Greenpoint, the bohemian and working class district of low-slung row houses, will soon get its first high-design, high-concept residential building.

The 93 units in the new development, located on 122 West Street a couple of blocks from the waterfront, are expected to lease for a minimum of $650 a square foot, according to Perry H. Soskin, executive vice president of Katan Development, which owns the site.

The building will feature bottom-floor duplexes with recreational rooms, top-floor penthouses with outdoor terraces, and on-site parking. The building is expected to be complete in 2009, but units will be on the market this fall, according to Mr. Soskin

“We’re hoping it will attract younger buyers who have been priced out of Manhattan or out of Williamsburg,” Mr. Soskin said. “Greenpoint is underdeveloped right now but in ten years that won’t be the case.”

Daniel Goldner Architects, which won an American Institute of Architects Design Award in 2004 for its Ironworkers Training Facility in Long Island City, designed the new structure to blend in with the bricks of the surrounding neighborhood. The building will use multi-colored brick on its exterior to mimic the color variations of the 19th century industrial buildings in the area. A series of cubic dormers will run along the top of the structure.

“We wanted it to reinterpret how today we might build a brick building,” Mr. Goldner said. “It opens a dialogue across a period of time about new ways of construction and new ways of living.”

Mr. Goldner acknowledged that the pixilated skin of the building could appear unusual to neighborhood residents accustomed to flatter, boxier structures.

“I think the asymmetrical quality of it really speaks to the way we live our lives now,” he said. “Our lives are not lined up in perfect little cubes. There is great power in abstraction.”

Mr. Goldner cited as his design influence the pared-down minimalism of Donald Judd’s sculptures.

“There was an honesty and simplicity in his work that stripped away a lot of the requirements for decoration and meaning that were not connected to the actual object,” Mr. Goldner said. “In 2007 we now know that it’s not necessary to build the way we’ve built for two millennia. As a culture we have grown to where asymmetry and chaos is really who we are.”

Construction of the building, however, meant demolishing portions of the Eberhard Faber pencil factory, which has angered some in the local community. The Landmarks Preservation Commission began proceedings last week to create a historic district around the remaining structure. The plant supplied the country with number two pencils from 1872 until it closed in 1956.

“We are not happy that the developer tore down two buildings just weeks prior to Landmarks taking action,” the founder of the Waterfront Preservation Alliance, Ward Dennis, said. He added, however: “From the renderings I’ve seen, the design looks interesting and the scale is in context with the surrounding buildings.”