Richard Meier is such an accomplished architect that, even when not at his best, he still deserves our closest attention. A case in point is One Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which amplifies certain formal ideas and preoccupations that were already present in the three towers Mr. Meier’s firm built on Perry and Charles streets over the past few years.

In the four decades that Mr. Meier has been building, he has proved to be remarkably consistent. One of the so-called New York Five, he broke upon the architectural scene back in the 1960s with a severely intellectual idiom that challenged and chastened the derivative funk into which mainstream modernism had fallen in the postwar years. From today’s architectural perspective, especially after the classicizing extravaganza of the 1980s and early ’90s, Mr. Meier and the architecture against which he rebelled both look more akin than different, with their emphasis on mostly rectilinear geometry as a metaphor for artistic and spiritual probity.

At the same time, it should be said that by standing his ground, Mr. Meier has seen the architectural community come over to his way of thinking to such a degree that this 74-year-old now seems to stand at the very forefront of contemporary design. Indeed, he could plausibly be called the first Neo-Modernist, a term that usually applies to a far younger demographic. For the reinvigorated appreciation of classical modernism that they favor, combined with a far greater sensitivity to the experiential resonance of light, air, and building materials, invokes no virtue that was not integral to Mr. Meier’s practice from the very beginning.

And yet, within the continuity of Mr. Meier’s career, there has been considerable evolution. Although curving lines were always an option in his earliest and perhaps finest works, it is really only in the last decade that the architect has begun using curves in a big way. And his curves are among the most eloquent in all of contemporary architecture.

As far as I am concerned, one of the folding plates for the Jubilee Church, on the outskirts of Rome, is worth the entire loopy career of Frank Gehry. The fundamental and defining difference between a Meier curve and that of most of his contemporaries is that these non-Euclidean sabbaticals he occasionally takes always remain embedded in a context of a fairly strict rectilinear grid to which he remains obedient.

An excellent example is the floating façade configuration on the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as the turreted keep in front of the United States Courthouse and Federal Building in Islip. Nevertheless, these two buildings, much like the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, which opened this past year, are mostly defined by those spectacular expanses of modular white wall that are the signature of Mr. Meier’s work and, to a lesser degree, of the other architects who once made up the New York Five.

But those habits and attitudes that served Mr. Meier so well in his institutional work and in his private homes had to be fundamentally rethought when he received plum commissions for residential architecture on Perry and Charles streets overlooking the Hudson River. Uninflected white walls are dazzling, but condo-buyers want windows and balconies that demand a very different aesthetic. The results have been quite good, though more so in the Charles Street tower that was built a year after the two Perry Street towers.

In his latest project in NewYork, One Prospect Park, the architect has adjusted the aesthetic of his three towers on the Hudson to a slab scarcely a stone’s throw from Grand Army Plaza. Now in summer, amid the luxuriant foliage of the surrounding trees, this nearly completed building is less visible than it will be in December. Like its predecessors on the Hudson, its 15-stories succeed in introducing a welter of variety within the context of a modernist grid.

Above an irregularly trapezoidal footprint, One Prospect Park declares its independence with the irregular placement of clusters of balconies along the façade. In a postmodern touch, these balconies are walled in frosted glass that recalls the sculptures of Christopher Wilmarth. At the same time, as though to reassert his modernist bearings, Mr. Meier has included at street level a cantilevered canopy that leads one into a free-flowing modernist space (according to the renderings I have seen). Meanwhile, at the summit of the building, just below the box that contains the mechanical core, is a filigreed structure that vaguely recalls Le Corbusier.

Although there are many worthy felicities of design in One Prospect Park, it is not a complete success. Its myriad asymmetries do not carry as much conviction as one would wish. Here, as on the Hudson, Mr. Meierhas used them, one suspects, to avoid the appearance of being yet another unimaginative modernist. It would have been better to follow the example of Jean Nouvel at 40 Mercer Street, by embracing and thus reinvigorating modernism in all of its gridded glory.

jgardner@nysun.com