Taped to the wall of my college’s art library was an ad someone had found in an old issue of the New York Times, from the 1950s. It consisted of a simple, full-page reproduction of the “Mona Lisa” and beneath it, the words “Drink Schlitz Beer.” The meaning was clear enough: Schlitz was to beer as Lady Lisa was to art. More importantly, the almost surreal juxtaposition of these two things was supposed to communicate that Schlitz had an appreciation of the finer things, and that, if you were a cultured person, you would want to drink Schlitz beer.

That was 20 years ago, and we all had a good laugh at the idea that there was ever a time when Americans were so backward as to be seduced by such a nakedly midcult pitch. Imagine my surprise, then, to find much the same point being made on the scaffold along the ground floor of Kohn Pedersen Fox’s 505 Fifth Avenue, which rises up, all but complete, at the corner of 42nd Street. Here, the old girl is joined by one of Rubens’s portraits of his wife and a Warhol version of Botticelli’s Venus. And the point, needless to say, is that people of distinction, people who are a cut above, will naturally want to rent office space in this brand-new high-rise.

The 27-story building is somewhat more sophisticated than might be assumed from its ad campaign, which, obviously, the people at KPF had nothing to do with. It is an example of the Deconstructivist style, and the interlocking and asymmetrical facets of its exterior were intended to convey some profound dislocation. But given that it was meant to “interrogate” conventional building habits, I marvel at how tame and unremarkable the whole thing feels.

Rising from a conventional six-story base, the cantilevered mass of the building starting at the seventh floor tilts, fractures, and buckles all the way to the 24th floor, where something like order is reasserted in the orthogonal lantern at the top. The main inspiration, surely, is Christian de Portzamparc’s far paler LVMH Building on 57th Street between Madison and Park Avenues. Indeed, the debt is so manifest, that you wonder whether the very clever and professional people at KPF did not feel a little embarrassed at having to design it, presumably at the behest of developers who wanted something “edgy.”

The other building it resembles is the far more rectilinear 565 Fifth Avenue at 46th Street, designed by the late Norman Jaffe and completed in 1993. This perfectly proportioned high-rise, whose sheer glass curtain wall gleams with the clarity of a freshwater lake, has never gotten the praise it deserves, though it is one of the best and purest to arise in Midtown since the days of Gordon Bunshaft. And though Jaffe embraced with some conviction the contextualism of Postmodern architecture, never have cornices and triglyphs fashioned from stainless steel been deployed as elegantly and tastefully, or in a state of greater harmony with the modernist vocabulary of the building as a whole.

Nothing in the massing of 505 Fifth Avenue approaches that perfection, and though it is still a dusty construction site, something tells me that its curtain wall, with its nagging intimations of value engineering, will never give off the luster of its neighbor, four blocks to the north.

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Speaking of midcult sales pitches, I read with amusement the following statement from Opus Condominiums, on Broadway and 107th Street: “In the original Latin, opus meant ‘work.’ In English, it refers to a work of distinction: a notable symphony, an arresting painting, an incomparable performance or a unique invention.”

The company’s Web site goes on to inform us that, “In the OPUS condominiums, The Clarett Group and architect Randolph Gerner have created an architectural work, a magnum opus – “crowning achievement” – worthy of its unique Upper West Side setting.”

Now this 19-story building, oriented toward the northwest, is probably a pleasant place to live, and the step-out balconies at the building’s corner overlook the charming Straus Park. But those very balconies, though intended to recall Upper West Side monuments like the Ansonia, create a curving corner that is decidedly ungainly.

Even worse is the use of “artisan rusticated brick” throughout the facade. The glazed and shiny burgundy of the brick makes it one of the ugliest building materials I have ever seen. The rough surface that the bricks collectively produce causes the building to seem, through no fault of its own, to be suffering from a scorbutic rash. Unless I am missing something, it is quite hard to imagine it looking good in any circumstances.

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Once again regarding that muddy crossroads between art and architecture, have you been to the Guggenheim lately? That’s some scaffold they’ve put up! Naturally, there is no rush to see it: Like most scaffolding in this city, it is never coming down. It is what we might call “giant order” scaffolding, since it rises to fully twice the height of normal scaffolding sheds, thus imparting to its elegant girders an almost Olympian grandeur. In a nice touch, the curvature at the corners suggests the vertiginous drum of the museum itself. On a recent visit, I actually saw a number of tourists taking pictures of it. Which proves either that they didn’t know it was unconnected to Wright’s design, or that, like me, they considered it an improvement upon that design (or that, like tourists everywhere, they will take a picture of absolutely anything).