There is a seductive mendacity to the translation of three dimensions into two. I am reminded of that every year around this time, when the world’s largest purveyor of cigars sends me a brochure listing all its brands at unbeatable prices. The cigars are photographed at life size (I have checked them against the real thing), yet through the alchemy of shading and background colors, they loom unimaginably larger on the page than in reality.

The same is true of architectural photographs and renderings. How many times does an image of a building or an apartment promise untold delights, only to disappoint the instant we encounter it in the flesh? Something in the angle of the shot, the cropping, or the weather in the background can redeem many a misbegotten structure.

And so it is with the nearly completed Urban Glass House of Philip Johnson Alan Ritchie Architects, with interiors by Annabelle Selldorf, who distinguished herself in the design of the Neue Galerie. This was billed as Johnson’s final project before he expired roughly a year ago.

I confess that I was positively enchanted when I first saw the rendering for this 12-story building at 330 Spring Street, a stone’s throw from the Hudson. In its blockish massing relieved by tasteful setbacks hewn from its cubic mass, in the luminosity of its facade, and in the downright poise with which it inhabits its corner of the city, it promised to be one of the most distinguished buildings to rise in Manhattan in at least a decade. Indeed, it seemed to carry over into an urban residential context the exquisite tact that Johnson marshaled at his best, as is evident in the Glass House he built for himself in 1949 or in the townhouse-size Asia House, now the Russell Sage Foundation, built in 1959.

Why, then, on seeing it close to completion, am I so much less impressed by this latest building than I had hoped to be? As I have pointed out in the past, few completed buildings ever look as good as their renderings, but they always look better than they do under construction. And so, the Urban Glass House will inevitably look better in a few months, when the scaffolding comes down, the dust settles, and all the hard hats have gone away.The question is how much better. And here I have my doubts.

The current structure is a fairly faithful realization of the renderings, which is not always the case. But the mood and feeling of the place are quite different. In one widely published rendering, the building, viewed from the north looking south, raises its slender mass into the empurpled evening air, its interior transformed into a crystalline vessel of light. The spandrels of the grid seem exquisitely proportioned, shunning the immateriality and subordination they usually exhibit in the construction of a modernist curtain wall.

The reality, as it is now coming into view, falls far short of that first impression. And it is hard to see how, even with all the scaffolding removed and all the well-heeled denizens installed, it will look much better. For one thing, the ratio of the spandrels to the glass is such that the former seem to predominate, imparting to the whole structure a heavier, more earthbound feeling than in the rendering. Even more dispiriting is the unshakable sense of value engineering – of building on the cheap – that hangs over the whole project in its present state. There is something deeply dissatisfying about the slapdash fashion in which the various units of the facade have been joined.

At its best, the International Style, of which this is a late flowering, feels like a dream of pure geometry miraculously realized in the here and now. On Spring Street, however, that reverie is disrupted by an acute sense of the imperfections of the construction, the dull graphite gray of the spandrels, and the ever so slightly warped surface of the glass.

Having said that, let me emphasize that this is in no way a bad building. It is better than any of the six or seven other structures that are going up or have just gone up in this suddenly “cutting-edge” district, a formerly industrial area that was rezoned back in 2003. And the frittering away of the cube along the top three stories of the western facade bears out much of the promise of the rendering.

The somewhat tortuous path that has brought us the present building is, by the way, an interesting example of the vagaries of architectural fashion and process. Originally, Johnson and his team created a very different building for the site, a 26-story tower to be called the Habitable Sculpture. A raunchy collision of postmodern vernacular contextualism and deconstructivism, it looked like a sausage of seven or eight buildings, each jockeying with the others in a race to the top.The community board stepped in, the project collapsed, and Johnson and company returned to the drawing board. The result is the building we see today, which is quite a bit better than what might have been.

In other words, the Manhattan skyline dodged a bullet – but not before the original proposal won considerable plaudits from the architectural commentariat, especially Herbert Muschamp at the Times. Now there is talk that the developer of that project, Nino Vendome, will try to get the Habitable Structure built in some other part of the city. Let us hope he fails.

jgardner@nysun.com