Have you seen the latest sacrilege on East 59th Street? No, I’m not referring to Gotham’s version of the Ka’aba, the black monolith that has arisen, temporarily, along Fifth Avenue as part of the extensive modifications of the plaza in front of the General Motors Building. This cube has already received some attention and will receive even more when it is transformed into a highly visible flagship for Apple Computer.

Rather, I refer to what is taking place more quietly at the Madison Avenue entrance to the GM Building. Here, too, the building’s architect, Edward Durell Stone, designed a plaza, one of the few on the avenue, in exchange for the developer’s right to build the oversize structure you see today. But this is not Mr. Stone’s year. Not only is it likely that his endearing folly, 2 Columbus Circle, will be altered beyond recognition; now the GM Building’s Madison Avenue plaza has been totally abolished, and the facade of the building, up to the fourth floor, has been made flush with the street line.

I confess I never realized how welcome an inflection this little plaza was until I saw what replaced it. In one of the dreariest excuses for a curtain wall, the emphatic horizontality of the new appendage – and the orientation of the mullions across the facade – clashes tastelessly with the almost obsessive verticality of the rest of the building, which rises in semi-elegant marble pinstripes all the way to the 55th floor.

The General Motors Building was never a masterpiece, but at least it had the grace of self-consistency. That has now been dashed beyond recall. Ironically, at various points where work is taking place, the management has placed self-serving pairs of photographs: the GM building and the Parthenon, GM and the U.S. Capitol, GM and Saint Peter’s.Yet the only possible point of similarity – the perceptual proximity of GM’s marble bays and the classical columns of the other buildings – is precisely what has been annihilated on the Madison Avenue facade.

Two blocks to the east, at 58th Street and Lexington Avenue, is a similarly illfavored building: the new flagship of the clothier New York & Company.The problem here, as with GM, is not that the structure is outlandishly ugly – the International Style errs through dullness rather than ugliness – but that it is utterly lacking in imagination. Like the GM’s new Madison Avenue facade, this is a horizontal curtain wall whose darkened, dusty glass has been arrayed across three stories and crowned with an entirely insufficient cornice.

A comparison between these two buildings and Boyd’s Chemists (aka Boyd’s of Madison Avenue) on the southwest corner of Third Avenue and 58th Street, is an object lesson in the difference between competent and incompetent use of the International Style. The structure that houses Boyd’s was completed in the past month and is a two-story expanse of curtain wall clad in rather attractive pewtery gray metal. The angles are obviously the same as in the other buildings and the materials at least comparable. But here as elsewhere, everything depends on the subtlest modulations in the ratios of glass to armature to infill, and in the quality of the glass and metal.

In every respect, Boyd’s comes out ahead. It exhibits neither the monotony of New York & Company nor the arbitrary variation between the first and second floor that defines the new facade of the GM Building. And it is hard to say exactly why the cornice that crowns Boyd’s works as well as it does.

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Perhaps by pure fortuity,the expanding glass walls of Boyd’s recall the architecture of the first few floors of the new Bloomberg Tower,just across the street. This latter building, completed in the past few months, is even better than it seemed while under construction: Those elements that appeared maladroit while they were being built, like the six-story annex that fronts Third Avenue and the penthouse that contains the building’s mechanical heart, look far better in proportion and detail than I expected.

To see the shaft of the main building, on Lexington Avenue, rising into the ether in the autumn light, is an inspiration. Its vertical ascent is held in check by a regulated sequence of horizontal white ribs that look almost like rows of ivory. Everything about the building declares that no “value engineering” went into its design or execution, that no corners were cut. Indeed, one of Manhattan’s finest new public spaces in recent memory is the mid-block through-street between Third and Lexington Avenues, which spirals upward, like a drunken Silenus, in the form of a conical section.

My only criticism is that not enough is being done with this through-street. Thus far, its main function is to facilitate the unloading of delivery trucks.A great urban opportunity is being wasted. It is not too late to transform it in such a way that there is seating of some sort as well as an outdoor restaurant unmolested by vehicular traffic.

One way or another, however, this building is a manifold improvement over the white Ka’aba of the old Alexander’s, over whose still unexorcised ghosts it now rises. And within the context of that tiny patch of Midtown to which this article has been devoted, it is one of the few recent developments that can be called a triumph.

jgardner@nysun.com