Perhaps it was the satisfying lunch I had just consumed at Katz’s Delicatessen, or the unusually fine weather for a mid-November afternoon. In either case, I found myself better disposed than I would ever have expected to Blue, Bernard Tschumi’s all but completed 16-story residential tower at 105 Norfolk St., right off of Delancey.

The somewhat unusual name of this development is no more of a mystery than the identity of the inhabitant of Grant’s tomb or the motivation of the proverbial chicken to traverse the proverbial road. Beetling over the generally low-lying building stock of the Lower East Side, this building rises up as an irregularly saturated mass of blue that can be seen from almost a halfmile away.

Though blue glass buildings, like colored glass buildings in general, are hardly unprecedented at this late date, there is something about this specimen, its massing and its hues, that seems so much more militantly blue than anything else in New York. That is a little paradoxical, since the glass panels of its pervasive curtain wall are actually two shades of blue and one of black. Nor is it a beautiful blue and certainly not the bright blue of the Manhattan sky last Friday afternoon. Rather it is a muddy, purplish blue that finds no match in nature. That and the aggressively amorphous structure succeed in making it one of the most distinctive landmarks in Lower Manhattan.

As to my puzzlement at liking the building, I should say that I do not usually take kindly to the deconstructivist style of which this is such an extreme example, and of which the architect, Bernard Tschumi, is perhaps the foremost propagandist. In an irritating new book from Monacelli Press, “Tschumi on Architecture Conversations with Enrique Walker, “this erewhile dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture declares that, “I see architecture not in terms of making singular objects, but rather of making an argument.” Elsewhere he asserts that “I’ve always been skeptical of reducing the architect to an iconic form maker. Monographs don’t interest me much since they are only about images of an architect’s work — what the work looks like. I believe that good architecture deals primarily with concepts or ideas, so I am more interested in arguments than in images.”

I find such sentiments odious for a variety of reasons. First of all, I happen to feel that it is the job of architecture — once it has fulfilled its utilitarian functions — to be beautiful or at least visually compelling Second, I observe the anomaly in Tschumi, as well as in other “idea” architects like Hejduk and Eisenman, that although they are always going on about the importance of ideas, the only important idea they seem to have is that ideas are important, that ideas should have a dominant place in architectural discourse. In the 170 odd pages of this latest volume, rarely if ever does Tschumi talk about specific ideas or programs, other than his anti-visual orientation. Beyond that, his thinking — if the term will be allowed — is really Sixties Leftist boilerplate thrice warmed over, with the usual references to Barthes and Godard.

But the “thinking” is further called into question by the way it is always subverted by its physical manifestations. Consider the shape of Blue itself. It is, quite frankly, goofy. Blue’s irregular mass bulges in the midsection before narrowing slightly at the top. Angular throughout, it resolves itself, from certain vantage points, into a placidly unruffled and entirely rectilinear curtain wall.

Now what, I ask you, is the argument encoded in this building? At this point one resorts to the most obtuse literalness: Because it bulges and buckles, because of the woozily irregular patterns of blue and black along its surface, it is doubtless supposed to “interrogate” the staid building traditions of corporate Midtown, to express the chaotic nature of the modern world, etc. But that is not an argument, merely a notion that scarcely rises to the status of a whim. Furthermore, it is a rather inveterate whim, 20 years into the lifespan of the deconstructivist style.

But the intellectual dishonesty here — fatal in someone whose stock in trade is, by his own declaration, intellectual argument — is that the real motivation for this building is that its compelling form simply appealed to the architect, who was desirous, for whatever reasons of vanity or personal aesthetic preference, to leave his mark upon the landscape. Quite aside from its being marketed to very wealthy clients, it will probably not be substantially worse or better than any other recent development in Manhattan, in terms of how it functions as a residential building. Because of its essential functionality, it will probably succeed far better than Tschumi’s Lerner Hall at Columbia University, a typically off-kilter fiasco that managed to square the circle by being anti-functional, architecturally unprecedented, and formally banal.

What redeems Blue is not its beauty but its boldness. The building may be goofy and intellectually suspect, but in a city where there is so much architecture that doesn’t even see imagination as an option, as a faculty that has anything to do with the art of architecture, it is reassuring that such an extravagant pile could be brought to completion in Lower Manhattan. For the first time in a long while, boldness is coming to be appreciated for its own sake in the architecture of the five boroughs. Whatever specific forms this development might take, in the main it is a fine thing

jgardner@nysun.com