East End Avenue, I confess, is a part of the city that I do not visit often. This is so much the case that, the last time I was on the premises of what is now 170 East End Ave., I was gainfully employed in the process of being born. Back then the place was Doctor’s Hospital, a dour brick structure erected in 1929 that became known, in 1987, as Beth Israel North. Over the years I thought it might be interesting to revisit the very building, perhaps even the very room, where I first emerged into the world. Well, I never acted upon that plan and now it is too late: The old building has been thoroughly demolished and replaced with a far more ambitious structure designed by Peter Marino.

As it happens, Mr. Marino’s authorship is a source of some interest, even confusion, to followers of architecture, given that he is better known for his high-end interiors than for his external structures. And while he has conceived several buildings to date, the present project will be his largest completed structure.

Mr. Marino has been called a “starchitect” in the same breath as Richard Meier, Santiago Calatrava, and the late Philip Johnson. Like them, Mr. Marino has the power, through the sheer weight of his name, to inflate the price of any apartment with which he is associated.

Mr. Marino came of age in Andy Warhol’s Factory and he happily invokes the Pale One as a major influence, but Mr. Marino remains largely unknown to the architectural establishment. Beneath their pleasant and undemanding exteriors, those buildings he has brought to completion tend, like his latest project on East End Avenue, to betray a certain amateurishness, a hesitancy that is not often seen among our architects, whose faults tend to be the sins of excessive and unimaginative professionalism, rather than of amateurism.

As with Mr. Marino’s other architectural ventures in Manhattan (the Giorgio Armani flagship at Madison Avenue and 66th Street and the Louis Vuitton flagship at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street), 170 East End Ave. will be covered largely in pale cladding that represents a kind of blanched minimalism. As a result, this building manages, like those others, to inject itself respectfully and rather unobtrusively into the urban fabric. The general vocabulary of the façade is a hybrid, largely modernist in tone with a hint of a cornice above every second story, as well as what look like paired pilasters in the spandrels between the windows. From a real estate perspective, the most striking feature of the building is the height allowed for each floor. Though ceilings have been rising steadily over the years, in reaction to their depressing lowness in the postwar period, here they achieve the sort of opulent spaciousness last seen before World War I, in the great Beaux-Arts palaces of Central Park West.

Beyond that spaciousness and the building’s pallor, the most conspicuous thing about 170 East End Ave. is its massive, boxy structure that takes up the entire plot. Presumably the developer felt that, being separated from the East River only by Gracie Mansion, the building didn’t need to enhance its view by rising up in the form of a tower.

This choice was less happy. Interior design in general, and Mr. Marino’s interiors specifically, is more a matter of surface patterns than of architectural volumes. The present structure is marred by Mr. Marino’s limited ability to think in more volumetric terms. On East End, as in his Armani flagship, he has conceived the building’s footprint as something approaching a foreshortened C-shape. It is hard to see what is gained, however, either in design or in functionality, by the recession that he has introduced midway along the building’s façade. The result is a surprisingly ungainly mass that is inflected in areas where uniformity would have been far more visually satisfying. Presumably the timid setback around the 12th floor along the avenue, and around the fourth floor along the side streets, was an attempt to bring the building’s height into greater harmony with that of its neighbors. It is a common ploy in recent Manhattan buildings, though it rarely works as well as architects imagine. In the present instance, in any case, it significantly neutralizes the result. A more inveterate architect, one more disposed to think in truly architectonic terms, could surely have managed these inflections with greater savoir faire than Mr. Marino has exhibited.

jgardner@nysun.com