As is entirely appropriate to its ecological context, there is finally something new under the sun. I refer to the Architecture of Virtue, an architecture inspired not by form or function in any traditional sense, but by the efficient and responsible use of natural resources.

Just as New York City, 100 years ago, was the cradle of the nascent skyscraper, so now, more quietly, it is becoming the most conspicuous seedbed of environmentally friendly buildings. According to “Green Towers in New York: From Visionary to Vernacular,” a new exhibition at the Skyscraper Muse um at the southern tip of Manhattan, our city is “the greenest place in America when measured by energy use per inhabitant. If the city were the fifty-first state, it would rank twelfth in population and last in energy consumption.”

The exhibition is devoted to various new buildings in the city that exemplify this environmental trend. Among these pillars of green technology are 1 Bryant Park, which is starting to rise up on Sixth Avenue at 42nd Street; the new Hearst Tower on Eighth Avenue at 59th Street; the New YorkTimes Building; 7 World Trade Center; the Freedom Tower, and Goldman Sachs’s new World Headquarters.

While office towers are conspicuous examples of this new form of architecture, it can also be found in hospitals like the Memorial Sloane-Kettering New Research Building as well as in a number of residences in Battery Park City, such as the Verdesian and the Solaire. But although Battery Park City mandated that its buildings be “green,”what is important about apartment buildings like the Helena and the Mosaic, on West 31st Street, is that they are private developments. In other words, developers are betting the newest generation of apartment buyers will be attracted on principle to green buildings, and will pay more for them in order to experience the warm inner glow that comes from knowing that they are doing the right thing.

Models, photographs, and computer simulations of each of these works are on view in the exhibition, together with extensive wall texts and various wonkish mock-ups of cross-sections of curtain walls that exemplify new trends in insulation and the maximizing of natural light.

One senses that the architects involved, among them Norman Foster, SOM, Renzo Piano, and preeminently Fox & Fowle (or more recently Cook + Fox), exhibit an almost athletic zeal in their desire to make the best and most conscientious use of the environment. For example, the various organizations that rank buildings according to their environmental viability award silver and gold stars for excellence. In theory, there is even a platinum star,but no one has ever received it.Yet 1 Bryant Park, with its soon-to-be famous waterless toilets, is competing hard for it, and might just get it.

From an aesthetic point of view, all this virtue is invisible. Aside from the usual preference for curtain walls, there is little in these buildings that would indicate their higher calling. Like any virtue worth having, the various efficiencies that these buildings boast are hidden, woven into the structure of the steel and glass, deftly concealed beneath the brick and granite cladding.

The argument could be made that this latest movement in green architecture is the logical consequence, the manifest destiny, of the opposable thumb. It is human nature, after all, to wish to make progress and improvements in our quest for ultimate perfection; to tinker away and make incremental improvements in efficiency and design until the last watt and lumen has been squeezed out. In this way, the biggest manmade objects in the world, our buildings, become one with the smallest, the microchip, in the desire to wring ever more out of ever less.

Until May (39 Battery Place, 212-968-1961).