Jean Nouvel (b. 1945) is the French Pritzker Prize–winning architect (2008) responsible for 53 West 53rd Street (2019), the 1,050-foot mixed-use tower above the Museum of Modern Art expansion that constitutes one of the most architecturally distinct supertalls on the Manhattan skyline. The building's exposed diagrid structural system — a visible white-concrete lattice that wraps the tower's exterior — replaces the traditional core-and-floor approach with a visible structural expression, producing apartment interiors with column-free spans and unusual light conditions. Nouvel's broader portfolio includes the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Philharmonie de Paris, and 100 11th Avenue in West Chelsea. 53 West 53rd remains among the more architecturally ambitious of the post-2015 Manhattan supertall corpus.
Biography
