In certain architects, the personal computer has engendered the bizarre delusion that anything is possible — that the laws of gravity have been repealed and the immemorial compacts of nature have been rendered null and void. Rather than the drably Newtonian right angles of the Modern movement, this new architecture professes to swivel and swerve on a dime, thanks to some logarithm that empowers computers to join titanium plates and much besides in ways unimagined by the builders of the past.

In his nearly completed Cooper Square Hotel, Carlos Zapata has created a 22-story tower that exploits, to no memorable effect, this infinite elasticity of postindustrial form. In both its shape and style, the building rises up like one of Constantin Brancusi’s birds in flight. But rather than being streamlined, like the works of the Romanian sculptor, Mr. Zapata’s as yet unfinished Cooper Square Hotel, slated to open later this year, is a faceted mass that bristles, perhaps unintentionally, with jagged edges. This is not the first bird in flight to strike the architect’s fancy. A comparable one, though much taller and quite a bit better, has been conceived as an office tower in Ho Chi Minh City, while another structure, of far more ungainly proportions, has been planned for 39-41 W. 23rd St. This latter building, after being rejected by Community Board Five, has now been approved by the City Council and the Department of City Planning.

To the north and west, the Cooper Square project is a pale glassy structure that assumes a calcareous coloration to the south, where it is clad in what look like limestone panels. Meanwhile, its eastern face has been marked by a clumsy and entirely unnecessary cantilever. Let it also be said that in a matter of months, the whole thing may look very much better, with the completion, just to its north, of a Thom Mayne building meant to house Cooper Union’s art, architecture, and engineering programs. But that is primarily because the latter project promises to look even worse. Overall, this bird-in-flight business may weigh heavily with the architect, but his more immediate source seems to be Daniel Libeskind’s initial plan for the Freedom Tower, a project that had no less of an influence on Cook + Fox’s Bank of America building, which is nearing completion on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue.

In fairness, it should be said that, although the building is as yet little more than a shell, it appears to be well made, in the sense that it does not look cheap and that corners do not seem to have been cut. But what are we to make of the fritted glass that accounts for so much of the northern and western façades of the building? Those millions of tiny white dots that are baked into the windowpanes are intended to filter out direct sunlight in an environmentally friendly way. Whether they succeed in this mission, they have become, over the past few years, virtually a symbol of environmental rectitude. But in the Cooper Square Hotel, the pure symbolism of fritted glass has been reduced to something like absurdity: There is a fritted motif recurring on the south façade, but carved into opaque panels. Fritting is as relevant to masonry as the aesthetic of the running shoe is to the toothbrush.

Cooper Square Hotel has been a source of considerable controversy for the good and obvious reason that it makes no sense whatever in its current location. It is rising up in virtual isolation over the row houses that surround it. The hotel is visible for nearly a mile around, towering as it does above the generally low-lying buildings that are its new neighbors. Without consideration for the style or scale of these neighbors, it seems to harass and cow them into submission.

Something about the base of this new building gives me the willies. Absurdly, its footprint is cleft to form a tiny pavilion of sorts that looks as if it had come unattached from the main structure and ends abruptly on the property line. Though it is hard to say for certain, this configuration looks to be the result of the developer’s inability to acquire the adjoining property, though it may also be a simple matter of artistic taste, an implementing of the Deconstructivist style. For my part, I cannot look at its unceremonious tangle of forms without imagining all the dirt that New York City’s microclimate will deposit into its folds, and the dreary, sleazy effect that it is apt to have on the whole building. We have already seen this result in what may be the progenitor of such “folded” architecture: Christian de Portzamparc’s LVMH building at 21 E. 57th St., which looks considerably older now than its eight years. It would be bad enough if Mr. Zapata’s building were fashioned from real stone masonry, which has the power to improve with the passage of years. Instead, one cannot look at this as yet unfinished work without the dreary foreknowledge that, very soon, it too will start to look very old indeed.

Why is that folding configuration there in the first place, and why does it reappear to equally unfortunate effect in the published renderings for Mr. Zapata’s 23rd Street building? Because architecture now has the capacity to realize such visions as architects should have the character and judgment never to attempt.