Villa Viscaya is the very handsome, extravagant, Italian Renaissance-palazzo style, waterfront museum of Henry Flagler in Miami.

The Viscaya, however, bears little resemblance.

It is one of the city's celebrated, and controversial, sliver buildings that began to sprout in the 1980s on small lots in good residential locations. Within a few years, the city passed new zoning regulations to discourage the proliferation of such slim towers that often were not in context with their neighbors. The developer here took a pleasant, Georgian-style, redbrick, five-story townhouse with colonnaded entrance and added a slightly setback tower with 16 gray concrete floors with rounded corners and large windows.

The mid-block building is just one building away, to the east, from another controversial, and considerably larger, tower on the southeast corner of Park Avenue, one of the few to significantly break through that famous boulevard's quite consistent cornice-line. That tower is clad in dark brown masonry and is quite plain except for an attractive entrance and lobby. Its large apartments, however, are quite impressive.

The tower portion of this building, on the other hand, is not very attractive, although the townhouse base is. Fortunately, the tower is so close to the rear of the Park Avenue tower that it is not highly visible from the west.

The tower was erected in 1982 as a condominium and the 22-story building has 21 apartments, of which 16 are two-bedroom units and five are three-bedroom apartments. The building has a doorman and a canopied entrance.

This is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city. Some of the city's most distinguished townhouses are nearby as well as many private clubs and major cultural institutions and famous boutiques.

A local subway station is nearby at 68th and Lexington where Hunter College has a campus.

Carter B. Horsley