The Paterson Silk Building, which stood at the southwest corner of University Place and 14th Street, had curious ups and downs in the last decade. Designed by Morris Lapidus and built in 1949 for Crawford Clothes, the building was purchased in the 1970s by the Paterson Silk Co., which covered it in gaudy signage that defined Union Square in its more squalid years. At that time, no one protested the building’s defacement; no one had interest in the kind of architecture the building represented.

Architecturally, it was off the radar. Then in 1998 Paterson Silk leased the building to Odd Job Trading, a discount specialist in “job lots,” the leftover, slow-moving merchandise that “jobbers” need to unload. Odd Job’s logo was the steel derby worn by the character called Oddjob in the James Bond movie “Goldfinger.”

Architectural conservation isn’t the first thing you think of when you think of Odd Job Trading. Yet it restored, at least, the building’s exterior to its original appearance. It’s not as though the company had to (the building wasn’t and never would be a landmark), and no one pressured it to do so. But landmarks types began to take notice as Odd Job and its architect, John Reimnitz, began to peel away Paterson’s encrustations to reveal the sleek contours of what struck a lot of people as a modernist gem.

Not long ago no one would have considered the Paterson building a modernist gem. But architects’ reputations rise and fall like the stock market. Morris Lapidus was once despised by the modernist establishment. This architect, who was born in Odessa and grew up in Brooklyn, decided he wanted to be an architect when as a boy he made his first visit to Luna Park, the onetime grand and gaudy Coney Island amusement paradise. Luna Park registered as something someone had made for the purpose of inducing pleasure in those who visited it, and Lapidus wanted to be that kind of magician. After going to Columbia’s architecture school, he went to work as a retail designer.

In 1954, he received the commission to design Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau Hotel, with which he brought together the influences of Luna Park, the Brazilian modernism of Oscar Niemeyer (the Corbusier acolyte who designed Brasília), and a kind of ostentatious pop baroque. That and Lapidus’s other hotels, such as Miami’s Eden Roc and Manhattan’s Americana, were a major hit with the middle-class public. For the modernist establishment, however, they were the antithesis of the pristine prisms that got all the hype, such as Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. The totally unaffected emphasis upon pleasure was, in other words, the quintessence of kitsch — the most damning word in the formidable vocabularies of arch-modernist tastemakers like Clement Greenberg.

Owing to several factors — not the least of which being the infiltration of camp into highbrow taste, as well as the willfully perverse “violated purity” championed by Rem Koolhaas and other heroes of a new generation of architecture students — Lapidus became, late in his life (he died in 2001 at the age of 98), a hot item. He was indeed a revered figure of a now more broadly defined modernist movement. A more detailed analysis of his career revealed he’d designed all sorts of things before the Fontainebleau, including the Paterson Silk Building.

Along its University Place side the building had a largely blank brick wall. But it was topped by the sort of Bauhaus-inspired strip windows, the presence of which is often sufficient to qualify any 1940s building for landmark designation. The real distinction, however, was that at the building’s corner rose a four-stage metal-framed glass tower, its top stage rising above the rest of the building, with a dramatic sloping roof. It gave the building a kicky presence in a part of town that seemed custom-made for a generation that valued a messy but vital urban dishevelment. By 1998, Union Square was “in,” and what better architect to go with Coffee Shop and De La Guarda? A building like One Union Square South seemed too affected. But Paterson Silk was Morris Lapidus, the real deal.

That’s the background to the last-ditch howling about the Paterson building’s recent demolition. On the same day in March 2005 that the Landmarks Preservation Commission agreed to hold a hearing on the building, the new owner’s wrecking crews began dismantling the corner tower. The demolition was halted, and preservationists urged that the building be designated and the new owners rebuild what they’d taken down.

But in May 2005 the commission rejected those pleas, saying that demolition had proceeded beyond the point where the building’s owners could reasonably be asked to turn back the clock. As it happens, another Lapidus building, the former Loews Summit Hotel at Lexington Avenue and 51st street, was calendared for a hearing on the same day as Paterson Silk, and it sailed through to designation.

The movement to designate buildings like Lapidus’s may have a built-in contradiction. Many of those who value what was once called kitsch also value what they call “creative destruction” in the urban environment. A building such as Henry Bacon’s stately, temple-like Union Square Savings Bank, on the square’s east side, bespeaks the values of permanency and continuity with the past. It is justly a designated landmark. But Paterson Silk was an evanescent expression of a society that did not seek to temper but to embrace its churn. Maybe like a shooting star its truest fate was precisely to be restored and destroyed within seven years.