611 West 56th Street (Noe & Associates | Sumaida + Khurana | LENY)
Eleventh Avenue is the last frontier of Midtown real estate, and its days of car dealerships, auto body shops, and light-industrial uses are getting a shakeup. Nowhere is the change more apparent than around Hudson Yards and along its northern reaches where the thoroughfare transitions into West End Avenue. The latter is where a parade of residential towers such as One West End, Frank 57 West, and 606W57 are marching south from the Upper West Side. And here, at the corner of Eleventh and 56th Street, is where Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza has been commissioned to design his first ever building in the United States.
The octogenarian Portuguese architect is internationally recognized for his sculptural works that exude what some call “poetic modernism.” Practicing for more than a half-century, many of Siza’s notable projects are intimately-scaled and located near his hometown of Porto. The 1992 Pritzker Prize laureate has also designed buildings in several European and South American countries but has never realized a project in the U.S. This New York tower will stand apart from his prior work due to its scale — coming in at 36 stories, 420 feet tall.
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Rendering by Noe & Associates with The Boundary
The project’s developers are Sumaida + Khurana in partnership with LENY. Sumaida and Khurana are also finishing up another condo development at 152 Elizabeth Street in Nolita designed by Tadao Ando (another Pritzker Prize winner). Addressed at 611 West 56th Street, the team purchased the property from billionaire supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis in 2015 and secured a $36 million acquisition loan in 2017. Recently, demolition of the pink-hued building at the site was completed and construction workers are now shoring up the foundation.
Renderings show Siza specified a stern façade of rectangular windows that wrap around corners on mid- to upper-level floors. There will be a sizeable setback on the eighth floor, giving way to a slender tower with no more than two units per floor. The building will be enveloped in a dour stone facade that will offset the thin-skinned, and often clunky towers nearby.
The venture will contain approximately 80 condos ranging from one- to four-bedrooms.
Several apartments will have private terraces that will offer wide-angle views that include Hell’s Kitchen, Midtown West, and the Hudson River. Michael Gabellini and Kimberly Sheppard will be collaborating with Siza to fashion the interiors. Amenities are to include a landscaped roof garden and sundeck, state-of-the-art fitness center, children’s playroom, and entertainment space. Sales are expected to begin in fall 2018 and marketing efforts will be led by Compass.
611 West 56th Street as of late January 2018 (CityRealty)
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