The reconstituted Kaufman Center, which opens its doors today after an eight-month, $17 million overhaul, may be the work of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, but it certainly is not what most people have come to expect from this eminent architect. Mr. Stern is famously a classicist and a contextualist, as is manifest at 15 Central Park West and his soon to be completed Brompton, at Third Avenue and 86th Street. But the new Kaufman Center — which comprises the Lucy Moses School, the Special Music School, and the Merkin Concert Hall — is a contemporary reworking of a thoroughly Modern — more specifically, thoroughly Brutalist — structure from 1978.

But that non-classical idiom is itself consistent with Mr. Stern’s previous practices. For it turns out that he and his project architect, Alexander P. Lamis, care even more for architectural history than for architectural historicism. So much so that they appear to love a building as apparently unlovable as the pre-existing structure, completed exactly 30 years ago to designs by Ashok Bhavnani, of the firm of Johansen & Bhavnani. The general mood of the earlier building, with its somewhat wobbly, even lumpy concrete façade, recalls nothing so much as those clumsy, almost goofy examples of Soviet Modernism that were the subject of a fascinating exhibition at MoMA last summer. That movement never quite achieved the skill, the polish, or the principled rigor of its Western European counterparts at their best, but an incomplete grasp of European Modernism led to an improvisatory originality that, at the very least, was rarely as boring as most mainstream American and British architecture of the same era.

Mr. Bhavnani is not from the Soviet Union but from India, and the only other projects associated with his name in New York are Island House and Rivercross, on Roosevelt Island. There is a certain suggestiveness to his being associated with that community: Just as Lincoln Center is New York’s foremost architectural artifact of the 1960s, such is the status that, for better or worse, Roosevelt Island occupied in the decade that followed. Usually insipid to one degree or another, the architecture there, by Jose Luis Sert, Philip Johnson, and others, represents the exhausted butt end of the Modern movement.

A similar exhaustion characterized the old Kaufman Center, a fact that does not undermine its claim to being one of the oddest buildings in New York. The façade of this six-story structure, facing south on 67th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, had a Bauhaus grid. It was distinguished by — and not in a good way — the irregular alternations between the gray concrete mass and a bizarre pattern of recessions from the street wall that created deep pockets of darkness that only enhanced the penal dreariness of the building. Its two other distinguishing features were a humongous, cantilevered canopy that led, at the western end of the site, into Merkin Concert Hall, and traces of red paint on the exterior walls, a typically 1970s touch that nevertheless failed to enliven the place.

Mr. Stern and Mr. Lamis have preserved the dimensions of the old building, and there is a general kinship between the old and the new. But the mood is entirely changed. For one thing, whereas formerly there were three entrances, these have been consolidated into one main one, with a very contemporary, cantilevered, and sharply angular canopy on the eastern limit of the site. The bizarre open-air atrium that previously occupied this part of the building is now glazed in a curtain wall that accounts for most of the street-level façade. Above it, the architects have sensitively and cleverly substituted a pale channel glass for the concrete of the exterior, thus preserving the chromatic tone of the original, while purging it of a residual 1970s sleaziness and making it feel much lighter. Elsewhere on the façade, some of the recessions have been preserved. But they make more sense visually, since they are no longer as deep as they once were. Furthermore, they are marked with a vibrant red along their walls, as well as with striking red banners designed by Pentagram, that bring out the chromatic vibrancy that was merely promised in Mr. Bhavnani’s original. The overall effect is one of precision and lightness, and a sense of balance and professional competence, all of which were missing from the original.

Inside the building, the firm has limited itself to redesigning the entrance and overhauling Merkin Concert Hall, as well as creating a far more spacious and elegant lobby for the hall and a reception space on the second floor. Here again, the drabness has been replaced by a new sense of competence and self-assurance. The strictly geometric redesign, though fully up to date, has an unmistakably late Modernist feel to it, which makes it about as historicist as any of the projects more typically associated with Mr. Stern. It is the style that the original architect, Mr. Bhavnani, might have invoked if he had had a little more imagination. The fiery red of the walls picks up the red of the exterior, while other touches — a pale, undulating panel of mineral composite, a stainless steel stairway, and shag carpets — enhance the feeling that one is entering a time warp. The new Kaufman Center may be coeval with Mr. Bhavnani’s building, but it is certainly more pleasant to inhabit.

jgardner@nysun.com