March 30 (Bloomberg) -- Jean Nouvel, one of architecture's most insightful and bravura talents, has landed the coveted Pritzker Prize.

The sponsoring Pritzker family's Hyatt Foundation of Chicago announced its 32nd laureate today. Nouvel will receive a bronze medallion and a $100,000 grant in a June 2 ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington.

The Pritzker jury lauded Nouvel for ``his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field.'' That's putting it mildly. He can take long and elaborate artistic detours to get us somewhere genuinely new -- and often controversial.

The dark, brooding exterior of a cultural center in Lucerne, Switzerland, with its knife-edge roof projecting over the lakefront, doesn't prepare you for the linen white and fleshy pink of the womblike concert hall within. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis dramatically extends its long lobby in a royal-blue bridge to nowhere that hangs over the Mississippi River. The Quai Branly Museum in Paris controversially reconceived ethnographic collections as world art, with serpentine passages and brightly colored cartoon forms.

When I spoke to Nouvel on the telephone, he professed awe at receiving the prize. He said from his Paris office that he was pleased the jury recognized ``I try to find the right building for the situation.'' Though Nouvel can appear commanding, with his large bald head and the dramatic features of his classically Gallic face, he listens and looks before designing.

Local Culture

``I prefer to work with all the parameters I can find in a place, the correspondences with the buildings around, with the local culture and the city -- even the color of the water and the clouds,'' he explained.

The best work of his 140-person Ateliers Jean Nouvel is magical, charming and utterly appropriate all at once. He can channel the ``localness'' of a place -- an essential skill for big-name architects hopping from city to city.

In the huge windows set in massive steel frames at the 40 Mercer condominium in Manhattan, for example, Nouvel picked up the brawn of cast-iron SoHo without being at all imitative.

Nouvel, 62, has never taken the easy route with his designs, and a very long list of unbuilt work is the result. His 1987 Arab World Institute in Paris put him on the map 17 years after he founded his own firm.

Its sleek glass exterior contrasts with the complex yet fascinating mechanical diaphragms that line the inside. They work like camera shutters to shade the building while evoking the dappled light of traditional Arab architecture and the inventiveness of Arab cultures.

Sensual Surfaces

The project also suggested Nouvel's signature obsession with opulent, sensual surfaces. Using glass louvers of varied translucency, he made the brightly colored metal panels of the Agbar Tower in Barcelona look veiled in sheets of flowing water. (Agbar is, in fact, a water company.)

At the Guthrie, images of past stage productions reveal themselves as ghostlike apparitions on the exterior.

Nouvel's untidy, sometimes surreal aesthetic doesn't always work. In New York, a hotel and movie complex between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges failed to go ahead. In Midtown he shaped a faceted 1,200-foot-high (365-meter) spire into a strangely fascinating wizard's hat on the New York skyline -- which doesn't mitigate the darkness that would be cast by its massive tree- trunk bulk at the street.

Unconventional Theaters

The Lucerne concert hall, the Guthrie and an opera house in Lyon, France, are so widely liked even with their unconventional styles that I assumed Nouvel must have a performance background or a deep love of music.

``I'm neither a musician nor an actor,'' he explained. Buildings for culture express ```the desires of an epoch.''

An 1,800-seat concert hall with seats that cascade like tectonic plates is under construction in Denmark. The 2,400-seat Paris Philharmonic hall, with balconies floating in cloudlike tiers, will open in 2012. He's working on a $400 million condominium tower in Los Angeles and the massive Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Nouvel says he'd like to spend more time at a house and studio he owns in the south of France.

``I want to find a balance of the pleasure of a beautiful place and the pleasure of doing interesting work.'' Uniting his enormously varied output, he says, is an attitude rather than a style: ``I know the starting point in every project, but I don't know where we are going.''

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg's U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: March 30, 2008 13:00 EDT