Jean Nouvel is the 2008 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, joining the ranks of the late Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Richard Meier, Tadao Ando, Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry, Sir Norman Foster, Rem Koohlaas, and Renzo Piano, among others.

An official ceremony honoring Nouvel will take place on June 2 at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, at which time the 62-year-old architect will received a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion.

Nouvel came to international attention in 1987 with the completion of his Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA). His more recent work includes the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (2006), the 75-story Tour Verre next to MoMA in New York, the Branly Museum in Paris (2006), the Agbar Tower in Barcelona (2005), and a concert hall currently under construction in Copenhagen.

Announcing the jury's choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, remarked, "Of the many phrases that might be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, foremost are those that emphasize his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field."

The 32nd laureate since the prize was founded in 1979 (with Philip Johnson as the inaugural Pritzker laureate), Nouvel is the second laureate to come from France. The first Frenchman was Christian de Portzamparc in 1994.

This year's jury comprised Chairman Lord Palumbo, architect Shigeru Ban, Vitra chairman of the board Rolf Fehlbaum, architectural historian Victoria Newhouse, architect and 1998 Pritzker laureate Renzo Piano, writer and editor Karen Stein, and executive director Martha Thorne.

Of Nouvel, the jury commented: "For over 30 years, Jean Nouvel has pushed architecture's discourse and praxis to new limits....He is not interested in a unified approach or accepted typologies. He likes ruptures of scale and form that move the viewer from one aesthetic sensibility to another....For Nouvel, in architecture there is no 'style' a priori. Rather, context, interpreted in the broadest sense to include culture, location, program, and client, provokes him to develop a different strategy for each project."