Who

The modernism-inclined architect Enrique Norten heads the architecture firm TEN Arquitectos.

Backstory

Mexico City native Norten teamed up with a colleague to found his first firm, Albin y Norten Arquitectos, in 1981. Four years later, he went solo with TEN Arquitectos—the EN in TEN stands for Enrique Norten—and in 2001, he established an office in New York. It's since become the larger of the two practices, which explains why Norten relocated to the U.S. He's managed to nab a handful of high-profile residential and commercial projects, although a number of them have failed to come to fruition.

Of note

Norten has had a bit of a bad streak of late: Four major commissions have slipped through the cracks over the past couple of years, including plans to construct a James Hotel in LA on behalf of Steve Hanson and Danny Errico, and a ballyhooed multiple-use development called Harlem Park. Norten's design for a $135 million visual and performing arts library at the Brooklyn Art Museum—announced to great fanfare in 2002—was all but axed in April 2007; and although in 2005 the Guggenheim Foundation selected him to design a Guggenheim in Guadalajara, plans for its construction now appear to have been shelved. Despite the defeats, Norten has plenty of work in the pipeline. He's attached to one of the city's most talked-about new developments, 1 York, which has generated attention for its futuristic automated parking garage. He's also in the preliminary stages of designing a 50-story hotel-condo for Gary Barnett's Extell on West 45th Street. And in Miami, he's working on the 70-story Brickell Flatiron—a modern version of the New York landmark—which will be one of city's tallest buildings once it's complete. Two design projects that remain up in the air: Shaya Boymelgreen's 400-unit, 375,000-square-foot Gowanus Village development, which has not yet received approval from the city, and a series of buildings for Joseph Sitt's Thor Equities on the site of the Revere Sugar Plant in Red Hook.

Personal

Norten and his wife, Leticia, have a son and a daughter. Norten splits his time between homes in three cities—Mexico City, New York, and Philadelphia, where he's currently an architecture professor at U. Penn.

In person

Norten is debonair and charming in person—but he reportedly has a wilder side, too. "Do not attempt to go shot-for-shot with this man," says a friend in the industry.