Among residents and passersby on the Bowery, the clean and luminous forms of the New Museum of Contemporary Art have generated considerable buzz as the building has taken shape over the past two years, its stacked white boxes providing a striking contrast to the area’s famously gritty cityscape.

But as the museum nears its planned reopening December 1, what is causing perhaps an even greater stir is the shimmering, silvery cladding on the eight-story structure, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA. The mesh veil, which is being attached to the building’s exterior by James & Taylor, a London-based firm specializing in façades, may be a first for the face of a major American building.

“The material has been around for more than 100 years, but it’s been used, until recently, for purely utilitarian purposes,” James & Taylor’s technical director, John Champion, said.

For SANAA, the appeal of the veil was that it would allow the boxes that comprise the façade to “read as single surfaces,” an associate architect at the firm, Florian Idenburg, said. By emphasizing the volume of the individual boxes, the designers succeeded in avoiding a monolithic and oppressive character to the all-white building, which otherwise might have upset the small scale and intimate feel of the neighborhood.

The mesh veil has also acquired some metaphorical connotations that are essential for conclusively relating the polished, streamlined building, which lies beneath the veil, to its crude, unrefined context. (The Centre Pompidou in the formerly industrial Parisian neighborhood of Beaubourg immediately comes to mind.)

“We wanted to have an industrial material that had some sort of reference to what was happening on the Bowery as a manufacturing street,” Mr. Idenburg said. The mesh façade recalls, therefore, a range of manufactured urban products from subway grating to New York City trash bins — i.e., the industrial history of the neighborhood.

SANAA initially selected a galvanized steel façade for the museum, during the design competition for the project in 2002. But after further research during the schematic design phase, the designers decided they needed a material that was both strong and very light.

Expanded aluminum veil, the mesh cladding system used for the New Museum, has been anodized for an especially durable finish. The material, which can be stretched along large surfaces, also has extraordinary light-sculpting properties. Its three-dimensional louvers allow for the distribution and reflection of light over the entire façade. The anodization also contributes to its radiant quality. The result is that the museum, quite literally, glistens.

Despite the emphasis placed on the material’s new applications, it retains its functionality. It is exceedingly durable, holds up under extreme weather conditions, and is an economical choice for architects and engineers who are often plagued by change orders and cost problems.

Although new to American architecture, metal cladding recently has found popularity in Britain, and Mr. Champion maintains that it isn’t just some fad. Among other notable projects, his firm worked on the 17,000 anodized aluminum domes clinging to the façade of Future Systems’s iconic (and controversial) Selfridges department store in Birmingham.

The hope here is that the New Museum’s application of mesh will set an architectural precedent for New York as well as the rest of America. If the New Museum finds success with the material, as others have found in Britain, metal cladding could become the architecture world’s hottest new façade solution.