53 West 53

53 West 53 rises straight out of the Museum of Modern Art and keeps going, to 1,050 feet. Jean Nouvel designed the Midtown supertall around an exposed diagonal structure that tapers to a faceted crown, a silhouette meant to read as a piece of the skyline rather than another glass box. Hines developed it with Goldman Sachs and Singapore’s Pontiac Land Group, Lend Lease managed construction, and the tower finished in 2019.

Project Scope

The 82-story tower holds 162 condominium residences above three floors of new MoMA gallery space, about 52,290 square feet of exhibition area folded into the building’s base. Nouvel’s design pushes the structure to the exterior, a concrete diagrid that thins as it climbs and produces the irregular, crystalline faceting near the top. WSP Cantor Seinuk engineered the frame, and Enclos delivered the complex curtain wall that had to follow the tapering geometry without a repeating typical floor.

The result is one of Midtown’s most structurally expressive towers, where the engineering is the architecture rather than something hidden behind a flat facade.

Why It Matters

53 West 53 is a case study in building a residential supertall on a tight Midtown lot directly over a working cultural institution. The exposed diagrid let Nouvel carry the loads without interior columns marching up every floor, which is what makes the high-end units work, but it also meant a structure with almost no repeating condition for the trades to settle into. Stacking luxury condos over a museum expansion, on a sliver of West 53rd Street, makes it a reference for dense vertical mixed-use. For another Manhattan supertall on Exchange, see 111 West 57th Street.

Project Team & Details