Devotees of Saturday Night Live will doubtless recall Nooni and Nuni Schoener, the ultra-effete couple played to perfection by Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph. They come from some unspecified place in Europe, but they might as well hail from Mars, given how viscerally weird they are. Specifically, this goofy pair incarnates a certain strain of European defined by its passion for hyper-aestheticized, high-concept living. Each chair, each lamp, each ashtray in the Schoener home has some exorbitant gimmick that categorically distinguishes it from the plain old, perfectly functional stuff that the rest of us have in our places of dwelling.

Like the Shoeners, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the two principals of the Japanese architectural firm SANAA, and the architects responsible for the recently opened New Museum on the Bowery, have devoted their career to the relentless re-examination of what the rest of us are apt to take for granted. Most importantly perhaps, as we now see in a show at the New Museum — “SANAA Works: 1998–2008” — they have consecrated, indeed sacrificed, themselves to this spirit of design, to a life in which one’s appearance and appurtenances define who one is and take on the tone and attributes of a secular religion.

Around 30 architectural mockups and renderings, as well as chairs, tables, and prototypes for ashtray holders, flower stands, and teapots, have been shoved into the café area on the first floor of the museum, as well as the glazed gallery just to the east of it. Let it be said in passing that there is something oddly slipshod and inaesthetic in the way these items have been displayed. Some of them have labels while others, inexplicably, do not. And given their coexistence with a fully functioning café, it was a little weird, the other day, to find meal trays lying on top of some of the displays —specifically the model for the Louvre-Lenz project — so that they were well-nigh invisible. You wonder how Ms. Sejima and Mr. Nishizawa would feel about that. Let it also be said in passing that this cramped use of space, also to be seen in the upstairs galleries, very likely underscores a problem hardwired into the very design of the museum. With much fanfare, the museum reopened on the Bowery last December in its new home, a 174-foot-high sequence of seven stacked boxes clad in dull metal mesh. Initially, some three years ago, I was dazzled when the museum’s designs were unveiled. But after the work was completed and I was finally able to inhabit it, the results seemed so much more pallid, the utility so much more compromised, and the experiential dimensions so much less satisfying than I had hoped and expected.

All of this is by way of preamble to my reluctance to judge the architectural models and renderings now on view in the New Museum. In order truly to appreciate the quality of any architectural artifact, but especially a contemporary example, it is necessary first that the building be completed and second that your body stand in some physical proximity to the structure. For that reason, and because SANAA has disappointed me before, all judgments must be provisional at best.

It is hard to generalize about SANAA’s aesthetic. The designs can be boldly geometric, as in the angular, industrial-strength masses of the New Museum, or they can seek an equally bold, and equally impersonal curvature, most emphatically in the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. Built in Ishikawa, Japan, between 1999 and 2004, this single-story structure was conceived as an enormous circle with interlocking spaces embedded in its circumference. At the same time, the SANAA team can suddenly explode into organic, asymmetrical forms such as that of their Flower House, in Suiza, Switzerland, also a single-story structure, whose several rooms irradiate irregularly, like the petals of a flower, from a central courtyard. This flower motif, recalling the flower-power emblems of the 1960s, recurs often in SANAA’s work, not least in the form of a silvery tree displayed at the New Museum. It is called a hanahana, and each of its branches culminates in a single fresh flower.

To date, their best work seems to be in the geometric mode. True, the Dior Store in Tokyo (2001–3), despite its two-plied creamy glass skin, ends up looking dully corporate, if the images and mock-ups and the New Museum are to be trusted. But there is poetry in the large-scale design for the Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen, Germany, as well in the far smaller one for a house in Kamamura (1999–2001). Both are conceived as fairly regular cubes whose uninflected and unadorned walls are irregularly perforated by the plainest of windows and doorways. Meanwhile, the Gifu Kitagata Apartments in Gifu, Japan (1994–2000), though not included in the show, look splendid in photographs. Conceived as a rigidly geometric, L-shaped affair along the lines of Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation, their façade is enlivened by a slightly syncopated but ultimately orderly succession of balconies.

As regards the design section of the New Museum’s exhibition, perhaps the most conspicuous entries are the various SANAA-designed chairs in the café, which you are invited to sit in. The Rabbit chairs, so named because their two-pronged back resembles a bunny’s ears, are of an acceptable level of incommodity. But the punitive rigors imposed by a series of smaller metal chairs represent a sacrifice to the gods of high concept that I, for one, was unwilling to make. Their only saving grace was the consistency with which I found myself slipping off.