French architect Jean Nouvel has been named the winner of the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture's highest honor, and will receive a $100,000 cash prize and bronze medal in Washington, D.C., in June.

Nouvel is the second Pritzker laureate to be chosen from France and the thirty-second laureate since the prize was founded in 1979. Funded by the Hyatt Foundation, the prize honors living architects whose work demonstrates a combination of talent, vision, and commitment and who have produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity.

Though best known for European projects such as the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the Agbar Tower in Barcelona, Nouvel has designed several buildings in the United States, including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the proposed seventy-five-story Tour Verre tower in New York City. Nouvel's firm, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, is headquartered in Paris.

"Since establishing his Paris-based practice in the 1970s, Nouvel has pushed himself, as well as those around him, to consider new approaches to conventional architectural problems," said Pritzker Prize jury chair Peter Palumbo. "For Nouvel, in architecture there is no "style" a priori. Rather, a context, interpreted in the broadest sense to include culture, location, program, and client provokes him to develop a different strategy for each project."