Sumaida + Khurana and LENY

Álvaro Siza in New York City

Álvaro Siza is finally designing a project in the USA. Working with our long term clients and collaborators, Sumaida + Khurana in partnership with LENY, Noë & Associates are documenting the making and in turn creating the branding and marketing of Álvaro Siza’s first US project. Called 611 West 56th Street, the 35-storey building will rise over 420 feet (128 metres). It will be constructed on New York’s West Side, near the corner of 11th Avenue and 56th Street. The 84-year-old Pritzker Prize Winner, who has been praised by his peers as one the 20th and 21st century’s finest architects has been commissioned by Sumaida + Khurana to design the residential tower. Noë & Associates have spent time with Mr Siza in Portugal documenting his process and his past works on video film with our director, Marcus Werner Hed, and and on stills camera with Ingmar Kurth.

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“Our collaborator Álvaro Siza has designed a building that we hope will be viewed as an elegant and timeless stone monolith, reflective of the quality and purity of design that defines his work.”

Amit Khurana, Founding partner of Sumaida + Khurana

A Tour of Portugal

The Noë & Associates team visited Portugal for six days to both interview Álvaro Siza and document some of his past projects. From the Boa Nova Tea House in Porto to the Serralves Museum, to the Campo Maior Winery and The Santa Maria Church at Canaveses, capturing the serenity and spirituality of Siza’s works was key. His sensitivity to projects is very apparent, the use of light, materiality, simple palettes uniting spaces and volume. His work work is rigorous and modern and fits seamlessly within the rural and urban surrounds, yet remains identifiably Siza.

“I begin sketching possible solutions with the little information I have. I feel I need to begin immediately with an idea — although then it can be completely changed.”

Álvaro Siza

The heroic spirit of modern architecture

The Pritzker Architecture Prize, explains Siza’s insistence on continuous experimentation, “Precisely for this reason his architecture can communicate to us an extraordinary sense of freedom and freshness; in it one clearly reads the unfolding of an authentic design adventure. In accepting the risk of such adventure, Álvaro Siza has even been able to bring to the surface, in his architecture, what one feared was in danger of extinction: the heroic spirit of modern architecture.”

“Every design… is a rigorous attempt to capture a concrete moment of a transitory image in all its nuances. The extent to which this transitory quality is captured, is reflected in the designs: the more precise they are, the more vulnerable.”

Alvaro Siza

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Next project: 400 Lake Shore Drive

Álvaro Siza in New York City

A New Icon for Chicago