Trend-setting Malvern commercial developer Liberty Property Trust is embarking on a bold new voyage from the Philadelphia Navy Yard by sailing into the waters of imaginative but affordable architecture, and its work is being heralded as some of the best new designs in all of Philly.

“Acting as a latter-day Medici, (Vice President for Urban Development John Gattuso) has assembled an impressive stable of designers and given them license and money to craft buildings that are both beautifully made and rigorously urban,” Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron wrote in a Philly.com review.

Despite the constraints of high union-labor costs and the city wage tax, Liberty has employed creative architects to develop “a smart design that does the most with the least,” Saffron noted. “That’s the starting point for all good architecture.”

ICYMI: Why some of Philly’s best new architecture is in the Navy Yard. My column: http://t.co/7WuA852l1R pic.twitter.com/tCRs5e1vSV

— Inga Saffron (@IngaSaffron) July 20, 2015

Four of Liberty’s Navy Yard office buildings serve as prime examples, one designed by exotic Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group and three others by local firms Digsau and Erdy McHenry.

Among their features, a “curved facade was shaped to embrace the circular green;” “dark zinc panels have the rich patina of a much older building;” “vertical fins and sloping windows give the long facade a compelling rhythm, not unlike a muscular old factory building;” and “an irregular pattern of narrow and wide (steel) panels, interspersed with windows of varying widths.”

The ingenuity far outpaces the architectural trends of Center City, Saffron wrote. “… For a place that started out as a blank slate, it offers lessons for how to build new.”

Read much more of Saffron’s critique and Liberty’s latest architectural masterpieces on Philly.com here, and check out previous VISTA Today coverage of Liberty’s prominent role in shaping the Navy Yard here.