There is no doubt in my mind that West 34th Street can take care of itself. It is alive with activity, even if of a sometimes unsavory sort, and whatever the ultimate result of the various plans for the High Line, Penn Station, and the Jets Stadium, it is likely to become only more active in the next few years.

Rather it is East 34th Street that gives me reason for concern. From the Empire State Building to Park Avenue all is well enough. But as you go east the trouble starts. Murray Hill, as the area is known, is a throwaway zone of the city. Nothing architecturally interesting, it seems, has ever happened there, with the lone exception of St. Vartan’s Church, a full-fledged autocephalous cathedral in the Armenian style, which seems to have floated over from Ararat and landed in Midtown.

It is always possible that the area could change for the better (I am unaware of any land marking regulation holding it back). But so far that is hard to imagine, and it has just gotten even harder. Two new structures, for better or worse, have altered this cross street over the past year.

For better, if only marginally, is New York University’s Clinical Cancer Center, at 160 E. 34th Street. Designed by Perkins Eastman associates, in collaboration with Larsen Shein, Ginsberg Snyder Architects, this 113,000 square-foot facility rises 11 stories above the street and sinks two stories below grade. Though hardly a striking building, it has the rare distinction for this part of Midtown of being comparatively well-made.

There is, for once, nothing flimsy in its appearance. It partakes of what has been called the collage aesthetic, in that it pieces together mismatched parts in a way that has something to do with Deconstructivism and was, if memory serves, quite stylish about three years ago.

In the present instant, it produces the major component of the building, an off-white facade made of pre-cast concrete with 7-foot-by-7-foot windows from the second floor to the 10th.To the east, starting on the second floor, is a smaller, six-story waiting area that is distinguished from the rest of the building by neo-Modernist ribbon windows punctuated by two-tone infill. Both parts of the facade, as well as the buildings’ overall massing, are contrived to emphasize flatness, inflected only by the setback from the seventh story to the roof.

It is hard to see what point is being made by this flatness, or any other part of the building, especially in relation to the function that the facility serves. Nevertheless, it is better than most other buildings in the neighborhood, and for that we should be thankful.

One block further east is a new residential building named the Anthem, designed by Costas Kondylis, of course. I say of course because you could be excused for thinking that every building in Manhattan that is not designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill is designed by Costas Kondylis.

For the most part, this firm invokes weary postmodern contextualism. This is evident in the Art Deco, Georgian, and neo-Classical delusions of its projects for Trump Place on the West side. But the firm can produce respectable work in a more modernist idiom, as is evident at the Trump World Plaza beside the United Nations.

Rising 21 stories, the Anthem at 222 E. 34th Street is about twice as long as an average residential building. Its facade is a flat and massive expanse of pink and reddish brick cladding meant to strike a vaguely Hampton Court-ish air, despite the fact that on its sides it becomes blandly modernist in its form and detailing. For some inscrutable reason, the fenestration of the facade is asymmetrical, with oriel configurations around the 16th floor.

As regards its Britannic pretensions, the Anthem’s emergence in the neighborhood signals the arrival of gentrified dreams to East 34th street, but beyond that, it does nothing for the neighborhood. Indeed, it ensures that, whatever changes should occur for the better in the area, there will always remain at least this one pocket that is irredeemably banal.

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Finally, allow me to take a moment to praise the wonderful Web site of the Emporis group (www.emporis.com),without which I would never have learned the name of the Anthem’s architect. So anonymously adequate are most of Costas Kondylis’s buildings that even the Anthem’s sales office could not tell me who had designed it. But Emporis knew all about it, and included photographs and vital statistics – not to mention a history of the firm, pages about each of the firm’s completed projects, and each of its works in progress.

I am not sure there is a single building under construction in the city or in many other places around the world, that is not given serious attention in this invaluable and selfless Web site. At a time when most people interested in architecture care only about one or two trophy buildings, Emporis provides invaluable information on places like the Anthem, which are always being overlooked even though they make up the vast majority of our urban fabric.