Edward Durrell Stone's Huntington Hartford Museum went up on Columbus Circle in 1965, looked out over midtown, and announced with a grin, Modernism is dead and here is its tombstone. Dotted with arches and portholes and sitting on its lollipop columns, the building was a decadent homage to historicism, a paean to pastiche. It was garish in a good way, and then, all of a sudden, it wasn't. The museum closed in 1969 and the building housed government offices for a while until it was left vacant in 1998. A cast-off relic, like a marble urn in a landfill, it wouldn't blend in and it wouldn't go away. So it was remodeled. The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), previously crammed into a space on 53rd St., bought the building in 2006 and hired Portland, Oregon architect Brad Cloepfil to redesign it, despite begging preservationists' efforts to save the landmark. Cloepfil kept the building's silhouette intact but covered it in glistening white terracotta tiles, clouded glass, and a pattern of right-angled slices. Two years and 90 million dollars later, Modernism has crawled back out of the grave, subtler, smarter, and stronger.

The museum opened in September and its inaugural show is a perfect fit. In his redesign, Cloepfil sliced and diced a forgotten piece of po-mo into high-gloss poetry. The artists in Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary (up through February 15) took cast-offs like old tires and plastic spoons and transform them into art.

"It's the new museum so it's our second life, it's the second life of the building, and it's the second life of all these materials," said David Revere McFadden, MAD's chief curator. "It was a chance to rethink what a material is about and how the process of transformation is realized. These artists are taking existing stuff and making it into a material which it was not before."

Sound familiar? Last January, the New Museum christened its new building with another assemblage show, filling its spartan galleries with piles of junk. But make no mistake: The pieces at MAD aren't trash art. What's crucial here is the craft, the narrative "how" of the objects. "A lot of people do assemblage," McFadden admitted. "But we wanted added layers. Not just the concept but the making of it, a sense of the hands-on quality of what the work is about."

That's why this show isn't just neo-Dada, and why Cloepfil's building isn't simply Modernism come around again. Bricks aren't a building, words aren't a story, and here, the trash itself isn't art, it's the material for art. Forty years ago, old car tires piled in a gallery courtyard or a room filled with a truckload of landfill garbage wasn't just art, it was great art. Allan Kaprow, Arman, and their dumpster-diving cronies made crap cutting-edge. In Second Lives, it's not that simple. Chakaia Booker carefully sliced and folded tires into a blooming flower. Jill Townsley rubber banded thousands of spoons into a towering pyramid that will slowly melt away as the rubber grows brittle and snaps. Hew Locke glued dollar store detritus into trippy boat-like icons peppered with plastic guns and glittery Mardi Gras beads, and in one of the most arresting pieces, Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth hung dozens of hypodermic needles, studded with Swarovski crystals, points-down from a chandelier.

Lit up with that particular breed of sharp, Manhattan sunlight amplified by acres of mirrored glass, Hope and Roth's chandelier is glitzy and gorgeous. Yes, this stuff is made of garbage, but squint and you'd have no idea -- it looks great. Only the faint whiff of latex breaks the spell of Susie MacMurray's rubber glove dress and you have to look hard to see the secret behind Boris Bally's toothy silver necklace (it's made of gun triggers). "I call it the double ah-ha," McFadden said. "The piece seduces you from the start, but then you go, 'oh my God that's what it's made of?' You would never know." To emphasize that narrative -- the "how" that turns junk into art -- MAD sprinkled video screens around the galleries where visitors can watch the artists at work: Long-Bin Chen, say, cutting up phone books and stacking them into a giant Buddha head.

McFadden had to plan out his show while the "how" of the building was still developing. For a while, he said, he didn't know what the galleries would ultimately look like, "but we knew there were going to be cutouts in the floor, so we built around those." And that -- those slices -- is where the show and the building overlap.

The cutouts are really one long slit that zigzags up the sides of the building and burrows through the gallery floors, letting natural light filter through the entire space. Sightlines through the slices (they're filled in with translucent glass) connect the galleries to each other. "You want to animate the building, to make people want to go to other floors," McFadden said. "You see people walk across the glass and think, 'what's up there?' Because it's hard to get people to go to a vertical museum. You're accustomed to going to the Met and walking on the same level for miles."

The slices do more than open the building up, though. They give it a narrative. Like the artists in Second Lives, Cloepfil is fascinated not only by materials, but by the extent to which he can manipulate and rearrange them into a gestalt. And this moves him away from traditional Modernism with its focus on stripped-down, just-the-facts-ma'am simplicity and allies him with builders like Louis Kahn, whose sculptural architecture of brick, concrete, and wood is more about the craft of composition than about the simple beauty of an I-beam, more sonnet than haiku.

The idea of the slices, Cloepfil said, "was the removal of concrete. We edited the building." Good architecture -- like good art -- tells a story, and Cloepfil's building, wearing the scars of those edits, speaks of its growth, of a process of cutting, covering, tearing out, and polishing. In other words, you get the feeling that this museum was built; you get a sense of the "how" between the first design and the final product. But only a sense. The museum is subtly seductive. Thanks to a custom glaze two years in the making, the terracotta is quietly iridescent. It glimmers in the sun, just this side of a mirage. Cloepfil literally lightened up Modernist stoicism, keeping the playful spirit of Stone's original building intact.

So enough with the teary-eyed preservationists thumping their AIA guides (that means you, Tom Wolfe). In a city, nothing is safe. The landscape evolves, buildings change, trash becomes treasure and falls back again. Cloepfil's building -- itself a study of change -- is a part of this cycle. In the show that fills its galleries, if you look close enough you can find clues to the works' past lives, and here, when the light is right, you can see Stone's lollipop columns still standing, fuzzed out under ghostly glass, making sure, Cloepfil said, that "the memory of this place in the city lives on." Buildings change, but architecture never really dies.