in the glass canopy over the entrance itself and in the angled skylight on the roof. This area, which like the floor divisions of the facade, is defined by red beams, is actually called the “dissonant zone.” It covers the point of the interior where the architect has tried to account for the differences in the floor plates of the two preexistent structures north and south of the central section.

Mr. Holl’s interior logically bears out the divisions and disparities of the facade. As befits a school, there is something rough and ready about this interior, with its unadorned concrete ceilings and pillars, and on either side, the exposed, weathered brick of the adjoining structure. Though the four architectural studios on the second and third floors are merely functional, the most powerful element of the design is a grandly minimalist, semi-circular stairway that spins down into the basement. From there, you are led into a 276-seat auditorium.

One of the concepts dear to this architect’s heart is the notion of “porosity,” as he is pleased to call it. I am not quite sure I get it, but I have found it adequately defined at the Architectural Review Web site as “the fusion of architecture, urbanism, and landscape; the fusion of light with form, shade, and shadow; and ultimately the fusion of spirit and matter, nature, and design.” In practice, as best I can make out, this concept is expressed in the largely uninflected floor plates that run almost without interruption through the new center. As mentioned, this is largely functional and, given the course of modern architecture over the last 100 years, hardly revolutionary.

In a literal embodiment of this idea, Mr. Holl has employed certain materials – like foamed aluminum in one doorway, perforated metal on the ceiling of the auditorium, and stained and perforated plywood at the reception desk – that bear out the architect’s porous preoccupation in varying degrees of attractiveness.

But if a fusion of architecture, urbanism, and landscape is what is wanted, the best part of the entire project may be the multilevel “plinth” upon which the building sits. Formed from red brick, mostly recycled from the original structure that burned down, this area extends beyond the facade to receive visitors in its benign embrace. On a recent visit, I found dozens of architecture students happily sunning themselves in this area.

Mr. Holl’s brief at Higgins Hall was to create, for the first time, a main entrance that would give structure and meaning to the entire complex. It is quite clear that he has succeeded, with elegance and absolute efficiency, in realizing that goal.

jgardner@nysun.com