Lower Manhattan now finds itself in the throes of a sloppy transformation, from an exclusively financial area to a multipurpose residential zone. If Santiago Calatrava’s catenary of stacked boxes, also known as 80 South Street, ever becomes a reality, there will be at least one good building that emerges from that sea change. But this is New York, and it seems far likelier that the majority of the new residential buildings will look something like the two latest efforts by Costas Kondylis & Partners, at 10 Barclay Street and 200 Chambers Street.

This firm has been responsible for dozens of residential towers in Manhattan during the past generation. “If I’m going to do a residential building in New York,” developer Larry Silverstein recently said, “the most natural thing in the world is to pick up the phone and call Costas.” Donald Trump apparently agrees, since he has enlisted the services of this firm on a number of projects, from the Trump World Plaza overlooking the East River to Trump Place overlooking the Hudson.

This default mode of choosing an architectural firm may well serve as the defining fact about architecture in New York. And the architecture that results is as good as the default firm itself and the historical circumstances in which the firm works. We have no reason to expect that, 20 years from now, when the streets of Lower Manhattan are crowded with residential towers, the result will have the stylistic continuity or harmony that can be found in the hulking, granite-clad piles built between 1890 and 1930, or even in the International Style structures of the postwar years.

As it happens, the firm of Costas Kondylis & Partners works in a variety of idioms. Their two latest projects, the historicist at 10 Barclay Street and the modernist 200 Chambers Street, are a case in point. In either of these, it can achieve a moderate grace or a pronounced banality. Unfortunately, the latter quality predominates on Barclay Street, in the form of an all but complete 56-story tower, containing 396 luxury rental units.

The historicism of this building seems misplaced, since it clashes with that of the Woolworth Building, its unlikely new neighbor, and does not accommodate any of the smaller and older buildings in its vicinity, like Saint Peter’s Church at its western flank. Just two blocks from the World Trade Center site, it will clash even more with the four towers that have already been designed for ground zero.

But the problem here is not historicism, which can still be employed to excellent effect. The problem is a pervasive sense of not even trying, a feeling of pronounced depletion verging upon exhaustion in this drably twotoned structure, whose main claim to contextualism is that it, like the classic skyscrapers of early 20th century, can be divided structurally into a base, a shaft, and a lantern. The lantern, a fussy affair consisting of three flanges interspersed with a metalwork filigree, looks as if it could not have taken more 10 minutes to design. Less time, surely, was needed to conjure into being the shaft and base, whose bays are formed through a pallid deployment of limestone facing, and whose corners are determined, illogically and unhistorically, by darkened glass walls. In fact, other than the lantern and a whiff of rustication at the base, there is little here that is specifically historicist beyond the overall structure, which is supposed to prompt vague reveries of a Beaux-Arts past in residents who are far more interested in looking out than looking in.

Somewhat better is 200 Chambers Street, a fairly stylish modernist structure distinguished by its complicated massing. Along West Street, its primary façade unfurls, in all its modular, modernist uniformity to form a slab of uninterrupted flatness. The complexion of the façade is dominated by the gleaming white marble infill that runs straight up, dividing the darkened glass zones of the windows. Meanwhile, on its northern side, the 30-story structure splits in such a was that it appears ready to split into two buildings.

What is going on along Chambers Street, however, is far more interesting and far more “architectonic.” At this point, the project becomes almost a complex, with two smaller, satellite buildings emerging from the base of the main slab. The modular division of these buildings differs slightly from that of the main structure, but they are equally modernist in vocabulary and formed from equally gleaming materials.

Let it be said that a good deal of the inspiration for the project must be attributed to Sir Norman Foster, who originally designed a building for the site but backed out when the community boards demanded certain changes that he found unacceptable. This was the point at which Mr. Kondylis’s firm stepped in. The general massing, the division into smaller buildings, and the fracturing of the slab are survivals from Sir Norman’s design. Even the whiteness and the modernist modularity were there from the start.

Ironically, however, the strict International Style rigidity of Sir Norman’s design lacks something of the movement, the life, even the grace that, from certain angles, can be seen in the version that was eventually realized.

jgardner@nysun.com