Jean Nouvel is planning his own twenty-three-story disappearing act. Now under construction, the luxury apartment tower will feature an ingeniously conceived bowed curtain wall of 1,700 clear glass panels, each of a different size and set at a different angle. Expect to be dazzled in 2008.

Architecture lovers should be sure to check out 40 Mercer Street, a superluxury condo collaboration between André Balazs and Jean Nouvel at the corner of Grand Street, in SoHo. With his sparkling grid of colorless, blue and red glass panes, Nouvel has pushed the curtain wall to a new level of transparent beauty. And he’s done this while respecting the scale of the surrounding cast-iron buildings and paying a nod to the architectural strategies of Jean Prouvé and Richard Neutra. The enormous floor-to-ceiling panes retract electronically, and a clever louver system provides shade and privacy to the spectacularly glazed penthouse apartments.

Known as the “King of Greene Street,” this 1873 French Renaissance Gardner Colby building, designed by Isaac Duckworth, is considered SoHo’s grandest cast-iron building. It’s distinguished by its elaborate portico, its projecting bay and the pediment at its crown.

Tourists feel compelled to visit Times Square for its digital dazzle, but I’m always impressed by the sheer variety and invention of east Midtown’s luxury district. Walk the blocks around 57th Street between Fifth and Park avenues and you’ll be awed by the contemporary chic of the fashion and jewelry boutiques, the department stores and the crystalline Apple flagship.

Work Architecture Company, a firm headed by two ex-Koolhaas staffers, is responsible for the soon-to-be-completed Diane von Furstenburg headquarters. Its architectural tour de force is a sparkling white staircase, with Swarovski crystals set in the guardrail, that runs through the headquarters’ adjoining brick buildings, shooting light from a glass “diamond” conference room on the roof all the way down to the ground-floor boutique.

North of Chelsea, along the waterfront, is Frank Gehry’s momentum-gathering headquarters for Barry Diller’s InterActive Corporation. Technically, it’s a bravura work, a ten-story building of billowing forms made up of curved glass panels, partially banded with white ceramic fritting. When the glazed towers catch the reflection of passing clouds, they almost disappear into the sky.

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At this flagship, the wildly inventive British firm Heatherwick Studio employed hot-rolled steel to create a ribbonlike topography of steps, landings and walkways with draping balustrades of glass—a concept inspired by the hot-selling Zip bag it designed for the company.

LVMH’s faceted tower, completed in 1999 by Christian de Portzamparc, one of the most gifted, thoughtful and least touted starchitects on the stage today, is well worth a considered study.

When Rem Koolhaas’s suitably extravagant—and groundbreaking—paean to luxury consumption opened on the corner of Prince Street, its sloping floor created a sensation.