The Chace Center features clear and etched glass complemented by red brick. The classroom and museum complex , designed by renowned Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneois is surrounded by historic buildings. The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

PROVIDENCE — It isn’t every building that can lose its most prominent feature and still be judged a success. If you don’t believe me, try imagining New York’s famed Chrysler Building without its iconic Art Deco top. Or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum without its corkscrew-shaped rotunda. Or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao without its distinctive roller-coaster curves.

Yet the Chace Center, the Rhode Island School of Design’s new classroom and museum complex on North Main Street, is just such a survivor. Shortly before workers broke ground on the building two years ago, its most notable feature — a wraparound glass façade that would have allowed the Chace Center’s upper floors to glow in the dark like a giant lantern — was rejected as too costly.

Nevertheless, the Chace Center, which officially opens on Saturday, is a gem — a compact yet powerfully sculpted building that pays its respects to its historic College Hill neighbors while remaining proudly and recognizably contemporary.

It may even be the best building its designer, the much-heralded Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, has completed in the United States.

At the same time, the Chace Center is not without flaws. First-time visitors, for example, may have trouble finding the building’s entrance, which faces a small plaza on the north side of the Chace Center. Bland rather than bold, it feels undersized for such an important building.

On the other hand, the Chace Center’s most important public space — a new 4,000-square-foot gallery for RISD’s Museum of Art — is appropriately grand. Unfortunately, getting there isn’t: taking the escalator from the first-floor lobby to the third-floor gallery feels more like riding the subway than entering the hallowed halls of Rhode Island’s largest art museum.

No doubt budgetary constraints are partly to blame. (Despite its hefty $34-million price tag, the Chace Center is actually smaller by one floor — there are five rather than six — than initially proposed. School officials also scrapped the building’s glow-in-the-dark top; instead, less expensive etched-glass panels were used on the Chace Center’s upper stories.)

RISD’s desire to pack as many functions as possible under one roof may also have been a problem.

Though most of the Chace Center’s public spaces, including the entry lobby, museum shop and main galleries, are located on the first and third floors, the building’s responsibilities don’t end there. A series of second-floor gallery spaces, for example, will be used to display student artwork, including large-scale installations and multimedia works.

Students also have the run of the fifth floor, which features a mix of classrooms and studios. The fourth floor, meanwhile, houses the RISD Museum’s print collection, along with a suite of curatorial offices and art-conservation facilities.

While the Chace Center handles most of these duties extremely well — indeed, most of the building is as sleekly versatile as a Swiss Army knife — a shorter to-do list probably would have produced an even better result.

In most respects, though, the Chace Center is a gem. (Yes, I know I said that already, but it’s worth repeating, especially in a city where new buildings — and especially ambitious new buildings — are often greeted with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for root canal operations.)

In fact, the Chace Center is a wonderfully deft blend of old and new.

Brick, for example, has a starring role on the exterior, providing a sash-like strip on the building’s west side (facing North Main Street) and becoming the dominant material on the north and south walls. That helps tie the Chace Center into the existing streetscape, where several neighboring buildings, including RISD’s College Building (built in 1822) and Metcalf Building (1869), are also covered with brick.

Meanwhile, a narrow setback on the south corner of the Chace Center helps frame the former People’s Savings Bank (1913), a small neoclassical building that currently houses RISD’s furniture department.

The result — a kind architectural pirouette — is so neatly done that many people may not notice. Yet they will notice the bank, which now seems more visible than ever.

Even something that appears thoroughly contemporary at first — the raised aluminum bands or “fins” that slice across the Chace Center’s façade — finds an echo in the city’s older architecture. (Try picturing those bands as giant clapboards and you’ll see what I mean.)

On a more practical level, the Chace Center vastly improves pedestrian access between College Hill and downtown. Granted, you could always cut through the RISD campus between North Main and Benefit streets — provided you knew the route (and provided you weren’t wearing high heels.) Yet the network of stairs, walkways and plazas that Moneo has wrapped around the Chace Center turns this raw urban trail system into something far more elegant and user-friendly.

In particular, visitors will want to seek out the small covered plaza Moneo has created between the Chace Center and RISD’s Memorial Hall. It’s the kind of hidden-yet-cozy place you’d expect to find in Paris or London, yet here it is in Providence. Priceless.

A sensitivity to history and context was, of course, one of the reasons RISD officials selected Moneo back in 2000. A 1995 winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, Moneo is known for his ability to blend old and new, past and present.

One of his most famous projects, the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain, incorporates parts of an ancient Roman town. Another project transformed a Renaissance palace in Madrid into a showcase for contemporary art. (In America, Moneo’s work includes the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.)

At the same time, Moneo is a contemporary designer of great skill and vision.

Compared to some of his more flamboyant contemporaries — among them, Frank Gehry and the Dutch architect Rem Koohaas — Moneo’s work can seem restrained to the point of severity. And certainly, the Chace Center has none of the boisterous energy — or eye-catching curves — of Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao.

Yet Chace Center has something else: a kind of quiet energy and strength that belies its (relatively) small size. Indeed, Moneo seems to have made the most of the building’s block-like shape, introducing just enough asymmetry to keep things interesting and dotting the façade with an array of windows, each one seemingly different from the others. The result suggests a giant piece of minimalist sculpture.

Moneo’s less-is-more approach is also evident in the Chace Center’s interior spaces.

The first-floor lobby is spare and simple, a place for students, faculty members and museum-goers to gather briefly before heading off in different directions. (Then again, there are several reasons to linger in the lobby, including a small café area with retro-modern tables and chairs and risd/works, a shop selling art and products designed by RISD graduates. A new ticket counter and reception desk for the RISD Museum are also located here.)

By contrast, the Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium, a new 210-seat auditorium just off the main lobby, feels almost like a guilty luxury. Covered with richly grained oak panels, the auditorium is a striking yet wonderfully serene space tailored for small-scale talks, lectures and performances.

From the lobby, most visitors will proceed to the Chace Center’s main gallery spaces, which are located on the third floor. As previously noted, the trip up (via elevator or escalator) is no great shakes, but the gallery itself is a beauty — a big, airy, versatile space that can hold its own with any museum gallery in New England.

And thanks to a new glass-covered “skybridge,” museum-goers can also access the gallery from the RISD Museum’s Radeke Building. There is even a bonus: sweeping views of the Chace Center’s main entrance and plaza area as you cross between the two buildings.

Finally, as they move around the Chace Center, most visitors will inevitably be drawn to the windows — some of them quite large — that Moneo has scattered throughout the building. Though their placement appears random from the outside, most afford spectacular views of the surrounding buildings and city.

It’s almost as if Moneo, who spent many years learning to love New England architecture while teaching at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, is saying: “Look, there’s plenty of beauty outside these walls, too.” And now that beauty includes the Chace Center.

The Chace Center is located at 20 North Main St., between College Street and Waterman Street, in Providence. It opens to the public on Saturday.

bvansicl@projo.com