LVMH Tower: Christian de Portzamparc’s Faceted Glass Landmark at 19 East 57th Street

Photo above: the LVMH Tower, 19 East 57th Street, photographed May 2026. Photo by Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

At a Glance

• Opened in 1999 as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s overseas headquarters — the first completed U.S. building by Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc.
• Known for a faceted, asymmetric glass facade that folds along a central diagonal: green fritted glass on the west side, milky white sandblasted glass on the east.
• Not to be confused with a different, unrelated project a block away: a currently under-construction Louis Vuitton flagship store at 1 East 57th Street / Fifth Avenue, designed by a different architect.
• Widely praised by architecture critics since it opened, and still LVMH’s New York headquarters today.

What Is the LVMH Tower?

The LVMH Tower is a 24-story, roughly 330-foot office tower at 19 East 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc as the overseas headquarters of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE. It was Portzamparc’s first completed building in the United States, arriving a few years after he became the first French architect to win the Pritzker Prize.

The tower occupies a narrow midblock site between an early-20th-century bank building and the 1995 American headquarters of Chanel next door. Rather than a single flat facade, Portzamparc designed the building’s glass skin as two distinct planes folded together along a central diagonal — described variously as resembling unfolding flower petals or the fall of a skirt over a bent knee. A blue glass cube marks the fold at the 10th floor, and the tower’s lighting scheme changes color at night.

One note on the address, since it causes real confusion: this is not the same project as the Louis Vuitton flagship store currently under construction one block away at 1 East 57th Street, at the corner of Fifth Avenue. That’s a separate, unrelated building — a vertical expansion of an existing 20-story structure into a 25-story, roughly 485-foot flagship, designed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA and wrapped for now in scaffolding styled after a Louis Vuitton trunk. This page covers the completed 1999 LVMH Tower at 19 East 57th Street only.

A Facade Four Years in the Making

Construction broke ground in 1996, but the building didn’t open until December 8, 1999 — delayed roughly four years by financing disputes and by the sheer manufacturing complexity of the tower’s custom-fabricated glass facade. Two different glass types had to be produced and fitted to Portzamparc’s angled, asymmetric geometry, an unusually demanding job for New York’s curtain-wall industry at the time.

The design was also a deliberate response to its site: Portzamparc used the facade’s folded planes partly to work within New York’s setback and zoning rules, and partly to avoid adding to the reflected glare from the IBM Tower directly across the street. An eleven-story base holds ground-level retail space; above it, each of LVMH’s business units occupies its own floor. When it opened, architecture critics were largely enthusiastic — one contemporary review called it simply “the best new building in New York.”

The Building Today

At street level, the fold in the facade reads less like abstraction and more like architecture doing a practical job: it lets the tower step back from its narrow midblock lot while still presenting a full glass face to 57th Street. The Christian Dior boutique that has anchored the base for years remains there today, one of several LVMH-owned maisons occupying ground-floor retail along this stretch of the block.

Still LVMH’s New York Headquarters

More than 25 years later, the LVMH Tower remains LVMH’s North American headquarters and one of Portzamparc’s most frequently cited works internationally, alongside projects like Paris’s Cité de la Musique and Beijing’s China National Convention Center. That legacy was formally recognized in January 2026, when Portzamparc received the Créateurs Design Awards’ Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award in Paris — an honor that specifically pointed to the LVMH Tower as one of the defining projects of his career.

Timeline

Location

The LVMH Tower sits at 19 East 57th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues in Midtown Manhattan. View on Google Maps.

Sources

Sources: Wikipedia; e-architect; Archello; World-Architects; Arquitectura Viva; Wired New York; designboom (2026 lifetime achievement award); ArchDaily; New York YIMBY (on the separate 1 East 57th Street flagship project, cited for disambiguation only).

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Hush Street Editorial researches and reports on the projects, permits, and physical changes reshaping Brooklyn — and, more broadly, New York City. Reporting draws on primary-source city records — Department of Buildings filings, land-use and planning applications, agency and community-board documents — verified and cross-checked against independent reporting where it exists. Coverage is continuously updated as new filings and decisions are recorded, and confirmed facts are distinguished from open questions.