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Abraham accomplishes this through the building's very proportion, just over a foot (30 centimeters) wide for every story it rises. But it is more than the slender profile that holds our attention. Layers of slanted planes in glass, steel, and aluminum appear to slide apart like a telescope, reaching for the sky.

AFC has already earned a raft of nicknames: the guillotine, thermometer, metronome, dagger blade, Easter Island Modern. No one can deny that this tower has personality. It is this layer of the building, the "glass mask" as Abraham calls it, that is the first and most successful of ACF's "elemental towers." (The other two are the "core," which contains all of the program space, and the "vertebra," occupied by the fire stair.)

The glass mask stares south, gazing in the direction of the vacant site of the World Trade Center at the end of the island. This visage is simultaneously ancient and modern, containing the pyramidal forms of some of the world's oldest man-made structures and the acute angles beloved by such contemporary designers as Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind.

The celebratory character of such Gotham landmarks as the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building is nowhere alluded to at ACF. It has a sharp, gray, menacing presence, which, quite unintentionally, makes it the perfect cipher for our current misgivings about tall buildings.

By Manhattan standards, ACF is not a tall building; it is about a quarter of the height of the Empire State Building. But its proportions make it a model of a tall building, a small-scale simulacrum of a skyscraper. This play of scale is what gives ACF its power on the street (though not on the skyline).

Inside, the Spills

Inside, the power of this street presence drains away. There are few spatial firecrackers: the double-story lobby with a stainless steel and aluminum stair that threads its way down to an exhibit space and up to a small performance hall; a two-story library that plays off the slant of the mask.

The sloped facade and the tight site suggest that the tower interior will reward us with an explosion of vertical space, but it is nowhere to be found. The fuse that fizzles and fails to detonate the spatial fireworks is the building's fire stair, which is a key component of Abraham's design.

In 1992, the Republic of Austria hosted an international design competition for the ACF, open to all Austrian-born architects. Of the 226 schemes submitted, Abraham's was the only one that placed the required fire stair across the back of the building, instead of along the side. This allowed occupied spaces to spread the full width of the site.

Abraham chose a scissor stair not only for ease (it allows two means of egress on each floor) but also for architectonic reasons. "Architecturally it has become the 'vertebra' of the Austrian Cultural Forum tower," explains Abraham, "striving for infinity as does the endless column of [Romanian sculptor Constantin] Brancusi."

The only view of the fire stair's exterior is from a glass-roofed double-height exhibit/lounge area at the back of the building on the first floor. It is not easy to see, and is not a celebrated part of the building's design, despite Abraham's lavish attention to it.

The fire stair owes less to Brancusi than to Trajan's Column, appearing as a diagonally incised monolith of Rheinzinc panels. Abraham held the fire stair back from the property line by about 15 feet (4.6 meters). If the building had filled the site, it might have allowed room for some dramatic, vertical spaces within the tower to counter its relentlessly cellular spatial character.

As it is, packing this much program space into such a tight site never allows one to enjoy the ACF's vertical nature from inside the building. The only place this happens is in the ACF director's 5,490-square-foot (510-square-meter) apartment, which occupies the 16th through 19th floors.

The apartment's four levels are connected with a wonderfully sinuous circular stair made of beautiful, close-grain wood. Unfortunately, it is a vertical spatial experience that very few of the ACF tower's visitors will ever enjoy.

Despite a construction cost of $29 million (which works out to approximately $967 per square foot, or $10,400 per square meter) the ACF's palette of materials and textures is spare, and the detailing seems undercooked. In the lobby is a stainless steel cylinder that contains the central passenger elevator, yet its form is difficult to read from the entry.

Public stairways throughout are stainless steel with brushed aluminum accents. Bluestone paving is used in the building's lobby, exhibit, and mezzanine levels. Finely grained wood paneling lines the interior of the 1,100-square-foot (102-square-meter) theater.

Many of New York's architectural intelligentsia hailed the ACF tower as the most important structure to be built in that city in the past 40 years. ACF is an important building because it is Raimund Abraham's first major public commission — a much-awaited accomplishment of an architect who has confined his work, for the most part, to paper. But taken on its own merits as a work of architecture with the power to move us and to take delight in its design, ACF is slim indeed.

Michael J. Crosbie is editor-in-chief of Faith & Form, an associate with Steven Winter Associates, and a contributing editor to ArchitectureWeek.   >>>

Nighttime view of the Austrian Cultural Forum by architect Raimund Abraham. Photo: Robert Polidori North facade of the ACF. Photo: Robert Polidori The exit stair plays prominently in the north (back) facade of the ACF. Photo: Robert Polidori Floor plans of the ACF. From top: second-floor theater, upper-mezzanine exhibition/ cafeteria, lower-mezzanine reception/ exhibition, and gallery. Image: Aterlier Raimund Abraham Floor plans of the director's apartment. From top: 18th-floor living room, 17th-floor master bedroom, 16th-floor children's rooms, and 15th-floor apartments. Image: Aterlier Raimund Abraham View from the lobby of the stainless steel cylinder that contains the central passenger elevator. Photo: Robert Polidori Finely grained wood paneling lines the interior of the small theater. Photo: Robert Polidori The ACF's 1,100-square-foot (102-square-meter) theater. Photo: Robert Polidori   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.