The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated as landmarks today the Morris B. Sanders Studio and Apartment building at 219 East 49th Street in Turtle Bay Gardens and the annex of the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America at 105 East 17th Street and 108 East 18th Street.

The Turtle Bay townhouse was erected, from scratch, in 1935 and was notable for its modernity and use of blue bricks and glass blocks. It followed by one year William Lescaze's famous glassblock townhouse around the corner at 211 East 38th Street in the same famous complex with its huge communal garden. Mr. Lescaze's house, however, was an alteration as opposed to entirely new construction.

In their great book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Humanism between The First Two World Wars," Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins noted that "William Lescaze's aggressively antitraditional, International Style design for his townhouse...exploded like a bombshell, sweeping aside virtually all inherited conceptions of the townhouse type as a principal instrument of the civicism of the Metropolitan Era."

"The Lescaze townhouse was not a modest tinkering with a brownstone, but a full-fledged reconstruction. Designed while Lescaze was in partnership with George Howe, it housed the firm's New York office as well as living accommodations for the Lescaze family. Most important, it was New York's preeminent example of the International style. Situated on the western fringe of Dean & Bottomley's Turtle Bay Gardens, Lescaze employed a strategy in some ways typical of all brownstone renovations, eliminating the stoop and pulling the facade forward to the building line. But its blazing whiteness, the machinelike planarity of its detail, and the innovative use of glass block - especially dazzling when the house interiors were lit up at night - made it a remarkably distinct icon for the new antihistoricist aesthetic," the authors continued.

The second and fourth floors of the Sanders's building, shown here, have indented balconies and Commissioner Libby Ryan remarked that "it is a miracle that no one filled in its voids,"" adding that the building has long been one of her "favorites."

The commission also designed the understated but elegant, mid-block and through-block annex of the Guardian life Insurance Company of America at 105 East 17th Street and 108 East 18th Street that was designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill in 1963. The four-story structure is distinguished by its silvery anodized aluminum facades with large windows, an aesthetic that had recently been used by the Pepsi-Cola Building at 500 Park Avenue. The insurance company moved to Lower Manhattan in 1999 and its complex, which includes the Renaissance Revival office building on the northeast corner of 17th Street and Park Avenue South that was designed in 1911 by D'Oench & Yost, was sold to the Related Companies.

Commissioner Fred Blank said the annex was "a great example of the International Style" and Commissioner Margery Perlmutter said it was "deserving of all accolades."