On entering the Nomadic Museum, which has just shot up on Pier 54, at 13th Street and the West Side Highway, I experienced a shock of recognition. Once I passed through the soaring open-air portico, with its four recessed columns like those of the Pantheon, I entered a dark and vaulted, cathedral-like space that was clearly modeled on and fully evokes the Corderie section of the fabled Arsenal in Venice.

So called because this extremely long and extremely narrow edifice was once used to twine cords for the riggings of ships, it has now been co-opted by the Venice Biennale as the most “cutting edge” part of its biannual exhibition. The Nomadic Museum, like its Venetian prototype, seems to continue forever, illustrating a building typology that, I would guess, has long since gone the way of the argosy and Spanish galleon. And the work that it houses, “Ashes and Snow,” an exhibit of new-agey photographs by the Canadian artist Gregory Colbert, was first exhibited in the Arsenal.

But whereas the Arsenal is compounded of mortar and brick, the Nomadic Museum is walled with stacked freight containers and its space is defined by 40-foot-tall pillars made of recycled paper. Along the endless corridor that is the entirety of the building, a wooden gangway in the center is flanked by strips of New Jersey gravel. The building is the invention of Shigeru Ban, one of the finest younger architects in the world.

To judge from Matilda McQuaid’s monograph on him (“Shigeru Ban,” Phaidon, 240 pages, $47), he is an artist who, professionally, revels in a split personality. He can create works of astounding refinement, like the Paper Art Museum in Mishima, Japan, a spectral masterpiece of frosted glass, and the deliriously lovely GC Osaka Building, a six-story structure of wood cladding on a steel armature.

At the same time, he can create hastily assembled forms out of the most debased materials, such as paper and beer crates. Among these are an entire shantytown made of paper logs for the survivors of the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and similar projects in blighted areas of India and Turkey. These appear to have been designed, if that is the word, with little attention to aesthetics – or, more precisely, in accordance with an anti-aesthetic, a populist rawness that is very different from the refinement that ban cultivates elsewhere in his work.

One could argue, however, that the constant, the point of contact between these two parts of his career is that hypersensitivity to the materiality of built forms that represents postmodernism’s most spectacular contribution to architecture. Whether Mr. Ban is working in tightly compacted paper, in parti-colored stacks of containers, or in the finest glasses and woods, he, to a prodigious degree, has made the resonance of matter one of the key artistic terms of his art.

Another constancy in his art is its reapplication to a postmodern, postindustrial context of the formal and opulent spatial simplicity of his native Japan. In the case of the Nomadic Museum, this is borne out in the paper pylons that define the interior space, dividing it into modular quadrants. In the more hastily constructed works, there is, I take it, an intentionally rough-and-ready aspect, a boisterous rejection of aesthetics in the name of an almost proletarian practicality.

At the risk of pooping the party, however, I must say that, in this respect at least, there is a falsehood at the heart of the Nomadic Museum. It is so called because it embraces impermanence and because, come June, will all be dismantled as the show moves to California. But as now constituted, it offends against strict utilitarianism in two respects.

Though the paper pylons that define the space look for all the world to have a structural function, that is pure illusion. Furthermore, as I visited the site, I was quite cold. When I asked the project manager if there was anything to be done about that, he pointed out, in essence, that it would soon be spring. I mention this since there will be a rush to marvel at the ingenious practicality of the Nomadic Museum, and one should be careful not to overstate the case.

Also it must be said that, despite the architectural virtues of the Nomadic Museum, it is not very lovely, even by the criteria of post-industrial detritus that figure so prominently in contemporary taste. Even as regards the mirage-like speed with which it was raised and will be removed, I am not sure that it would have taken that much more effort or time to create a permanent structure of the same dimensions.

But all of this is perhaps churlish. We should take pleasure, rather, in the spectacle of a work (similar in this regard to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Gates,” being dismantled at this very moment) that is both massive and impermanent. Above all, however, we must hope that Mr. Ban, who has already completed several projects in America, will find a way to build something permanent in Manhattan that will approach the beauty of what he has wrought in Japan.