The Landmarks Preservation Commission yesterday rejected an application for a torqued office tower at 837 Washington Street at 13th Street in the Gansevoort Market Historic District as too tall although it indicated it liked the design by architect Morris Adjmi.

The developers are Taconic Investment Partners and Square Mile Capital, who acquired the existing 1938 building from the estate of the late Robert Isabell, a well-known floral designer and party planner, who died in 2009.

The development team argued that the design expressed the flow of people in the area where the old downtown street grid intersects with the 1811 Plan.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation noted that "the Commissioners agreed that the proposed seven-story addition would overwhelm the existing two-story builidng," adding that "while they thought the proposed design was interesting, they thought its massing inappropriate for both the building and for this primarily low-rise historic district."

The commission asked the applicant to revise the proposal and return for a public hearing.

The proposed addition was one of the striking building designs not only in the Meatpacking District and Chelsea but the city.

It was closest in spirit to Frank O. Gehry's wave-inspired building several blocks to the north on West Street for Barry Diller's I.O.C. company that is just to the south of Jean Nouvel's taller curved residential condominium tower with its random fenestration patterns in which different size windows have different angles.

The proposed rooftop addition, furthermore, was very close to the recently glass-enclosed rooftop addition to Diane von Furstenburg's shop and it is across the street from the bent new Standard Hotel that straddles the High Line Park. The city's newest spectacular skylight can be found atop Diane von Furstenberg's emporium at 874 Washington St., between 13th and 14th streets. The large, prismatic skylight is at the southeast corner of the building, the culmination of a four-story, high-tech staircase. It was completed about two years ago by Work Architecture Co., of which Amale Andraos and Dan Wood are principals.

The proposed Adjmi addition for the building on the southeast corner of West 13th Street bears a similarity in its twists to a stunning 54-story skyscraper in Malmo, Sweden designed several years ago by Santiago Calatrava that was a precursor of his celebrated but apparently aborted designed for 80 South Street that was not "torqued" but was to have had a very tall stack of 10 four-story townhouses in the sky just south of the South Street Seaport.

Adjmi's curves are not as sinuous as Gehry's 8 Spruce Street apartment tower nearing completion near City Hall.

Indeed, they are much tamer than Gehry's spectacular Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and his concert hall in Los Angeles, but they are quite impressive by New York City's standards.

Adjmi design encloses glass-enclosed offices behind an angled steel gird. "Planter boxes ring the new building at each floor, softening the hard lines and offering an homage to a plan that Robert Isabell hoped to build after he bought the 1938 market building for $45 million back in 2008. When the High Line opened in June of 2009, Isabell saw to it that the old metal canopies ringing the base of his building were planted with a profusion of flowers, offering park-goers a colorful vista across Washington Street," according to ny.curbed.com.