Inside the Guggenheim’s staff entrance sits a cardboard box with a scrawled note asking for donations of newspapers for use in cleaning mirrors. The reason, I suppose, is that the museum’s rotunda now houses a huge, rectangular mirrored tower called “Around the Corner” (2000-05). The piece forms one part of a new exhibition, “The Eye of the Storm: Works in situ by Daniel Buren,” which opens Friday. Accompanying the show is a novel, humorous, and thoroughly engaging catalog, The Buren Times, published on newsprint.

Mr. Buren (b. 1938), a French painter and conceptual artist, is known chiefly for his Minimalist stripe paintings of the 1960s and for having incited an art-world controversy some 34 years ago at – you guessed it – the Guggenheim. As Chief Curator Lisa Dennison recounts in an admirably lucid essay, Mr. Buren’s contribution to the sixth “Guggenheim International Exhibition” (1971), was a large banner (66 by 32 feet) of alternating white and blue stripes on both sides, which hung from the roof, filling the rotunda.

Before the public ever saw the work, a number of the other artists – Dan Flavin and Donald Judd among them – complained that the piece, “Peinture-Sculpture (Painting-Sculpture),” obscured their own works. They succeeded in having it removed. The catalog includes fascinating letters and other documents from the storm of argument the museum’s actions caused.

T.S. Eliot once wrote that in order to appreciate a work of art fully one must first submit to it. Excellent advice, and particularly apt in the case of this exhibition. No great fan of conceptual art, I admit I came to the show with a healthy degree of skepticism. I found, however, that it contains a multitude of minor echoes – like the newsprint catalog that, inadvertently or not, recalls the newsprint used to polish the mirrors – that together compose resonant symphony.

You enter the show through the guts of the tower, and from the darkened space created by the scaffolding that supports the plywood mounted mirrors, you proceed into the light-filled rotunda. The tower, which rises from the ground to the top of the sixth-floor ramp, is actually one corner – jutting into the center of the rotunda – of an enormous imagined cube.

Were it complete and centered in the round space, it would fill the rotunda entirely. Above, pieces of magenta gel have been placed in a spiral pattern on the museum’s skylight oculus. Stubby, vertical stripes in bright green run up the outside of the spiral ramp. The gallery bays punctuating the spiral ramp have been left deliberately empty, though Mr. Buren has made use of three of the museum’s annexes.

“Murs de peintures,” an installation of 20 stripe paintings made from 1966 to 1977, hangs salon-style in the High Gallery. Mr. Buren’s stripes, be they painted or mirrored or cut from other materials, are always 8.7 cm wide. Yet in the paintings they only look mechanically regimented from afar. Closer inspection shows they have been applied by hand, with wavy digressions and other handmade “errors.”

Yellow, red, magenta, and green gels in a circular and semi-circular motif (with blue gels filling the space between) cover the windows of the third-floor Thannhauser Gallery. Across from them, mirrored stripes decorate the wall. On the windows of the fourth-floor Thannhauser Gallery are similarly colored gels in a diamond-and-triangle motif, with white stripes filling the spaces between the shapes.

As a whole, the installations are both fast and difficult, monumental and subtle. By fast, I mean that they are easily consumed in a glance, and just as easily dismissed. The Thannhauser Galleries seem to be simple, Pop riffs on geometrical patterns; the tower is a big, fun mirror. But few site-specific works are as specific as these, and they reverberate with the museum’s unique architecture. In doing so, they show it to you anew. If you submit to the work, you might, like me, realize myriad connections that combine to make a fascinating and surprising experience.

The rotunda installation turns a corner on the debacle of 1971. Where “Peinture-Sculpture” closed off views of other artworks – thus mimicking the primary complaint against Wright’s building, that it distracts from the art – the mirrored “Around the Corner” reflects, and opens up, views of the empty galleries, and thus of the architecture itself.

Over the years, I’ve spent quite a lot of time at the Guggenheim, but until this show I’d not, for instance, noticed how the ceilings along the ramp slant beautifully upward at the edges. The circular gels in the Thannhauser Galleries lead you to discover the circles that have always been incised into the museum floor, and the magenta gels spiraling the oculus draw your eye to the way the circles in the floor reconfigure the spiral of the ramp.

As you ascend the ramp, you encounter different architectural perspectives reflected in the mirrors: The way, for example, the ramps are displaced, as if through water, in the mirrors. The seemingly rigid stripes found throughout point up toward the building’s numerous skewed angles, and the reflections of those stripes on the shiny floors remind one of how the mirrored tower both displaces and discloses the architecture it reflects.

We, the visitors, are reflected in the mirrors too. Part of Mr. Buren’s aim seems to be to ask us to meditate on how we fit into a museum, how we move through and inhabit the building. Most works installed at the Guggenheim have to fight for attention with its extraordinary architecture. Mr. Buren has filled the building with something that, for an instant, seems like nothing but slowly shows a beautiful whole. It is an artwork that exposes the architecture that ordinarily distracts from it – something worth pausing to reflect on.

March 25-June 8 (1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).