With the new Hotel QT at 125 W. 45th Street, part of Andre Balazs’s ever-expanding empire, Lindy Roy almost lives up to her reputation as one of our most innovative younger architects.

This 42-year-old native of South Africa has made a name for herself as a pioneer of the neo-mod style, exemplified in her Vitra Showroom in the Meatpacking district. That store never generated the electric excitement it was supposed to possess, but her latest project, though imperfect, is somewhat more satisfying.

The building represents a massive intervention upon a prewar structure whose original facade has been left essentially undisturbed above the third floor. Rejecting contextualism, Roy has clad the lower facade in a matte and monolithic gray material. An outsized metal canopy dominates, and a two-story window brings you directly into the lobby.

This lobby is a little too cramped to accommodate Ms. Roy’s many ambitions, but she makes a noble attempt. The best part is a glass reception area that looks like a concession stand and whose appearance is dictated by whatever you put behind the glass; when I dropped by, several hundred boxes of Dots, the chewy fruit candy, filled the spot. Presumably this is all some sort of comment on consumerism, but at least it has the virtue of being new.

From this colorful and brightly illuminated zone you immediately proceed into dusk. The split-level lobby shows, behind glass, a diminutive swimming pool that is artificially lit and where it is always night. Behind the pool is a retro bar whose seating seems to be clad in pale plastic molded to suggest sharkskin.

The elevators, also awash in vespertinal gloaming, are among the best features of this project: Their walls are textured metal and their ceilings translucent amber.

The pleasures cease upon leaving the lobby, however. On every floor, the corridors that lead to the private rooms are the same disappointing expanse of textured gray. The rooms themselves, though quite imaginatively designed, are appallingly cramped and dark. This claustrophobic quality is so prevalent throughout the building that I suspect it is intended to be part of the hotel’s postindustrial, entropic charm.

The Hotel QT seems to enshrine the oppressive heaviness of Midtown, where the skies are always lowering and there is no natural light worth having. If that was the intent, I sincerely admire it. But I would never want to spend a night in such a place.

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Funny story: The other day I learned of a recently completed building, the Hampton Inn at 116 W. 31st Street, and I decided to write it up for the present column. But after taking a look, I could have sworn that I’d already written about it, in a column last September. Not quite: When I got home and found that column, I realized that what I’d written about was another Hampton Inn that just happened to look a lot like this latest one.

Bear in mind that this chain has no standard design, as do Holiday Inn or McDonald’s. And when I compared the particulars of the two structures, the differences were obvious. So what produced that ineffaceable feeling of deja vu? Both buildings, as well as a very similar Four Points Sheraton also considered in that earlier column, were designed by the same man, Gene Kaufman.

We tend to think of distinctive patterns in architecture as the exclusive domain of world-class visionaries: Frank Lloyd Wright and his organic cantilevers, Frank Gehry and his waves of buckled titanium. But even in the pallid mediocrity of these three hotels, you notice an unmistakable convergence of form and mood. Even here, to quote Buffon, the style is the man.

Mr. Kaufman can do far better when left to his own devices, as in the residential building he designed for 224 W. 18th Street. But these hotels are uniformly uninspired.

Like its predecessors, the new hotel is a 19-story high-rise recessed from the street line. This time it is clad in a glazed dark brick, slightly enlivened by a passage of paler brick from the second to the sixth floors and then again along the sides near to the summit. While it is more insistently rectilinear than its predecessors, with none of their discrete curves, it has the same signature canopy, in gunmetal gray, that protrudes to the street line. The grayish lobby also feels identical to those of the previous two.

But the most remarkable thing about all three is that, although they have been around only for a matter of months, they feel as though they were built during the Eisenhower administration. Such is the oppressive pall of this stretch of Midtown.

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The most profitable part of my trip to West 31st Street was the discovery, one block east, of an odd and rather pleasant new structure that had almost no windows and did not even appear to have doors. It consists of three identical divisions, each roughly three stories tall and marked by five identical bays that are covered in brown brise-soleil and that seem to conceal some vast secret.

An almost opulent, cream-colored stone cladding surrounds the three divisions, and is marked by some rather tony glass lanterns. The same stone cladding dominates a well-proportioned pavilion to the west of the main structure, which is slightly taller and appears to contain a few offices.

From a staff member of the Herald Square Hotel across the street, I learned that this place had recently been built by Consolidated Edison and, I had the impression, represents nothing more than a utilitarian cog in the power grid. Yet it underscores a point I have made before: that some of the better new buildings in Manhattan are purely utilitarian pieces of infrastructure. Without being flashy or prone to self-advertisement, they exhibit the sort of solid and effortless good taste that we find all too rarely in most other corners of Manhattan real estate.