People keep gathering outside Ian Schrager's latest project in downtown Manhattan to take photos, but they're not paparazzi. They're taking pictures of 40 Bond — the 90,000-square-foot building is the celebrity. Designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss neo-modernists Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, 40 Bond blows hot and cool with equal aplomb: Its translucent green façade shimmers like Kryptonite in the fading afternoon light, yet at the building's base, a swirling, graffiti-derived steel gate looks like a Le Corbusier brise-soleil that's melted in New York's high-intensity glare.

While 40 Bond may at first appear the smaller sibling of Lever House moved to a more rugged address, Schrager, perched on a white couch in one of the building's recently sold units, says it's actually informed by the neighborhood's 19th-century cast-iron buildings. "It's not something that landed from outer space," says the 61-year-old Schrager, still a fast-talking son of Brooklyn, who bemoans the contemporary caliber of the city's skyline. "There's a lot of ideas out there on the street."

At an age when many men begin taking their foot off the gas, Schrager, whose storied biography runs from law school to Studio 54 to a jail stint to the reinvention of the American hotel, is entering the most ambitious phase of his career yet. After selling the Morgans Hotel Group nearly three years ago, the company he founded with his long-term partner and close friend Steve Rubell, he's branching out. Take 40 Bond. He hired architects who had never done a residential project in the U.S., and had them create it using difficult and extravagant materials, like curved glass from Barcelona and a Corian-walled lobby. He included five town houses in the design, a form that hadn't appeared on the block since the 19th century. The market's demand was unclear, he explains: "Is there going to be a family that's going to want to buy a town house for $10 million down here?" (Apparently so — they sold out quickly while setting a New York record of about $3,000 per square foot.)

In a year or so, Schrager will also be calling 40 Bond home, occupying the building's triplex penthouse surrounded by a 4,000-square-foot terrace. (At some 8,500 square feet, it's the largest one-bedroom pad in the city, with room enough for his two young daughters, Ava and Sophia, who live with him part-time following his divorce.) The space is being designed by the English minimalist John Pawson, who did the interiors at Schrager's last residential project, 50 Gramercy Park North. But true to counterintuitive form, Schrager doesn't want a minimalist space. "It won't be the kind of thing that one would expect from John. I didn't go to him for that."

Getting people to do new things — hiring, for instance, painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel to decorate the Gramercy Park Hotel — is a Schrager trademark. "I like the fact that they've never done anything like this before, because they come with no preconceived notions," he says. His wish list bristles with architects with scant or no experience in the U.S., like the Portuguese master Álvaro Siza. "I'd love to work with Peter Zumthor," he also says, calling the Swiss architect "the Louis Kahn of today." Not that Schrager's pulse-taking only occurs within the realm of architecture. "Why's Hannah Montana so big? Why do my daughters like the Jonas Brothers? — their father's a minister, they're like a new kind of rock band. I'm curious about it."