Looking a bit like a finely tooled, large, rectangular key with alternating notches to open some great vault in the sky, this sleek and svelte slab tower is the best looking of the Far West 42nd Street residential projects.

It has a cool plan that its architect, Costas Kondylis, maintains "recalls the bow of a great ship interpreted all in glass with wrap-around balconies and expansive views," adding that his design was inspired by the oceanliners that used to dock nearby along the Hudson River in the 40s.

The slab tower has all glass fa??ades at its corners and the north and south fa??ades have four 2-story-high protruding fa??ade elements at the corners of the building that extend about two-thirds of the way across the fa??ades in alternating fashion. The effect is very striking, bold and high-tech. It's almost as if the building were showing off its abs.

The building has 478 studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments that initially ranged in price from about $500,000 to $2,000,000 and changed in September 2006 to $800,000 to $1,475,000. The building opened in 2007.

The Atelier has a 12,000-square-foot fitness center, a sky-lit indoor pool, a sun deck, a Sky Lounge with billiards room, catering kitchen and sun deck, full basketball and volleyball courts, a 100-car garage and 15,700-square feet of ground-floor retail space.

It also has a concierge, a landscaped recreation terrace, cross-town shuttle service, and Bosch washers and dryers in each apartment.

Kitchens have white gloss cabinets with under-cabinet task lighting, white quartz kitchen countertops, Sub-Zero glass-door refrigerators, and stainless steel Bosch appliances. Master bathrooms will have polished Bianco Verde marble floors and wall detailed with polished Panda white marble walls and tub surrounds, Hansgrohe chrome faucet and fixtures and fully-recessed storage cabinets.

It is the first phase of a 1.5-million-square-foot complex of commercial and residence space that is being developed by The Moinian Group and MacFarlane Partners.

The developers also have acquired the adjoining low-rise Verizon building and a gas station to the east and plan to develop those two sites with a second phase that is expected to be completed in 2009. The second phase will be developed on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and 11th Avenue.

The second phase will be a 57-story tower with 938 condominium apartments at 605 West 42nd Street. The new building will include 375 parking spaces and about 200,000 square feet of retail space.

The new building appears like two slabs: the shorter, southern slab has a pronounced grid fenestration pattern punctuated by four different windows bands that pay homage to the Atelier s distinctive fa??ade; the taller, northern slab, however, not only has a clear fa??ade that is not distinctively gridded but also a roofline that slants upward from the west to the east, adding a new visual dynamic to the grouping, one whose slanted roofline hints to the midtown skyline and whose notched western ends thematically recall oceanliner bridge aesthetics.

The developers purchased the project, which is known as the Atelier, from the J. D. Carlisle Development Group and CUBS 42nd Street LLC.

MacFarlane Partners, which is based in San Francisco, is the leading minority-owned real estate investment management in the United States with about $2.2 billion in investor equity and $8 billion in properties completed or in construction. MacFarlane Partners is investing in the project on behalf of its venture with the California Public Employees' Retirement System ("CalPERS") to invest in urban-infill properties in major metropolitan areas nationwide. CalPERS is the nation's largest public pension fund, with assets of $195 billion.

Other New York City properties in which the firm has invested include Tribeca Green, a 274-unit apartment high-rise under construction in lower Manhattan; and The Shops at Columbus Circle, the retail component of the Time Warner Center, which opened in February 2004.

The Moinian Group owns more than 14 million square feet of commercial and residential space in Manhattan.

Forty-Second Street west of Eighth Avenue has been undergoing a major transformation for many years, led by some off-off-Broadway theaters, then the twin apartment towers of the full-block Manhattan Plaza project, then Harry Macklowe's Riverwest apartment tower followed by Larry Silverstein's Riverplace tower overlooking the Hudson River. More recently, Extell completed its very tall Orion apartment tower just to the west of the "Green Giant," as the former McGraw-Hill Building designed by Raymond Hood is known. Two other apartment towers have been recently completed and there are two very large undeveloped parcels that are likely to be development in the not to distant future.

While some observers have characterized the Moinian Group's 42nd Street towers as flamboyant and colorful exercises in Miami style, it would be hard to not characterize them as "handsome" and "attractive."

There is always a shock in comparing renderings with finished products. What appears daring and bold in a drawing may be merely a carbuncle in some prince's eye.

Kondylis's designs for Moinian on 42nd Street have a simple but stunning resonance where fine proportion and plan may outweigh detailing.

In 2007, The New York Times moved into a new battleship-gray skyscraper across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue and the city and state grappled with financing for an extension of the 7 subway line from Times Square to near the Javits Convention Center whose expansion plans were also being restudied.

In addition, the MTA received bids to redevelop its rail yards near the Hudson River and the city passed a Hudson Yards zoning district and both such developments pave the way for the eventual development of millions of square feet of new commercial and residential development in the Far West midtown area between 42nd and 31st Streets.