Even in its barest skeletal form, Gwathmey Siegel’s new project, the Astor Place Tower, dominates its adopted neighborhood so thoroughly that Saint Marks Place, with its unwashed lumpen proletarians, its head shops, and its vendors of vinyl LPs and subversive comic books, will never be the same. The contagion of full-blown gentrification finally has reached this strange holdout, as we have known it would for several years now. And the area is already changing for the better.

For decades, the fate of the triangular plot that this new structure has just begun to occupy has been the subject of much debate. The answer is a gunmetal gray residential tower that even now provides New Yorkers, as they head down Fourth Avenue from Union Square, with one of the best prospects in a city that is famously poor in prospects.

The architect, Charles Gwathmey, is one of the so-called New York Five. Back in the 1960s, he – along with Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Michael Graves – represented the second-generation of the International Style in the city. Over the last few decades, however, he has distinguished himself from these others by actually getting his projects built in New York.

As a consequence of that rare good fortune, he has been responsible for several distinguished projects around town. Among these are the Science, Industry, and Business Library on Madison Avenue and 34th Street, the new home of the International Center of Photography on 43rd and Sixth, the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter building on Seventh Avenue at 48th Street, and the 1992 addition to the Guggenheim.

It will be a few months still before the builders start putting some skin on this skeleton, and more than a year before the picturesque denizens of the neighborhood will have their chance to give a lusty welcome to the homemakers, professionals, and trustifarians who wait in the wings. But already we can hazard an assessment of the building, with the proviso that every structure looks better completed than under construction.

This being New York, take whatever expectations you might have, lower them by half. Then compromise, subvert, and short-circuit them by a further fifth – just to get you in the mood – and then, only then, will you be in a position to appreciate the new building.

Mr. Gwathmey has always had an affinity for sinuously curving masses that nevertheless respect the midcentury grid that, conceptually at least, underpins them. That will be born out in the Astor Place Tower, a 21-story mixed-use commercial and residential condominium, comprising 39 residential units and 13,000 square feet of commercial space.

The core of the building is a rectilinear column surrounded by three turreted extrusions whose curves are repeated at the summit. From the renderings at the firm’s Web site, the base looks to be a glazed atrium in white whose ultimate success we cannot yet assess. Nearby is to be a 4,500-square-foot plaza, open to the public from Cooper Square and including a waterfall.

On the basis of the renderings, the Astor Place Tower does not look as if it will fit in very well with the generally low-lying and undistinguished building stock in this part of the city. Even its success as a free-standing structure is a matter of conjecture at this point. We will, however, know more by next spring.

***

Random House Tower on Broadway and 56th arose with such little fanfare last year that most people who write about architecture, including yours truly, completely missed the story. I cannot honestly report that a masterpiece has been overlooked, but the building is of some interest if for no other reason than that it is by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and can be read as a kind of dress rehearsal for the nearby Time Warner Center, which opened last February.

Surely there are differences. Here only one tower rises from the base, rather than the two that soar from the base of the Time Warner Center. The latter building is also far more glassy and black. The granite facing they share accounts for far more of Random House Tower, and its frosted glass panels look incongruously as though they had been slathered with animal fat. But the accumulation of morphological parallels becomes striking once you enumerate them.

Whereas Time Warner Center aspires to be a collage of five buildings in one, here you have essentially three buildings, each with a related but ultimately distinct facade. In both projects, the black towers rise at oblique angles above a faux-masonry base. At the northern entrances of the two buildings – coincidentally the best feature of both structures – is a weighty, cantilevered metal canopy that protrudes from a stainless-steel gridwork.

Furthermore, the main entrance of both buildings is a soaring glass curtain-wall. (In the case of Time Warner Center, this has become something of the talk of the town, for reasons that elude me.) Finally, despite the generally modernist vocabulary of both buildings, each derives a conceptual boost from an all but subliminal postmodern historicism: Just as the twin towers of Time Warner Center recall the Art Deco Majestic at 72nd Steeet and Central Park West, so the tripartite massing of Random House Tower’s summit suggests the Midtown of Rockefeller Center.

The one element that puts the Time Warner building in an altogether different league is its location and the imperishable memory most New Yorkers retain of the horrible Coliseum that preceded it. And whereas the prominence of black glass gives a general unity to Time Warner Center, Random House Tower seems more like an assortment of mismatched parts. Which is to say that, ultimately, it is just another tall building in Midtown.