VIEWED in silhouette, the Lower East Side has for years had the shape of a saucer, with taller apartment buildings on the edges sloping down to a uniform line of four- and five-story tenements in the center.


That concave profile is quickly changing. New buildings, some over twice the height of the existing architecture, with multicolored checkerboard facades to boot, have driven neighbors to demand that the city change the area’s zoning to protect it.

And the city has responded. At a packed community board meeting last month, the Department of City Planning unveiled a plan that would basically allow taller buildings on wider streets but ban them on narrower ones. The plan’s details are expected to take months to hammer out.

Overlooked in the hubbub, perhaps, are smaller new structures like the Switch Building that are changing the neighborhood’s look, if not its skyline.