In New York’s architectural community, the center of everyone’s attention these days is Bond Street. In that narrow stretch from Lafayette to Third Avenue, a number of boutique condominiums — some of the more imaginative buildings in Manhattan — are complete or nearing completion. Residential architecture’s equivalent of the boutique hotels that are now taking over Lower Manhattan, these upstarts answer to the same aesthetic and spiritual ambitions and serve a very similar clientele.

Beside the innovative but overrated 40 Bond St. and the impressive 25 Bond St., 48 Bond St. is now approaching ripeness. Scheduled for completion in the spring, it is the work of rising star Deborah Berke. Formally, Ms. Berke is something of a minimalist, but not so much in architectural terms as in sculptural terms; to date, the most distinguished project that Ms. Berke has completed in New York is the Marianne Boesky Gallery, at 509 W. 24th St. In the blockish simplicity of her forms — for example, the huge white cube that makes up the façade of the gallery — she recalls ’60s sculptors like Tony Smith. At the same time, that building affects — somewhat unconvincingly, it must be said — a demotic, low-tech vocabulary of materials, from its bare concrete flanks to its corrugated aluminum base.

On Bond Street, her materials — more glass and less metal — are somewhat different from what she has used in Chelsea, but a similar design aesthetic prevails. This aesthetic could scarcely be more divergent from the organic exuberance and opalescent, almost bling-like sheen of Herzog and de Meuron’s 40 Bond St., or from the robust and muscular movement along the stone-clad façade of 25 Bond St.. Ms. Berke’s building rises from a gray, granite base up seven stories through a middle zone, conceived as a cube comparable to that of the Boesky Gallery, before it terminates in a two-story curtain-walled setback. The overwhelming impression of the building is its flatness. This is the architectural equivalent of geek chic, an extreme rejection of detail and inflection, a self-induced monotony, that would once have seemed tasteless but that, for the moment, enjoys a certain vogue. That monotony is evident in the most striking passage in the façade, the intermediate cube, which not only occupies most of the building, but is clad in a black, lusterless, and soulless granite that is nearly unique in the new architecture of the five boroughs. Its chilling, flattened surface is scarcely relieved by the fenestration, consisting of tripartite windows that open from the bottom out on the right or left side, depending on the floor, in an attempt to vary and jazz up the rhythm.

In the back of the building, according to the renderings, the north façade will be decked out from the second floor all the way to the top in the dark granite that covers only the middle zone of the south façade. It is entirely flat throughout, since the setback at the front of the building is flush with the rest of it in the back. This austerely geometric façade is traversed by ribbon windows that embody the neo-Modernist aesthetic that prevails among so many of today’s architects, such as Richard Gluckman, Jean Nouvel, and 1100: Architect.

The result is a building that, visually, is perhaps a little less interesting or beautiful than it thinks it is, or than the architectural press and community seem to want to believe. But it is sufficiently engaging, in its drama and its attitude, to serve as an improvement on the standard fare that is usually served up to New Yorkers.

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A new building on Lexington and 79th Street perplexes me. For years and years, this space was home to a fine purveyor of wines and spirits that has now been replaced by a bank. Why is it that the previous structure, a mere two stories high, should have been replaced by another — more modern to be sure — that is also only two stories? In our age of incontinent development, surely this would be the perfect place for a condo development. But such is not the case here.

Now, as bank designs go, this one is rather good. Conceived by Studio A, it happens to be one of the few autonomous bank structures built in Manhattan in recent years. That fact may seem counterintuitive, given how many new banks there are, but most of them merely occupy space in preexisting structures. In the way this rectilinear and resolutely modernist structure occupies its corner, it draws inspiration, as is so often the case for banks in Manhattan, from Gordon Bunshaft’s Manufacturer’s Hanover Bank in Midtown. That is to say, it presents itself to the world as a free and clear curtain wall, accented with horizontal coursing lines, through which pedestrians can look in on a mostly wood-paneled interior. Its modernist credentials are further solidified by the assertively cantilevered canopy that extends into the street, boldly emblazoned with the bank’s name.

jgardner@nysun.com