In the past two years, three of the four outer boroughs have announced or completed plans for a major overhaul of their main art museums. Only this past weekend, the Queens Museum of Art became the third such institution to express the need to revise itself, following in the footsteps of the Brooklyn Museum, which reopened in 2004, and of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which reopened last week.

Like the Bronx project, and unlike the Brooklyn one, this latest effort in Queens is under the aegis of the Department of Design and Construction. Founded in the Giuliani administration, this department’s authority has been greatly enhanced by Mayor Bloomberg, who, perhaps because he is a plutocrat, seems to have or at least to express a prompter sense of the spiritual rewards that art can confer on an urban population. In the past few years, the DDC has greatly improved the cityscape with such projects as the refurbished fountain at Columbus Circle, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the New York Hall of Science, which stands near the Queens Museum of Art.

Surely the architects enlisted for the Queens Museum, the firm of Grimshaw/Ammann and Whitney, are highly accomplished, as their plans for the Fulton Street Transit Center, scheduled to be completed in 2009, would attest.But, boy, do they have their work cut out for them over in Queens! For the past half-century, the museum has inhabited a building that began life as the New York Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair. This was the dreary work of Aymer Embury III, who, as one of Robert Moses’s preferred designers, also received the commissions for the Triborough Bridge and the Central Park Zoo (before it was greatly revised in 1988).

It would not be unfair to characterize the style of the Queens Museum as, pardon me, Fascist. Emphatically I do not invoke that term in any politically loaded sense, but simply as a description of a somewhat kitschy and bombastic neoclassical style that inspired certain architects in Europe and occasionally in America during the 1930s. The one-story, double-height structure, whose neighbors were once the legendary Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 Worlds Fair, lies flat along the expanse of Flushing Meadows and Corona Park, its 10 austerely square columns flanked by massive granite pavilions.

Grimshaw/Ammann and Whitney’s revisions to the building will not be the first. At the hands of Daniel Chait the museum received a rather clumsy makeover in preparation for the 1964 World’s Fair, and in 1994 its galleries were further revised by Rafael Viñoly. That the museum has been in an unenviable situation for some time is manifested by the fact that, up till now, it has occupied only half of the Embury structure, the other half having been given over to an ice skating rink.

It is always perilous to judge a project solely on its renderings. But because renderings look, if anything, a little or a lot better than the finished product, it follows that if the renderings look weak, we have a problem. The problem with the Embury structure has always been the monotony of its spare right angles and the tedious, drumbeat regularity of its trabeated colonnade, here as elsewhere one of the traps that can waylay architects with a less-than-perfect grasp of the classical idiom.

Thus the real job of Grimshaw/Ammann and Whitney becomes, wherever possible, to qualify and mitigate the twin devils of severity and monotony that often beset Embury’s brand of architecture. The firm has done its best, but that may not be enough.The reason for this is a curious confluence of two very different styles that somehow manage to reinforce each other’s faults The dominant style of the Grimshaw design is the neo-modernism that has taken over much of Manhattan in the past five years. Where Embury’s structure is grandly boring, Grimshaw’s revisions, above all the insistent rectalinearity of the mullioned windows that glaze the eastern façade and the cornice that has been added to the roof, are minutely, punctiliously boring. And that, if you think about it, is the besetting sin of the whole neo-modern style. The result, if the renderings are to be trusted, is a drab gray structure that sorts all too well with the drab gray highway running alongside it.

There are, to be sure, some redeeming elements of the Grimshaw design, such as the cage of luminescent glass in the center of the interior that recalls this firm’s far better project for the Fulton Street Transit Center and a metallic canopy along the eastern façade that will have the brooding presence of one of Donald Judd’s minimalist sculptures.

Unfortunately, the landscaping, which seems to consist of uninflected rectangular zones of grass, will only accentuate the monotony of the structure as a whole. Nor are matters helped by the application, along the west façade, of a superstructure of gray (!) glass which, in a nod to multiculturalism, has been tritely inscribed with the museum’s name in a hundred languages.

If ever there were a case for the convulsive energy of the deconstructivist style, or the jazzy syncopations that Arquitectonica has just unleashed at the Bronx Museum, this is it. Instead, the ultra-cool Chelsea Gallery look makes common cause with the austerity of midcentury classicism to create something that will surely be an improvement of the existing structure, but probably will not be good enough.