The new apartment building at 15 Central Park West, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, has received a good deal of attention for its 201 luxurious and super-expensive apartments that all sold before the building was completed. The apartments, we are told, evoke, as has nothing in more than half a century, the graciousness and the spaciousness of pre-war buildings designed by Rosario Candela and J.E.R. Carpenter.

Most New Yorkers, however, will never enter one of 15 Central Park West’s apartments — let alone own one. But we all still have to live with the building, which is a very large object in a very prominent setting. How does it work in its urban context?

Mr. Stern’s firm doesn’t lack for work or prominent commissions. At the same time, architectural trendies dismiss the firm’s work for its occasional traditionalism and for its not indulging a single brand of aggressive avant-gardism, or of aggressive anything. For others of us, however, that is the firm’s glory: The ruling philosophy appears to be to design appropriately, even when appropriateness is, as today, not in fashion.

The forerunners of Mr. Stern’s firm would be Cross & Cross (architects of the General Electric Building on Lexington Avenue at 51st Street) and Clinton & Russell (architects of the Cities Service Building at 70 Pine St.). Neither firm had a signature style, or ideology, but rather designed consistently excellent buildings that enhanced their settings. In New York, the Stern firm has designed the lovely Kol Israel synagogue in Midwood, Brooklyn, the main building of Brooklyn Law School on Joralemon Street, and several other buildings that jettison trendiness, and instead relate sensibly to their surroundings. In some cases, such as that of the law school, the firm’s work miraculously weaves together jumbles of mismatched buildings to create coherent places where none existed before. An architectural firm has no higher purpose than that, and only secondarily should be commended for creating a beautiful discrete object.

Stern’s 15 Central Park West isn’t merely a “retro” building, but one that seeks to relate to wildly different settings that surround it. The building fronts on four streets: Central Park West, 61st and 62nd streets, and Broadway. On Central Park West, no. 15 stands to the north of the Trump International Hotel & Tower, a glitzy makeover of the once utterly banal Gulf & Western Building, and to the south of the Century (1931), which is one of its avenue’s twin-towered Art Deco classics.

The really high part of the Stern building is set back from this front block, and so doesn’t crowd the Century but gently evokes its fenestration, setback railings, spandrel paneling, discreet centered doorway, and twin towers. The top of 15 Central Park West, with its distinctive play of cubic volumes, austere colonnade, and arch owes a debt to the beautiful 1930 apartment building at 10 Gracie Square, with its neoclassical roofscape.

The Stern building also holds in common with 10 Gracie Square its allover limestone sheathing. Any apartment house clad top to bottom in limestone ranks among the town’s most exclusive. The classic pre-war middle-class Manhattan apartment building has a limestone-covered first couple of floors that then yield to brick. Sometimes, because terra-cotta ornamentation often adorns the brick shafts of these buildings, they may have a visual richness that the alllimestone façades lack. In general, however, Manhattan’s all-limestone buildings exude a quiet elegance that announces in no uncertain terms that people of means reside there.

The building has contexts other than Central Park West. It extends to Broadway, which has a style as different as can be from Central Park West. After Lincoln Center took shape in the 1960s, the city looked at Broadway’s jumble, redolent still of old Lincoln Square, and thought the corridor leading to Lincoln Center from Columbus Circle could be made into something special. In 1969, the city created a special zoning district, its concept worked out by urban planner Jonathan Barnett, to encourage arcaded sidewalks, with outdoor cafés, and midblock plazas. The gigantic 30 Lincoln Plaza apartment building went up in 1978 on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd streets, and conformed to the zoning district provisions with its sidewalk arcade (echoing that of the earlier One Lincoln Plaza to the north) and pleasant courtyard plaza, with its fountain. The Century forms the plaza’s east wall, and Dwight James Baum’s West Side YMCA (1930) stands across 63rd Street. On the plaza’s south side now rises Stern’s building, across 62nd Street, which, miraculously, manages to evoke something of the mood of 30 Lincoln Plaza, thereby tying it and the Century, together with itself, into a coherent group of buildings. My only complaint is that 15 Central Park West dispensed with the sidewalk arcade. There no doubt are all sorts of reasons it did. But if any architect could have pulled one of those off with the utmost panache, it’s Mr. Stern.

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