Hospital Row, as York Avenue is known from 59th street to 71st street, is not a part of the world that I visit often. But when a small airplane crashed into the building at 524 East 72nd St. — the Belaire, designed by Frank Williams — I went to have a look at the devastation and found myself in the neighborhood once again.

The gray inclemency of the weather, with a drizzle that soon swelled into a downpour, suited both the catastrophe that had just occurred and the general lugubriousness of this part of Manhattan. There is no law that hospitals have to look ugly or off-putting. Some, like Mount Sinai’s East Building on Fifth Avenue and 102nd street, are decidedly inviting. But most of these structures, from Bellevue and Saint Vincent’s in the south to Columbia Presbyterian in the North, and above all the present occupants of York Avenue, seem almost by design to instill a pallid hopelessness in even the hardiest of souls.

It is a great relief then to discover that, in the year since I last visited the area, there has arisen on the southwest corner of 70th Street, at 1305 York Ave., a new building that, though not quite complete, has already improved the building stock of this sad neighborhood. This 15-story, 300,000-square-foot structure is the Weill Cornell Medical College’s new Ambulatory Care and Medical Education Building, and, according to a press release, the first clinical facility in that institution’s 107 years of existence. According to the architect’s website, it is “the first step in what is envisioned as a state-of-the-art new campus for this prestigious medical school.”

Now, aside from their general dreariness, there is no real building typology for hospitals. They come in every imaginable form and fashion and their architectural success is entirely dependent upon the firm that designed them. And so it is that, amid the assorted Art Deco towers and modernist slabs that define this part of the city, the new building, designed by Polshek Partnership, stands splendidly forth in all its post-modernist inscrutability.

Nothing about it bespeaks its function as a hospital: It might just as well serve as an office or residential tower. With its narrow side facing the avenue, the bulk of the building looks onto 70th street. The long, strip-like facets that descend the length of its white ceramic fritted-glass curtainwall ripple and buckle across the surface of the building in that deconstructivist style pioneered by Frank Gehry.Yet there is not, nor is there supposed to be, anything especially radical about the building, and there probably could not be at this late date in the arc of the deconstructivist style. Furthermore, radical deconstructivism, if you think about it, is probably the last thing you would want to see as you bolt into the emergency room. Fortunately, then, despite roots in that idiom, the new building exhibits a reassuring, even consoling self-confidence.

What is really wonderful about it, however, is an experiential richness that is all to too rare in architecture, especially in the five boroughs. As you come upon it, it seems to rise (or descend) out of nowhere, a liquid monolith, indivisible and pristine, from its undifferentiated base all the way to the 15th floor. In vain do you look for a window and even the location of the entrance is not obvious at first. This fact, combined with the pedestrian’s inability to see into the building, fosters a momentary but compelling sense of dislocation, as though the building were some natural structure, like the side of a mountain, waterfall, or forest. But rest assured that there is something delightful about this building, and nothing at all disquieting.

This intentional distortion of scale, this inability to find one’s bearings in a building deprived of the modular regularity of windows and doors, is surely the best and most radical element of the deconstructivist style, and probably the only element of it that deserves to survive, long after its presumptive theories and its more exorbitant practices have been relegated to the status of a period style.

The new medical center is one more feather in the cap of Polshek Partnership, which occupies an odd eminence among New York’s many architectural firms. Though not as corporate as Skidmore Owings and Merrill, it exudes a sense of confidence and prestige scarcely second to that of SOM. To date, this firm has designed a few residential projects, but it is best known for its institutional works: museums, schools, concert halls, and perhaps most famously, the William J.Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark. Here in New York, it has given us such successes as the new Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Scandinavia House on ParkAvenue and 38th Street, and the Lycée Français off York Avenue on 76th Street. Not all of the firm’s efforts have been successful, however, as is proved by their 2 year old reconfiguring of the entrance to the Brooklyn Museum.

As for styles, no one idiom dominates what comes off the drawing boards of Polshek Partnership. The firm’s design can be rigorously geometric, as in the Lycée Francais, reflecting the taste of Susan Rodriguez, who oversaw that project, or daringly curvaceous, as in Todd Schliemann’s Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. In most cases, however, it is content to reapply the language of the International style in such a way as to arrive, as in this latest instance, at entirely unanticipated results.