Not so very long ago, an establishment that chose to call itself the Bowery Hotel would have carried very different associations from those it might carry today. But then, until very recently, no such hotel, not even a single room occupancy catering to the denizens of skid row, would have willingly assumed such a title. After all, you want a touch of class in the name you give your hotel, and the very syllables of “Bowery” had long since become a byword for bibulous dissolution.

But times have changed. A new hotel will soon open bearing precisely that name, a boutique hotel no less, and a remarkably accomplished and self-assured building. Because of its unusually checkered construction history, authorship of the design is not entirely clear. But the owners, Sean McPherson and Eric Goode, who also own the Maritime hotel at 88 Ninth Ave., are claiming credit for its present appearance. The structure resembles Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center in that it is a postmodern imposter of a building. Unlike the Neo-Preo contextualism that Robert Stern is implementing at 15 Central Park West (which seeks to persuade the inhabitants that they are living in a pre-war building), the point of this new building is to draw attention to itself and its contemporaneity.

This aim will be easily acheived. Amid the generally low lying buildings of the area, even the new ones, the Bowery Hotel stands out as a tower that rises 17 stories, which makes it taller than any other structure on the avenue. Now this would be a fine time to launch into a high-minded sermon on the evils of tall towers that destroy the scale and crush the spirit of their communities — especially since this latest building, once intended as an NYU dorm, has been beset at every step by controversy regarding its function, shape, and height. But I will not bore you with any such claims.

The truth is that the Bowery is one of the most irredeemably graceless stretches to be found anywhere in the five boroughs. That fact has nothing to do with the condition of the place, but with the inherent soullessness of its building stock. We may gather from its name, suggesting a grove of blossoming bowers, that once, long ago, the neighborhood impressed its citizens with a certain bucolic charm. But any trace of that has long since vanished and most of the buildings that remain are unlovely in themselves and inharmonious with their neighbors.

The result is a jagged catenary of low-lying lamp stores and restaurant hardware outlets. If anything, the Bowery needs more tall and distinguished buildings along the lines of this soon to be opened hotel. Unlike Harlem or the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, there is little here that merits landmark protection.

The Bowery Hotel manages to be both contextual and boldly idiosyncratic. It attempts to look as though it were the sort of hulking, super-serious tower that once served as a fixture of film noir. Like the World Financial Center, its general type is immediately understood by the eye, before the dissonances and ambiguities set in.

The façade is an eloquent testimonial to the possibilities of spare geometric integrity and of a respectful obedience to it. The three main portions of the structure, rising in setbacks from the base to the water tower, are unimpeachably cubic. Their pervasive brick facing is richly relieved throughout by square mullioned windows, each one elegantly ballasted by a limestone sash. A series of discreet stars, fashioned from blackened bronze, punctuate the infill between the windows and succeed in exerting considerable visual force.

The same bronze material that makes up the mullions and the stars accounts for the hulking canopy that marks the grand entrance along the avenue, its intentional heaviness mitigated by its glazed roof. The same metal will be found in the retro sconces that flank the canopy, as well as in the fire escapes at the upper levels, which seem to exist mainly as a period detail. On the northern end of the building’s footprint is a restaurant, a one story structure clad mostly in glazed green brick and equipped with a charming striped awning whose elegance is of a piece with the rest of the hotel. But once the mind has gratified itself by perceiving this conformity to type, attained through the expert use of period details, the eye is tipped off that it is looking at an unapologetically contemporary building. Above all, this effect is achieved by the helter-skelter manner in which the three main boxes that make up the building have been stacked one on top of the other. Yet even here there is ambiguity. These boxes are not as boldly disjointed as those that will soon make up the New Museum, which is rising on the Bowery a few blocks to the south. In fact, they fall just barely within the context of what would have been allowable in a building of 1900. But don’t be fooled. The jauntiness of their juxtaposition is vividly contemporary and they afford several dozen fascinating angles from which to view the structure.

The Bowery Hotel may represent the first example of a contextualist building that has learned anything worth learning from the deconstructivist style. Surely it is not obviously deconstructivist, in the manner of Gehry’s the Sails over on Eleventh Avenue and 18th Street. But in its ability to create architectural interest through fractured formal irregularity, it far surpasses its much publicized neighbor to the west.

jgardner@nysun.com