They capitalize on views of Central Park — “the money shot,” in the indelicate phrase of Carol Willis, director of the Skyscraper Museum — over which these buildings will cast long, literal shadows. (She has organized a show about them, on view through April 19.)

The buildings are stirring some populist fury and prompting an argument: Do we need more public oversight when it comes to the city’s stratospheric architecture? Are we selling off our skyline to the plutocrats? Or are those who occupy these spaces serving up much needed tax revenue to the city?

There are no simple answers. But I believe there may be ways to thread the needle — to encourage ambitious buildings and also to curb bad design. First, however we must be clear-eyed about the options.

“If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said somewhat peevishly when the buildings — none yet completed, some yet to break ground — had become a political football in the campaign for his successor. “Because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.”

That is, unless those billionaires don’t actually live here: Buyers parking fortunes in places like One57, across from Carnegie Hall — where two penthouses reportedly sold for more than $90 million apiece — often keep their primary residences elsewhere, as James B. Stewart noted recently in The New York Times. So they pay no city income tax, and in these new luxury buildings, property taxes are comparatively low — “even,” the column pointed out “as the city’s services prop up the value of their trophy real estate.”

One57, is Exhibit A in what we should be able to prevent. Developed by Extell, this 90-story apartment tower made headlines last year when a crane nearly fell down asHurricane Sandy approached. Its French architect, Christian de Portzamparc, won thePritzker Prize 19 years ago and during the late 1990s designed the compact LVMH Tower up the street, a jewel-like building.

This one unravels as a cascade of clunky curves descending toward ribbons billowing into canopies. The conceit is falling water. The effect: a heap of volumes, not liquid but stolid, chintzily embellished, clad in acres of eye-shadow-blue glass offset by a pox of tinted panes, like age spots. It’s anybody’s guess how the building got past the drawing board. It is now enmeshed in an anticorruption investigation, centered around a tax abatement that Albany legislators tucked into a real estate bill in January.

Extell is also the company that put up the two towers on Broadway at 99th Street that caused so much tsuris on the Upper West Side that new zoning regulations were cooked up to stop construction of more high-rises in the neighborhood, effectively guaranteeing the views from Extell’s buildings.

Perhaps even worse is yet another Extell project just a block away from One57. The Nordstrom Tower, at 1,424 feet, will be higher than the top floor of 1 World Trade Center. Its architects, Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill, designed the aspirational Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. So far, only incomplete renderings of the Nordstrom Tower have been made public, although its signal gesture has already caused a big fuss: a cantilever over the Art Students League, a landmark building from the 1890s, in French Renaissance style, by Henry J. Hardenbergh. Picture a giant with one foot raised, poised to squash a poodle.

Despite strong community opposition, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commissionapproved the cantilever in October. A Landmarks spokeswoman told me the other day that the commission is confined to assessing a project’s impact at street level, and the cantilever, at 290 feet in the air, is high enough not to affect views of the Art Students League, as if nobody in New York ever looks up.

That cantilever is necessary to provide a Nordstrom store with an unobstructed floor plan, Extell has explained. It also happens to ensure that apartments above the store will look onto Central Park by peeking around another luxe high-rise slated for a block north, to be designed by Robert A. M. Stern.

The Landmarks Commission’s review was, in effect, the public’s chance. Nordstrom Tower and One57 were developed “as-of-right,” meaning their designs required no special permits from the City Planning Commission. Behind these super-tall buildings are New York zoning codes that permit builders to accumulate adjacent parcels of land then stack their air rights into a single structure occupying a part of the site.

What results isn’t always tragic. Another developer, JDS, is erecting the skinniest of the new towers at 111 West 57th Street. It will be nestled into the courtyard of the landmark Steinway Hall by Warren & Wetmore, from the 1920s. The architects are the partners at SHoP, the New York firm. The project rises like a sugar wafer, a sleek glass sheet, facing north and south, finely undulating bands of terra cotta and bronze filigree decorating the extra-slim east and west facades. At the top, shallow setbacks reach a feathered crown. The project bids to update the romantic skyscraper drawings of Hugh Ferriss for the 21st Century.

A second ear-popping billionaires’ lair may not end up badly either. For the developer Harry B. Macklowe, the architect Rafael Viñoly has devised a minimalist needle, also nearly 1,400 feet, at 432 Park Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets. Mr. Viñoly has been in the news for a 37-story office building nicknamed the Walkie-Talkie in London whose reflective glass concentrated even that city’s dim sunlight into deadly rays, potent enough to melt a Londoner’s parked Jaguar. But the project here is different, its attenuated grid of concrete and glass an architectural riff on a Sol Lewitt sculpture.

So, soon the view south from the park will be as if from inside the world’s biggest chessboard, with the buildings on Central Park South mere pawns before the queens and bishops that blot the sky behind them.

What do these projects add at street level where the other 99 percent live? What’s their return for claiming the skyline that is our collective identity?

We need to be careful. Almost everybody hated the Chrysler Building at first. The Empire State Building once stuck out like a sore thumb. Those buildings along Central Park South used to be among the city’s tallest, intruding into the park over the treetops. Taste is tricky to legislate.

This doesn’t mean New York should consign its silhouette to private builders. The city should put a limit on air rights that can be merged without public review. Exceptional height should be earned, not just bought. Let community groups and city agencies weigh in. Developers will raise hell, but the move would not stop sky-high buildings from going up. Buildings striving for such height would just need to make a case for themselves aesthetically and otherwise. Developers might also give something back for the profits reaped as they leverage public assets like parks. They could pony up for affordable housing and improved transit.

The next mayor also should explore “view corridors,” vistas that, like landmarks, New Yorkers prize and want to protect. London regulates views. New York already limits signs facing into parks. Does the skyline merit similar protection? That sort of question certainly matters more than who bought what for how much. We fixate on real estate porn. We need a healthier conversation about urban priorities.

A forthcoming report from the Municipal Art Society, called “The Accidental Skyline,” bemoans what’s happening on 57th Street, absent New Yorkers’ input. It suggests any new tower casting a shadow over Central Park should require the approval of the City Planning Commission. That’s a plausible trigger for public oversight, dependent on city commissioners with backbone who understand design.

Oh, and the mayor could lobby to raise taxes on those out-of-town plutocrats buying zillion-dollar aeries.

Members of the Art Students League haven’t yet voted whether to approve the sale of their air rights to Extell for the Nordstrom Tower. While the league stands to gain millions, cranky artists might still succeed where Landmarks failed, and shelve the cantilever.

Here’s hoping they do.