In the beginning is the dream, and every building, with the exception of a mud hut and a blockhouse, is the realization of a dream, is the dream, even does the dreaming. Three new buildings have arisen on West Houston, each a different kind of dream building. Though it is fair to ask whether Houston Street can ever have any charm to speak of, at least we can say that, with the completion of these new arrivals, it looks far better than it has in some time.

The best is 610 Broadway, a glinty, heavy-metal anomaly amid the cast-iron relics and wannabes in the neighborhood. If you have not been lately to the corner of Broadway and Houston, you may be surprised to find the beloved car wash and three level underground garage no longer there. Nor is there any trace of the massive Eurotrash billboard directly above them. In their place is a seven-story, glass-and-steel structure with a setback, whose irregular massing becomes entirely metallic in the eastern end as it curves gracefully into Lafayette Street. This is divided from the bulk of the structure by a glass tower, the building’s tallest feature.

The structure is the most ambitious office building to rise in the vicinity of SoHo in decades. 610 Broadway’s aesthetic strongly recalls those early 20th-century dreams of modernity immortalized in the best paintings of Charles Sheeler. The architect in charge of the dream was Christian Amolsch, of the L.A. firm Studios Architecture. Judging from the other buildings this firm has designed in the South, the Midwest, and England, this virtuosic industrialism is a favored idiom. Only the skill with which it is put together, as well as the opulent simplicity of the materials, suggest that this is a contemporary work imitating the hardscrabble factory aesthetic of an earlier age.

The two other buildings, 19-35 West Houston and 55 West Houston, are the dreams of H. Thomas O’Hara, engrafted onto structural shells created by Beyer Blinder Belle. According to the architect’s Web site, these two buildings, respectively between Mercer and Greene and Greene and Wooster streets, represent the “Gateway to SoHo.” Who, only a few decades back, could have imagined that we would one day be speaking of a “Gateway to SoHo”? It would have been the equivalent of talking today about the “Gateway to Bed-Stuy.” But, given the trend of the market, even that may sound eminently sensible in a few years.

In the past, I have written about this firm in terms far from respectful. Such uptown high-rises as the Impala on 76th and First and 425 Fifth at 38th Street were and remain fairly inexcusable. The present buildings, however, are arrayed horizontally rather than vertically and in a more vernacular style. The result, while hardly trailblazing, is pleasant enough.

Each building takes up an entire block along Houston. The more eastern one, 35 W. Houston, is divided into halves, the taller on the east side and clad in red brick. Other than their height, both parts of this building are fairly similar in detail. They consist of multistory bases and then bays, dissected by black metal pillars, rising up to the roof in imitation of the loft buildings that define so much of SoHo.

If the dream of 35 W. Houston is to look back to 1900, the pale facade of 55 W. Houston looks back to the cast-iron buildings of half a century earlier. Here, too, is a multistory base, but the massing is tripartite, with the tallest section toward the center. In keeping with the style of its sources, this building is far more modular in feeling and far less energetically articulated than its neighbor to the east.

The dominant feature of both is the bare water tower that rises in each case from the highest point of the building. Once architects exerted all their powers to cloak these purely utilitarian elements. Today the eye of the beholder agrees to see them as things of beauty in and of themselves, and of moral integrity, too.

The dream of both buildings is to embody a building in New York that embodies what well-heeled foreigners think of when they think of New York architecture. And that is what the firm of H. Thomas O’Hara has responsibly done.

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How reasonable it all sounds! Last week a compromise was reached on the Whitney’s proposed expansion. And compromises, as you know, are always good. The issue was whether the Landmarks Preservation Board would allow Renzo Piano, architect of the expansion, to tear down two row houses on Madison in order to expand the entrance. In the name of preserving buildings of absolutely no distinction, other than that they are more than a century old, the board allowed him to tear down the entirety of one and half of the other, leaving only its facade. Through all its 40-year history of overreach, petulance, and spastic servility by turns, we may doubt whether the board has ever made a more ill-considered call. They have cut the baby in half and accomplished nothing more than to deny Mr. Piano (oh, and 8 million New Yorkers) the possibility of a grand entrance to a museum that could surely use it.