Few architectural artifacts attest more eloquently to the changing fortunes of Chelsea than the nearly completed tower at 545 W. 25th St., which rises, all-seeing and all-seen, over one of the most incandescent neighborhoods in Manhattan. This sight, we may imagine, is how the Woolworth Building felt back in 1913, when it soared up, in splendid isolation, over the humbled building stock of lower Broadway.

In flagrant resistance to the overwhelming tide of Gotham real estate, however, the new 21-story Chelsea Arts Center is not destined to be a residence, but a commercial condominium. Like the fabled Fuller Building at 57th Street and Madison Avenue, it will apparently be stacked vertically with wall-to-wall galleries. Already the first two floors have been sold to the Marlborough Gallery, which has the means to move anywhere it wants. Their new space, designed by Thierry Despont, is supposed to open in the spring.

As for the building itself, less than a year ago this tower was little more than a notion, and now it rises above the world of contemporary art in a distinguished design by the little known firm of Kossar & Garry Architects. You can count this building as yet one more scion, the fifth by my counting, of Christian de Portzemparc’s LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) Building at 13 E. 57th St. It emerges in a facetted mass that attests to the now pervasive and once radical style known as Deconstruction. A variety of planes fracture and intersect across the surface, which frees itself from its base about half way along and picks up three cantilevered balconies before it hits the top.

With the possible exception of Kohn Pedersen Fox’s 505 Fifth Ave., this is perhaps the best of the five sons of LVMH, and better than the parent building to boot. Certain details, like the way the curtain wall of the base eccentrically inhabits the masonry box that frames it, are quite masterful. It is in the nature of Deconstructivist buildings that they offer very different prospects depending upon the angle from which they are seen. That they should be visually interesting from all angles is a tall order, but the Chelsea Arts Tower manages to pull it off. Not the least difference between it and all its predecessors is that, whereas all of them are much darker buildings than LVMH, this latest arrival relies far more on the integration of masonry amid the curtain walls, whose darkness is enlivened by paler steel mullions than in the earlier buildings. Finally, despite the fractured energy of the façade, a strong narrow line of masonry descends the eastern side, giving ballast and support to the composition as a whole.

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The more one sees of 7 World Trade Center, designed by David Childs of SOM, the worthier it seems. Its distinction is especially remarkable in that it was a speculative venture on the part of the developer, Larry Silverstein, rather than something built at the behest of a single entity that might invest heavily in its design. But from the glass surface of the six-story trapezoidal base, which houses a Con Edison station, all the way to the top, one senses that every detail has been scrupulously pondered and artfully realized.

The New York Academy of Sciences was the first tenant to sign a lease and has just moved in. For almost half a century, the academy inhabited a very different structure, a three-story Italian Renaissance palazzo up on 63rd Street between Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Now occupying the entire 40th floor of the new building, the academy has exchanged a proximity to Central Park for breath-taking vistas of the Hudson and East Rivers, New York Harbor, and a nearly unobstructed view uptown.

The look of the place is, as might be expected, radically different from what it was. Designed by the improbably named H 3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture (that is to say, the prolific Hugh Hardy and his project manager, Mercedes Amarillas), it is modern and light-filled, whereas its previous incarnation was augustly classical and somewhat dark.

The first thing you notice on entering the new space is a pierced tripartite screen, behind the reception desk, that looks like a cross between cobwebs and lace, but is actually a three-dimensional rendering of the street grid of Lower Manhattan that marks several of the previous locations of the 189-year-old academy.

This new space winds round the building’s central core and is separated into two equal parts. The public half occupies roughly the northern and eastern sides. In much of this area, the walls are covered in reassuringly corporate anigre wood, while the floors are graced with teak. The carpeting, designed by the architects, is a bright red patterned with helical strands of DNA. This 14,000 square foot space contains a good-sized flexible auditorium, three meeting rooms, and two pantries, in addition to the reception area.

The administrative half, also 14,000 square feet, has space for 14 private offices, 64 work stations, and an art gallery among other features. Along the walls are brightly colored images of flowers, designed by the firm of 2×4. Their boldest stroke, however, is an anamorphic projection of a painting from 1632, Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury’s “Galileo in Front of the Inquisition,” that looks like an abstraction when you face it head on, but collects itself into coherence when viewed from the side.

Perhaps the best thing about these new premises is the repetition, in the offices and the layout, of the motif of a slightly skewed parallelogram. This echoes the foot-print of the building itself, a curious design decision by David Childs that influences, implicitly or openly, everything that will ever be placed inside the building.

jgardner@nysun.com