New York’s MoMA may have recently opened a new building, but its continued ambition couldn’t be any more obvious. Late last year, MoMA announced it had struck a deal with real-estate development firm Hines to turn the museum’s adjacent vacant lot into a monumental seventy-five-story tower of concrete and glass. For its part, the museum will pick up 40,000 square feet of exhibition space in the Jean Nouvel-designed building. Across the Atlantic, Nouvel has been reshaping the post-modern look of Europe with buildings like the new Philharmonic in Paris and his older Institut du Monde Arabe, setting the tone for metropolises worldwide. Now, in his third and largest building in the US, Nouvel’s genius is making a splash stateside. Above the museum floors, the building will house 120 private luxury residences and a 100-room “seven-star” hotel — whatever that is. With this project underway, New York City will once again set the high-rise standard in architecture, not simply for building big but rather for creating structures that are both smart and culturally relevant. While many architects may have a vision for the future, few are as futuristically epic as Jean Nouvel’s.