There was a time, within very recent memory, when sophisticated people would not have wished to visit, let alone inhabit, the vicinity of what is now called the High Line, the rusting and abandoned elevated rail that was built by Robert Moses and hasn’t seen a freight train in more than a generation.

But over the past two decades, nothing short of a revolution in taste has changed the way society, or at least a certain part of it, looks at the rotting relics of the industrial age. That community of boosters, many of them Europeans or people connected in some way to the art world, has come to look on the High Line as not merely a development opportunity but a thing of genuine beauty. And it will appear to them even more beautiful, one suspects, when the firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro finishes transforming the place into a park.

In anticipation of its opening, two new buildings, both condominiums, have arisen along the meandering path that the High Line cuts from just south of the Javits Center, through Chelsea, to its terminus in the Meatpacking District. These buildings are High Line 519, at 519 W. 23rd St., and the Caledonia, at 450 W. 17th St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues.

The use of the words “High Line” in the first building’s name is striking. Though the building does not really abut the High Line, but stands one lot away, clearly the developer could not draw attention to the association fast enough. The project has been designed by Lindy Roy, the principal architect of Roy Design. This young architect of South African origin has made something of a name for herself through her neo-mod designs — among them her Vitra flagship at Ninth Avenue and 13th Street and her Hotel QT at 125 W. 45th St. — that often invoke curving, non-Euclidean shapes recalling the more free-spirited architecture of the 1960s.

The most noteworthy aspect of the High Line 519 project is the specific application of Roy’s neo-Mod sensibility. This nine-story structure, her first multiple-unit residential building, is a narrow and fairly ordinary modernist affair of rectilinear curtain walls. Both the steel armature of the windows and the uninflected wall facing east appear as a sober study in gray, and the entire building would seem tedious were it not for a single accessory, a series of irregular shapes that are irregularly applied to the façade and recall the once-futuristic computer graphics of the 1960s.

And yet, even with the addition of those shapes, the façade remains — by any ordinary assessment — distinctly tedious. As it is arrayed across the façade, this motif emphasizes, or rather exploits, it own flatness, dissolving, through ironic self-effacement, into something close to pure décor. The structural simplicity and the general feebleness of the details do the building in; the surface ornaments ultimately seem like a stab at meaning and an attention-getting device, with nothing more to them than that. But this being Manhattan, where some of the world’s most interesting architects have done some of their dullest work, simply to make an attempt at originality probably stands in some rank of praise.

If Highline 519 is dull in an interesting way, the Caledonia, six blocks to the south, has the integrity to be dull in a dull way. Designed by Handel Architects, this 24-story development, containing 478 units, consists of a sturdy slab whose hybrid passages of brick and glass curtain wall rise from a brick-faced base. As it fronts 10th Avenue, the Caledonia becomes pure curtain wall that advances toward the avenue in a V-shaped configuration. Above it, an asymmetrical glass tower is attached to the red-brick slab in a pseudo-deconstructed style that, as the saying goes, is so five years ago. In fact, it is almost otiose to call this project architecture at all. Though it is not without a few grace notes, its main reason for being is to make the land pay — as the late 19th-century architect Daniel Burnham said — by exploiting what was once a dead zone and turning it into condominiums. There is nothing wrong with that, and the Caledonia is not an eyesore, but is it so unreasonable to hope for something more ambitious from architecture?

Perhaps the most urbanistically interesting thing about the Caledonia is the way it rubs your face — almost literally — in the High Line. As the tracks approach their terminus, several lines come together in a junction, and the confluence of rusting, hulking iron makes the High Line, in its titanic infrastructural immensity, more urgently present here than anywhere else along its run. The High Line slashes directly across the Caledonia façade — indeed, the interplay between the façade and the tracks functions rather like a Rauschenberg sculpture, whose aesthetic consequence consists in integrating some found object or ready-made into its artistic context. Passing across the new Equinox gym that is set to open here, the High Line will cast a pall of unending night across one of the main entrances to the building. Ours is the age in which — for the very first time — humans seem to relish that prospect.

jgardner@nysun.com