GREEN MONSTER - A STARTLING ADDITION TO ASTOR PLACE.(apartment buildings)

The first thing you think when you see the new luxury apartment building at Astor Place--a slick, undulating tower clad in sparkly green glass--is that it doesn't belong in the neighborhood. The tone of Astor Place is set by places like Cooper Union, the Public Theatre, and the gargantuan former Wanamaker store on Broadway: heavy, brawny blocks of masonry that sit foursquare on the ground. Louis Sullivan once described one of Henry Hobson Richardson's great stone buildings as a man with "virile force--broad, vigorous, and with a whelm of energy." The new building, designed by Charles Gwathmey, is an elf prancing among men.

Of course, cities are often enriched by architecture that seems, at first, to be alien: the pristine glass towers of Mies van der Rohe and the sylphlike bridges of Santiago Calatrava have brought grace to countless harsh, older cityscapes. But this new building, which is on one of the most prominent sites in lower Manhattan, does not have a transforming effect. If, as Vincent Scully proposed, architecture is a conversation between generations, this young intruder hasn't much to say to its neighbors. Its shape is fussy, and the glass facade is garishly reflective: Mies van der Rohe as filtered through Donald Trump. Instead of adding a lyrical counterpoint to Astor Place, the tower disrupts the neighborhood's rhythm.

In an inelegant way, Gwathmey's building has exposed a truth about this part of lower Manhattan: inside those rough-and-tumble old masonry buildings is a lot of wealth. By designing a tower with such a self-conscious shimmer, the architect has destroyed the illusion that this neighborhood, which underwent gentrification long ago, is now anything other than a place for the rich. The thirty-nine apartments inside the Gwathmey building start at two million dollars.

It is a paradox of the New York real-estate market that nothing breeds gentility like harsh surroundings. Once, it all happened indoors--grimy factory floors in SoHo became expensive lofts. Sleekness was a private pleasure, not a public display. But the pair of exceptionally elegant glass towers designed by Richard Meier that went up on the western reaches of Greenwich Village a few years ago changed the rules. High-gloss modernism, preferably attached to the signature of a famous architect and dropped into an old industrial streetscape, became the hottest thing in Manhattan apartment architecture since Emery Roth invented the foyer.

Gwathmey was asked to design the tower soon after Meier's buildings were completed. The land on which Gwathmey's new building sits is owned by Cooper Union, whose main building is right across the street. It used to be a dreary parking lot. Cooper Union tried for years to build something noteworthy on the site, coming up with several ambitious schemes--several years ago, Rem Koolhaas, collaborating with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, designed a striking, angular boutique hotel--but none came to fruition. Eventually, Stephen Ross, the head of Related Companies, who built the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, took over and commissioned Gwathmey to create a small, sophisticated apartment tower that would attract the same kind of people who had bought apartments in Meier's buildings--people who were tired of living on Park Avenue, or who might otherwise have settled in Tribeca lofts but would be tempted by sexier views and architectural glamour.

What architect wouldn't want to design a building here? Gwathmey's site, at the corner of Astor Place and Lafayette Street, is nearly as free and open as that of the Flatiron Building. Framed by streets on three sides, it faces a large, open intersection containing one of the city's best-known pieces of public sculpture: Tony Rosenthal's black cube, "Alamo." The site dominates this part of downtown the way the Plaza anchors the southeast corner of Central Park.

Gwathmey responded to this opportunity with a piecemeal design: a four-layer cake. A chunky trapezoidal base is topped by a twenty-one-story section of curved glass; above this rests a boxy minitower, which is crowned by another curved section. For a while, the base of the building was surrounded by ...