For the second time in as many months, it is possible to speak well of a project designed by Costas Kondylis and Partners. The abundance of this firm’s architectural product is such that you could be excused for thinking that one out of every two new condo developments in Manhattan was conceived in its ever-busy studios. Certainly anyone who spends his time writing about the New York architectural scene will find frequent occasion to discuss Mr. Kondylis’ firm, and even though he is a great gentleman, the products of his studio have tended to be less than inspiring.

Usually contextual and historicist, they demonstrate only rarely the respect for history that you find in the works of Robert A. M. Stern. Mr. Kondylis’s buildings are sometimes little more than modernist skyscrapers with fake limestone cladding and a few desultory details tacked on. Among the most recent examples are 10 Barclay Street and 985 Park Avenue.

But while Mr. Kondylis is not usually associated with modernism, he is somewhat better at it than he is at the contextualism for which he is known in the trade. Whatever you think of the monolithic blackness of Trump World Plaza, by the United Nations building, or of its urban implications, it remains a fairly elegant revision of the late modernist black tower. And the Legacy, at 157 E. 84th Street, is a surprisingly subtle structure, given that it consists of little more than ribbon windows along a grid and loft spaces in the interior.

It is surely a testament to this firm’s prolific output (it has been responsible for more than 45 towers in New York in 20 years) that yet a fifth building is going up at 200 West End Ave., at 70th Street. This new building is a compromise between the firm’s modernism and its contextualism. In the simplest of terms it maintains the general dimensions of the classic West End residential palace, roughly 12 or 13 stories high and receding sufficiently down the side-street to achieve a boxy mass that feels very different from the typology of the modernist slab. At 200 West End Ave., a tower rises from the northern half of the building, so that it tops out at 27 stories. But this is only one of many refined inflexions that mark the exterior of the building.

The two dominant formal terms of the façade are a mullioned curtain wall in the tower and bone-white masonry cladding in much of the rest of the building. What unites these two so happily is that they harmonize along the same grid, but it is a fine, evocative, human grid, with no harsh points to make. Variety is achieved in the grid by the interplay between the mullions of the curtain wall and the right angles of the masonry cladding, which contains two floors within each compartment, rather like the window-work at 985 Park Ave., but here contrived with greater simplicity and elegance.

Further variety is produced along West End Avenue by the understated interstitial recession between the north side of the building, with the tower, and the south side. This accomplishes the difficult task of accounting visually for the structural shift while, at the same time , reinforcing a fundamental unity across the project as a whole. Above all, this and other structural inflections, play off very nicely against the restrained flatness of the façade, both in the limestone passages and the curtain-walled passages.

Let it be said that, as welcome a development as 200 West End Ave. is, anything that was built along this stretch of the avenue would be an improvement over what is there now. Yes, there are many stately pre-war residences in this part of the city. But right here, the avenue collides with the Corbusian fantasies of a host of mid-century superblocks in all their bare brick, tower-in-the-park ugliness. Few areas of the city have been as efficiently blighted by the failure of architectural design as the few blocks directly west and north of Lincoln Center. Mr. Kondylis’s new addition adds a much needed touch of class.

jgardner@nysun.com