As yet another testament to the internationalization of architecture in New York, the well-heeled are already moving into 40 Bond St., an energetically postmodern affair designed by the Swiss firm of Herzog de Meuron. This firm is famous in architectural circles for such completed projects as London’s Tate Modern and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Soon, however, it will become even more famous for its “bird’s nest” stadium, which will serve as the centerpiece of next year’s Olympic Games in Beijing. Strange to say, that project has certain points of similarity to the new development on Bond Street. Just as Jacques Herzog is never mentioned without Pierre de Meuron, so neither is ever mentioned without solemn invocation of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s Nobel, which was awarded to them both in 2001.

On that occasion, J. Carter Brown, chairman of the Pritzker jury, asserted that, “One is hard put to think of any architects in history that have addressed the integument of architecture with greater imagination and virtuosity.” Another juror, the venerable Ada Louise Huxtable, added that, “They refine the traditions of modernism to elemental simplicity, while transforming materials and surfaces through the exploration of new treatments and techniques.”

Both jurors are to be commended on the astuteness of their observations. Indeed, Messrs. Herzog and de Meuron are mainly concerned with surface, and nowhere is this more apparent than on Bond Street. Even when they attempt something daringly volumetric, as in their Ricola headquarters in Laufen, Switzerland, their real point is to subvert the very notion of volume in the name of pure surface, to revel in the slick immateriality of things.

Many of their completed projects to date have been, structurally speaking, so aggressively simple, if not quite dull, as to seem almost nerdy. But one can see through that faux simplicity to the irony of their idiom. This is the architectonic equivalent of geek chic, their apparent insistence that they don’t know better, confident all the while that you will understand that they do.

And at that point, your response to their work will reflect how you feel about irony, both generally and in its architectural expression. Though their most immediate Swiss forbear, Le Corbusier, had no use for it in his International Style projects, irony worked wonders for an earlier Swiss builder, the 17th-century master Francesco Borromini. But his sense of irony, achieved by enlivening and even dismantling his surfaces, never transgressed against those canons of beauty that Herzog & de Meuron so exuberantly reject. Take the irony from their works and, more often than not, you are left — on the exterior, at any rate — with a glorified outhouse.

So, where does 40 Bond St. fit into this discussion? As concerns its massing, the architects had relatively little to say in the matter, since their brief was to fill several interblock lots and to preserve the street line. Underpinning its 10-story grid, which includes a setback, is the ghost of several preexistent cast-iron buildings, to which the new configuration alludes. As such it recalls such recent or upcoming projects as Jean Nouvel’s 40 Mercer St. and Charles Gwathmey’s Soho Mews, both of which claim to evoke the cast-iron buildings in their midst.

Having seen the building at various stages of completion, I was initially disappointed by what appeared to be its thorough banality. From its grid-like regularity, I assumed that yet one more high-flying international firm had been waylaid by the same aggregate of community boards, bureaucrats and philistine developers who consistently clip the wings of international starchitects and insure that what they produce is no better and no more imaginative than what the local talent can come up with.

In the present case, however, the developer was Ian Schrager, the inventor of the boutique hotel as we now know it and the man wise enough to hire Philippe Starck to work his magic over at the Hudson on 58th Street and Ninth Avenue. One expected something special from this arbiter of taste, who promised, according to building’s Web site, to do for condominiums what he had already done for nightclubs and hotels.

Well, now that the project is all but complete and the irony has been added in the way that the architects have treated the surface, the problem with the design is not only the inherited grid, which isn’t particularly interesting in itself, but also the fact that its ironic banality ultimately seems just banal. Perhaps this is because there are enough unironically boring grids in the city that they are indistinguishable from ironically boring grids.

When a friend of mine saw the building and learned that it was by Swiss architects, he said that in fact it appeared characteristically Swiss to him. I understood what he meant: Certainly it doesn’t look like the usual New York architectural fare. What distinguishes its grid from most of the others in New York is the slightly textured, lustrous and inflatable quality of its metal armature, and above all, its bluish sheen. This sort of thing is quite rare in the five boroughs, but it is seen all over Europe. On Bond Street, its application is intended, one imagines, to invoke a tawdry, gaudy, even campy flimsiness that emphasizes those pure surfaces for which this firm is famous.

As I have said, to some of us, that sense of irony, intentional or otherwise, simply feels banal. As if the architects themselves feared this response, they have gussied up — one might almost say, pimped — the ground floor with a tangled, tendrilous, filigreed screen of biomorphic forms that are in complete contrast to the geometric regularity of the rest of the building. This is the part of the project that bears such a strong comparison with the stadium in Beijing. But there, where it defines the entire project, its effect may be tolerable. In the present application, it looks simply tacky — and tacked on. It truly has to be seen to be believed, and may achieve some cultural status through its very awfulness. But something tells me that it will not still be there a generation hence.

jgardner@nysun.com