Not long ago, many critics lamented that New York had too insular an architectural culture, in which geniuses from outside the city had great difficulty securing commissions here. That has changed, and Jean Nouvel, who on Monday won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, represents the transformation that has made foreign architects desirable to New York developers who are seeking to cash in on the cachet of hot, heavily touted global designers. Never before in New York has it seemed so incumbent upon developers that they hire a “name.”

Since the Prize was begun in 1979, 30 Pritzkers have been awarded. Many refer to it as architecture’s top honor, though others consider the Driehaus Prize, which recognizes architects “whose work embodies the principles of traditional and classical architecture and urbanism in contemporary society,” to be the field’s most prestigious award. By my rough count, 15 of the Pritzker architects have worked or are slated to work in New York, on projects of varying scale. Tadao Ando of Japan is represented by a restaurant, and Rem Koolhaas of Holland by a retail store. On the other hand, Norman Foster, whose firm is based in London, designed the Hearst Tower and is the architect of one of the towers scheduled to rise on the World Trade Center site. And the town is awash with buildings by Pritzker laureates, such as the New York-based Richard Meier and Renzo Piano of Italy. Mr. Nouvel rose to international superstardom in the 1980s with his Institut du Monde Arabe (1981–87) in Paris. The architect was only 35 when he won the 1980 competition for the building. He first tested New York’s waters in 1999, when he was commissioned by the Brooklyn developer David Walentas to design a hotel and theater complex for the DUMBO waterfront. That project, however, never made it past the design stage.

Mr. Nouvel next showed up in 2001, with a design commissioned by hotelier André Balazs and the development company Hines for a 180-room hotel in SoHo. The local community board strenuously opposed the plan, claiming that the design was out of keeping with the SoHo Historic District in which the hotel would be located. But the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which must review all designs for new construction in historic districts, gave its approval. The project evolved into the larger-scaled 40 Mercer Street Residences, on the north side of Grand Street between Mercer Street and Broadway. (The site was once occupied by Lord & Taylor, but had been a parking lot for many years.)

Mr. Nouvel’s modernist pastiche at 40 Mercer consists largely in exploiting wide window bays (in a manner reminiscent of I.M. Pei’s 88 Pine Street from 1973), using dramatic new forms of glass that varies from true transparency to total opacity, and in color (vibrant, beautiful blue and red). He employs glass that looks very different at different times of day, lending to the building a varying level of ethereality. The metal grid holding the windows is, as in the work of Mr. Meier, as crisply delineated as can be. I can’t say the

building is out of place where it is. This kind of sleek, gridded neomodernism does well in context with buildings such as the justly celebrated cast iron-fronted loft buildings of SoHo or, elsewhere in the city, early 20th-century reinforced-concrete industrial buildings.

I am bothered that the building already seems not to be weathering well. It’s all just a little too much perfection for gritty New York, where dirt and debris settle in the seams between metal members, metal panels buckle, and the lintels or hoods that keep rain off the all-important windows channel the water down the narrow slits between windows, streaking them in an unattractive way. And the narrow light-court that separates 40 Mercer from the building to its north is utterly drab.

Also, I wonder also the current penchant for glass among many leading architects. Mr. Nouvel treats his windows as screens, or fields of imagery, that inevitably de-emphasize the building’s corporeality. Up Broadway, between Prince and Spring streets, stands the late Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s Scholastic Building (1995), by the Pritzker laureate of 1990. Here’s a building that seems to be holding up and even acquiring a patina of age like buildings of old. It’s not about the glass — not at all. The white stone piers, rust-red horizontal steel bands, and green steel spandrels lend a powerful physicality to the building, together with beautiful colors, that makes it look like a keeper.

Hines has tapped Mr. Nouvel to design a 75-story residential and hotel building abutting the Museum of Modern Art to the west. MoMA will expand into the second, fourth, and fifth floors of the building. The extreme height (on a very narrow lot) has nonplussed some neighborhood residents, yet a clear consensus has emerged on the Web logs that if you’re going to build super-tall buildings in New York, then you can’t really make the case that 53rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas is an unsuitable location for one.