Two weeks shy of 91, I.M. Pei, the Chinese-American architect who won the Pritzker Prize a quarter-century ago, is making New York headlines — now as much as ever. The head of the firm that designed the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Pyramide du Louvre in Paris, has co-designed a luxury condominium, now rising in Midtown, as the city considers landmark status for his concrete residential superblock, University Village.

The Centurion, Mr. Pei’s first involvement in luxury housing design in the city, is being developed by Robbie Antonio at 33 W. 56th St. The design is being credited to Pei Partnership Architects with I.M. Pei. Pei Partnership Architects has no connection to Pei Cobb Freed & Partners (as I.M. Pei & Associates, founded here more than 50 years ago, came to be called). The former comprises Chien Chung (“Didi”) Pei and Li Chung (“Sandi”) Pei, who are I.M. Pei’s sons, both trained at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. They have designed the Centurion in collaboration with their father, who retired from Pei Cobb Freed in 1990.

Currently under construction, with a ready date of early 2009, the Centurion marks Mr. Pei’s first foray into Manhattan housing design since 1966, when University Village went up, bounded by Bleecker, Mercer, and Houston streets and La Guardia Place. The complex, built by New York University on land reclaimed by Robert Moses for urban renewal in the South Village “slum,” is made up of two high-rise apartment buildings — known as Silver Towers — used by New York University (mostly for faculty housing) and a third tower ground-leased by NYU to a Mitchell-Lama co-op.

In the mid-1960s, Mr. Pei was still very much the follower of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect to whom we credit the towers-in-a-park approach to housing. Isolating high-rises amid generous open space was about bringing light and air into apartments and maximizing the space available for recreation, playgrounds, and so on. Such projects were once viewed as the antidote to gritty, dirty, and dark inner-city neighborhoods. By the time University Village was built, urbanist Jane Jacobs had delivered her bruising salvo against such planning. Jacobs advised that such projects be renovated or remade so as to create connections with the traditional urban fabric beyond the projects’ grounds. And that would involve “infilling” the yawning spaces among the towers.

In 2000, NYU purchased a supermarket, at the corner of Bleecker Street and La Guardia Place, within the University Village block. This led to speculation among Village residents that NYU was going to build a new tower on the site. Many locals didn’t want another high-rise in the neighborhood, and preservationists, increasingly concerned about saving Modernist buildings, felt that any new construction would harm Mr. Pei’s careful composition. In 2003, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation began a campaign to have University Village designated as a city landmark. While the supermarket is not considered architecturally significant, it was included by the Society for Historic Preservation in its quest for landmark designation. It would be a “non-contributing building,” in landmarks argot. That means that though it isn’t itself of landmark quality, any changes made to it would have to be approved by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, because those changes would inevitably affect the nearby landmark-quality structures.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission has scheduled a hearing for University Village for this June. NYU says it supports the designation effort, though last spring, in its “NYU Plans 2031” presentation, the university showed alternative proposals for infilling the University Village superblock, including one proposal called “The Wrapper,” in which new buildings would be “wrapped” around the open periphery of the west side of the superblock to create a new street-wall in a way that it’s hard to think Jane Jacobs would not have approved. Such a project would not be possible if the block were to be designated as a landmark.

The movement to landmark University Village — to the extent it’s not just an anti-development or anti-NYU ploy — shows how far preservationists and urban activists have come from their once automatic admiration for Jacobs. So much of the preservationist energy of today is distinctly at odds with Jacobs’s vision of the city.

Modern architects as well as curators find Mr. Pei’s towers beautiful. Their cast-in-place concrete grids result in deep-set windows and a highly “modeled” appearance, with much interesting play of shadow, that definitely place these a cut above the superblock housing norm in New York.

Farther uptown, there’s the Centurion. It’s too soon to tell, but it looks like an interesting building. The required setbacks “cascade” rather than step. Most interesting of all is the Peis’s choice of a soft Burgundian limestone for the façade, another step in our new limestone revolution, and a far cry from the concrete of University Village.