Now all but completed, Renzo Piano’s New York Times headquarters is intended to stand as an architectural projection of the institution it will soon house. Press releases from the Times assure us that the sheer glass curtain wall of this 52-story building at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street will represent, as you probably guessed, the transparency, the openness, and the love of truth that form the core of the Times’s stated mission. If that is truly the case, one is compelled to wonder what we are to make of the feudal French vocabulary of the 18-story structure that, since 1913, has been home to the paper at 229 W. 43rd St. But then, the idea that the architecture of a newspaper’s headquarters must express something about the newspaper itself has been current at least since Raymond Hood won the coveted Chicago Tribune competition to build the Tribune tower in 1922. In truth, however, such architectural statements usually end up saying more about the architecture than about anything else, and one suspects that that is the case on 8th Avenue as well.

In at least one respect, however, this latest example of the genre does represent the institution it serves. Here, as in the very pages of the Times, one senses an almost exhibitionistic high-mindedness, a fervid need to embody and to be seen to embody the virtues dearest to one’s contemporaries. Back in 1913, that resulted in the high-church Tudor vernacular on 43rd Street. Today, it takes the very different form of environmentalism. It is no accident that the new building’s design owes as much to FXFOWLE as to Mr. Piano. FXFOWLE stand at the forefront of “green architecture.” The admirable ambition of their complicated and wonkish approach to architecture is to create buildings whose material, design, and mechanical core do as little damage to the environment, all the while conserving as much energy, as possible. As it happens, this is a field in which New York City is in the forefront, largely due to FXFOWLE’s Conde-Nast Building and the Bank of America building, which is now rising at 42nd and 6th Avenue (by the firm of Cook + Fox.)

If Le Corbusier famously saw the building as a machine, the green movement sees it as an appliance, something between a dish-washer and a computer. The same imperatives of miniaturization and ever greater efficiency produce a structure far more friendly to the environment than anything we have seen before.

As for Mr. Piano’s design, surely it is ironic that the 70-year old architect began his career, at the Centre Pompidou in 1977, by reducing to pure ornamentalism, the machine aesthetic of Le Corbusier. Forcibly externalizing its structural components and invoking a vocabulary of stove pipes and girders, this building, which Mr. Piano designed with Richard Rogers, aspired to be functional rather than beautiful and, in fact, was neither.

In his latest work on Eighth Avenue, however, Mr. Piano has found a postindustrial aesthetic that works somewhat better. In one sense, this pale slab of a building, rises from an adjacent base like an iPod from its charger, is antithetical to the earlier edifice. In keeping with the postindustrial aesthetic that defines it, the dominant formal conceit is that the visual manifestation of the appliance in question is the mere surplus of its cybernetic guts. At the same time, though, the notion that a building must make some visual accounting for its functionality survives intact. Let it also be said that the new Times Headquarters reprises the machine aesthetic last seen at the Centre Pompidou.

The building’s most striking aspect is the fact that it is clad in two skins. First there is the transparent glass of the traditional curtain wall and then, superimposed upon it at a distance of 1.5 feet, a fretted screen of 250,000 white ceramic rods, 1 5/8 inches in diameter, that are wide enough apart to permit you to see out. Formally, however, the sum of all those rods may well be the vastest expanse of brise-soleils ever seen. This device was pioneered by Le Corbusier, once again, in Brazil in the 1930s and has been revived with a vengeance in the neomodernism that we now see everywhere around us in New York. Now brise-soleil screens almost always look good. And yet it must be asked whether their latest deployment across the new Times Building is — in the words of Harry Hotspur — that “whereof a little more than a little is by much too much.” Indeed, one cannot shake the suspicion that, as far as Mr. Piano himself was concerned, their sheer visual zazz superseded any concern for function. And once they have been denied — in the eye of the beholder — the prestige of that practicality, their effect runs the risk of quickly becoming cloying.

To be sure, this is not a bad building. It has a sleek elegance to its massing, and its detailing seems — in its nearly completed state — to be quite refined. A fragile and diaphanous mass, its secondary, external skin reaches to the roof, where it rises above the core of the building itself, vanishing into etheric abstraction. That is the point at which it becomes the sort of pure ornamentalism that betrays so much contemporary architecture that overzealously aspires to appear purely functional.