Two new buildings have recently arisen in uptown Manhattan — one east, the other west — both of which deserve at least a moment of your attention. The first, and certainly the more striking, is Pop Burger, at 20 E. 58th St. Its name is admirably accurate, since the establishment does indeed serve burgers, and its dominant aesthetic, from the bubbly glass protrusions of its façade to the Warhol-inspired dining area in the back — not to mention the mod lounge and pool room upstairs — is an homage to Pop Art.

It is rare that a restaurant takes over an entire building in Manhattan, but such is the case with Pop Burger. Restaurant buildings represent a very different typology from that of residential or office architecture. With a restaurant as client, the façade becomes, as here, a massive three-dimensional billboard. Its purpose is to communicate neither the safety of residential architecture nor the sturdy monetary conservatism of an office tower, but to pull you in by the lapels and sit you down at one of the tables. At the same time, the façade is meant to suggest, especially in a burger joint, that fun of a slightly rebellious and demotic order is in the offing.

In this regard, the new structure, designed by Ali Tayar of the New York-based Parallel Design, does its job admirably. In full retro mode, it invokes the sort of hospitality architecture you might have found in Manhattan back in the swinging 1960s. The facade is somewhat unusual: a grid formed by an anodized laser cut aluminum facing. Inserted into the grid, in several sizes, are slumped glass windows that protrude a good six inches from the street wall, giving the facade a space-age look. Between these portholes and the gun-metal gray of the cladding, the grid itself is a fiery, over-ripe red.

Though the workmanship feels hasty and impermanent, and hence somewhat unsatisfactory, it exemplifies the slap-dash look that the owner wanted, as he makes even clearer in the interior. Here you encounter a long corridor formed of rough-hewn oak that faces a floor-to-ceiling stainless steel panel, covered in repeating patterns of culinary words and phrases. Through it food is ordered and dispensed.

Once you are lucky enough to receive a pair of sliders, a coke, and an order of fries, you take them to the back of the establishment, a brightly lit space decked out in white Formica tables and mod blue chairs. The walls, faced in the same rough oak as in the front, are covered with Warhol silk screens of Campbell Soup cans.

Mr. Tayar specializes in the architecture of hospitality. In addition to creating the Omnia, a hotel in Zermatt, Switzerland, he has also designed, here in New York, such downtown restaurants as Midway, Pizza Bar, Bouley Restaurant, and the original Pop Burger, similarly conceived, on Ninth Avenue at 15th Street.

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A paradox: On the Upper East Side, the highly commercial 86th Street has several major apartment buildings under construction and clearly aspires to be the new East 72nd Street, a pristinely residential area. But on the Upper West Side, the highly commercial 72nd Street aspires to the residential gentility of West 86th Street. Regarding the west side, however, the process is happening much more slowly. Indeed, Harsen House, a nearly completed residential development at 120 W. 72nd St., between Columbus Avenue and Broadway, is the first substantial new building of any kind to rise on the street between Broadway and Central Park in nearly half a century.

But then this has always been one of the oddest patches in all Manhattan. Its pleasant pre-war residential architecture stretches from the park to Columbus and then lingers a few feet west toward Broadway, before bursting into an unceremonious riot of row houses that have been commandeered and fundamentally perverted by the restaurants, new stores, banks, and boutiques at street level.

Now there are fewer of these businesses at street level, with the welcome arrival of Harsen House, whose 16 stories contain 23 units. It is designed by BKSK Architects, which has been very busy of late in the five boroughs, with the recent completion of the visitors’ center of the Queens Botanical Garden and the highly distinguished residential development at 25 Bond St. In the present project, the architects’ main ambition was to create a building that would harmonize in size and spirit with those immediately to the east. This is does successfully, in so far as the street wall and the fairly uniform building height are preserved.

Stylistically, the dominant look is — if I may reheat a term I used a few years ago — neo-preo: It is a new structure trying its damnedest to look pre-war. But in the past decade, the fortunes of the neo-preo aesthetic have changed, with the result that BKSK Architects wishes both to harmonize with the past and to declare its independence. To this end, they have created a façade that is clad predominantly in brownish brick, like so many of the neighboring buildings, and that rises above a uniform limestone-clad base. But of the three bays of windows that make up the façade, the one furthest west is clad in gray metal in a residual nod to Deconstructivism. It harmonizes well enough with the rest of the building and the rest of the block, but it weakens the overall elegance of Harsen House, without adding much in the way of interest. An example of a similar and far more successful hybrid of neo-preo and Deconstructivism is 47 E. 91st St., a boxy brick building with portions in metal and glass designed by the firm of Platt Byard Dovell White.

The windows are an additional problem: The mullions or metal surrounds have an ineffaceable whiff of value engineering to them, of building on the cheap. I mention this because it is one of the more persistent and recurring weaknesses in recent residential architecture in the five boroughs. Given its ambitions, Harsen House is largely a success, but it would be even more successful if the fenestration had been better conceived.

jgardner@nysun.com