There was much merriment across the Upper East Side last week when Sir Norman Foster, the famed British architect, praised the neighborhood’s “tradition of radicalism.” Mr. Foster was addressing the Landmarks Preservation Committee about the 30-story high-rise he wishes to build atop the former home of Parke-Bernet auction house at Madison Avenue and 76th Street.

It occurs to me that, since Mr. Foster comes from London, perhaps he meant to say the East Village, which also has the word “east” in its name. But whether or not Mr. Foster has his directions right, he could hardly have contrived a more misdirected project for the Upper East Side than this hypermodernist glass and steel tower that would rise above the six-story plinth of the old auction house.

The evidence for Mr. Foster’s claim of radicalism consists of exactly two buildings, the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim Museum. But Mr. Foster misses the point. Surely the style of those landmarks was and remains radical in any sense of the term. But ultimately more important than their style is their fundamental respect for the forms and dimensions of the neighboring buildings. The problem with Mr. Foster’s proposal has nothing to do with style — only height. At 350 feet, it would fatally undermine the scale and spirit of the Upper East Side.

When the renderings of the proposed building were first published in the New York Times a few weeks ago, it seemed as though the wisest course was to ignore them. This, after all, is the neighborhood that has kept the Whitney in litigation for years, thwarting its eminently sensible ambitions to expand laterally in a way that would respect the neighboring buildings and serve the public. The idea, then, that the locals or the powerful Landmarks Preservation Committee would sanction such a project seemed so remote as not to merit further consideration. But the developer, Aby Rosen, has marshaled some impressive forces to his cause, and one never knows how the Landmarks Preservation Committee will come down on any issue.

Mr. Rosen, it turns out, is nothing if not well connected: He simply flipped his Rolodex for Jeff Koons, Richard Meier, Larry Gagosian, and other art world heavy-weights to show up in public and praise his efforts. Rumored to have a collection of contemporary art in excess of 800 works, Mr. Rosen is so eager to please the art world that he surrendered the entire Gramercy Park Hotel to the painter Julian Schnabel to do with as he wished. The result, to date, has been a tasteless abomination of such pretension as to inspire no confidence in any project of visual culture with which Mr. Rosen might chose to associate himself.

Granted Mr. Foster is not Mr. Schnabel. He has designed buildings of true distinction in his time. The Great Court of the British Museum is one of the finest architectural triumphs of the new millennium. But Mr. Foster works in a listless variety of styles. He can suddenly turn mediocre or far worse from one project to the next. Regarding his latest design for the Upper East Side, it is hard to come to any real conclusion, since the images that have been released thus far have been indistinct to the point of uselessness. The overriding impression one has from them, however, is that, far from being radical, this design is no more daring or new than any of a score of stale late modernist towers that have been collecting soot along Second and Third Avenues since the early ’70s. So what if the shaft of the proposed tower is curved, rather than rectilinear or that it appears (from the images) to consist of two proximate structures? As an architectural statement, it is not nearly as interesting as Mr. Foster’s New Hearst Building on 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, and that, for me, was not nearly interesting or daring enough. But at least that project, with its harlequinade of cross-hatchings, was something of a nonpareil. The dreary glass and steel curtain-walls offered up on Madison Avenue and 76th Street promise no such distinction.

Though it is true that the Carlyle Hotel is about as tall as the proposed building, both the classicizing style in which it was conceived and its isolation, amid the lower lying building that surround it, make for a harmonious interaction with its architectural context. But to have this tasteless new tower directly across the street from it, blocking out the view for strollers in Central Park, and substituting it with an unwelcome jolt of late modernism, would immediately and irreversibly rend the delicate urban fabric of the Upper East Side.

What should and probably will happen is that Mr. Foster will have to go back to his drawing board and fundamentally rethink the project. He and Mr. Rosen will get as many square feet as they now desire, but it will come in the form of a box rather than a tower. It will be less dramatic and the prices it commands will be somewhat scaled back, since it will not be able to offer its clients the bracing pleasure of blocking other peoples’ views or ensure that clients can be seen from as far away as Hoboken. But in the present delirium of real estate speculation, there is no reason to doubt that Mr. Rosen will turn a handsome profit and that the Upper East Side will be saved.

jgardner@nysun.com