During the past five years, one of the striking architectural developments in Manhattan has been the ascendancy of the office tower over all other building types. In the past, residences, even in the form of modernist shafts, could be counted on to look like residences, while commercial space appeared suitably commercial, and offices were sleekly and consolingly corporate. But you would be hard put to divine from its exterior that the Chelsea Arts Tower, designed by Kossar & Garry, was meant to house art galleries or that Place 57 was designed by Ismael Leyva Architects as a residential structure. Both would look right at home amid the mercantile towers of Midtown.

More surprising still is the new Centria, at 18 W. 48th St., designed by Perkins Eastman. How odd it is to find residential architecture in the heart of Midtown, especially across the street from Rockefeller Center. Why — some might ask — would anyone want to live amid grimy, sooty Brazilian and Korean restaurants and a stone’s throw from the dehumanizing slabs of Sixth Avenue? Well, just as living things can be found at the bottom of the sea, under a rock in the Sahara, and atop Mount Everest, so it is that, for many years, humans, however few and far between, have resided even in the dullest stretches of Midtown, the meatpacking district, and Dumbo. The difference now, of course, is the positive avidity with which homeowners seek out these areas, to which, in years past, they would have been driven by only the most desperate destitution. The 33-story Centria aspires to transcend pure utility in the service of an unlikely glamour, by offering luxury one- and twobedroom condominiums in a building whose amenities include a spa, a conference center, a club room, and a lounge.

The façade of the Centria, like those of the Chelsea Arts Tower and Place 57, consists of a fractured shaft that relieves the modernist tedium of its curtain walls. But whereas those two earlier buildings owed much to Christian de Portzamparc’s LVMH Building, off Madison Avenue at 57th St., the Centria, seen in profile from the West, appears to have taken its cue from Raimund Abraham’s nearby Austrian Cultural Forum at 11 East 52nd St. That is to say that the main façade tilts back from the base toward the summit, while a superimposed rectilinear plane re-establishes order and harmony in the building as a whole. Surely the feel of the two buildings could not be more different. In contrast to the almost surly granite facing of much of the ACF, the Centria is a vast expanse of silvery dark curtain wall. Only at ground level is there any differentiation in texture, with granite cladding to the east, a boldly rounded metal pillar at the center, and a cantilevered glass canopy to the west. The lobby, a japonerie of pale wood and rice-paper screens, is perhaps the most decisive success of the entire project, the achievement of Philip Koether Architects.

Although the Centria, for all its borrowings from the ACF, is neither a daring nor an innovative building, it has managed to look quite a bit better in its completed state than it did while under construction. That should remind us of the perils of judging a building too early in its gestation.

Another recently completed tower by Perkins Eastman is the Cielo, at 450 E. 83rd St. Unlike the Centria, it has arisen in a largely residential part of the city, on upper York Avenue, and it looks far more residential. And how does a building “look residential”? If corporate architecture tends to favor the sheen of power and high-tech efficiency, residential buildings have traditionally sought to humanize the geometric severity of the modern idiom through an assortment of textures and vernacular details. In the case of the 27-story Cielo, this means limestone strips descending the length of its several facades, interspersed among a fairly traditional curtain wall of two-toned, darkened glass. Unfortunately, the metal bracings that surround the glass produce a flat and paltry effect that suggests value engineering.

Aside from two forms of granite in the entrance, limestone is the predominant feature of the façade up to the fifth floor, at which point the tower goes it alone in a setback. This recession, though doubtlessly required by the zoning code, rarely if ever achieves the desired effect of conjuring pedestrians into believing that the high-rise in question has been harmoniously integrated into the generally lower lying neighborhood. Finally, in keeping with the tripartition of traditional New York residential towers, the top is contrived to form a limestone lantern of sorts that conceals a water tower.

Over all it must be said that the Cielo, though doubtless adequate to inhabit, is entirely without distinction as architecture.

Perkins Eastman is one of those firms that, in marked opposition to the current cult of the “starchitect,” are quietly responsible for most of what gets built in the five boroughs. Perhaps its most public project to date is the new TKTS Booth that now occupies Father Duffy Square in Times Square. As to the ultimate success of this new enterprise, we should know more in a few months, if, as promised, it opens in the early summer.

jgardner@nysun.com