On Wednesday Ikea will open its doors in Red Hook, and Brooklyn’s appealingly dilapidated waterfront warehouse district will be home to a 346,000-square-foot store as bright and cheerful as a new box of Legos. Cue the balloons and complimentary water taxis.

It’s the first outlet in the five boroughs for the Swedish retailer. But by now, 23 years after its arrival in America, Ikea is no longer a novelty. Even New Yorkers, who regularly cross the Hudson to go to the store in Elizabeth, N.J., know what to expect before they set foot inside: tea candles and modular furniture, patio sets and sheets for the guest bed, limited-edition Hella Jongerius vases and the best kitchens this side of Bulthaup.

But for all the ingenuity that goes into what Ikea sells and how it sells it, the company seems to soft-pedal when it comes to architecture. The building has an enviable view of New York Harbor, yet it will be as blue and boxy as every other Ikea in the world.

In thinking about the building, I’m reminded of one of the central arguments made in “Learning from Las Vegas,” the seminal piece of architectural theory first published in 1972. The book, by Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown, posits that every building falls into one of two categories, “duck” or “decorated shed.” I’m not one to mine decades-old architectural criticism like some overreaching undergrad, but the duck/shed split is oddly prescient.

The book argues that there are buildings that can’t be anything but what they are, like the duck-shaped coffee shop that still stands next to a highway near Riverhead, Long Island. That duck is from an era when roadside coffee shops took on strange shapes — windmills, coffee pots — and so it telegraphed its purpose: Stop here for coffee. A duck might be a public building, such as a train station, or it might be commercial, such as a grand hotel, but you could tell what it was just by looking at the architecture. A decorated shed, on the other hand, is a generic structure with a purpose identifiable only by its signage. Is it a mall, college, or mega-church? Check the sign to see.

Despite being a city of high-rises, New York is on a decorated-shed bender. Every year, hundreds of expensive but generic buildings are designed, assembled, and then branded. Take the Time Warner Center, which, for all its flash, is a decorated shed: Identical twin towers house corporate headquarters, a luxury hotel, and high-end condos, but there’s nothing in the architecture to tell you which is where. Sheds make economic sense. Should the fortunes of one of those tenants change, the others could seamlessly expand into the breach.

Architects tend to champion ducks. It could be because they’re romantics, and there’s a sentimental allure to a train station that looks like a train station, a hotel that has the glamour of a hotel. And it could be because it’s in their training: They go to school to design ducks, not sheds.

The Red Hook Ikea, like all Ikeas, is the ultimate decorated shed, an actual shed that’s been literally decorated.

But it’s not just any shed. Even though no two Ikeas are exactly the same, the massing and geometry of each are similar, and have a familiar volume. More important is the decoration, the yellow “Ikea” emblazoned on the façade’s vast blue field, two distinctive colors that might have been lifted from the Swedish flag but which by now are more recognizable as belonging to Ikea.

And that’s where the genius lies. Ikea has created a decorated shed so iconic it’s become a duck: An Ikea-looking building can be nothing but an Ikea. To use another term from “Learning from Las Vegas,” it’s a decorated shed that quacks.

The Red Hook Ikea will join Grand Central Station and the Brooklyn Bridge as one of the most instantly recognizable structures in New York. It will certainly be more of a landmark than the celebrated projects of some high-profile architects. It will be more unique here than Frank Gehry’s IAC/InterActiveCorp headquarters, which for all its technological achievements and critical plaudits is already being aped by second-rate buildings such as the Cooper Square Hotel on the Bowery. And the Brooklyn Ikea will be longer-lasting than Richard Meier’s Perry Street towers, which are already showing their age. Ikeas are timeless, unadorned Modernism that packs a visual punch year after year.

Is the Red Hook Ikea beautiful? No. Is it good design? One could make the argument. Is it successful? Absolutely, and I’m not just being contrarian. The stripped-down architecture has become the company’s best advertising, and the smart money says this Ikea will be an instant triumph. With apologies to John Kander and Fred Ebb: It’s going to make it here, because Ikea has made it everywhere.