Ismael Leyva Architects

Ismael Leyva Architects, which goes by ILA, is a New York City architecture, interior design and urban planning firm founded in 1996. It works from an office on East 33rd Street in Midtown Manhattan. Its portfolio is heavy on high-rise condo and rental towers, with Time Warner Center, MiMA, Mercedes House, Abington House and One Hudson Yards among the Manhattan projects it lists, plus The Beacon in Jersey City and hotel, dorm and college work. It also has projects in Latin America, the Middle East and China. In Jersey City, ILA is one of two architects, alongside GRT Architects, on AVIVA, Alpine Residential’s 500-unit rental at 225 Phillip Street that anchors the SciTech Scity campus.

For a firm whose work is mostly towers, the client list is the more revealing document. ILA publishes 29 of them, and the names explain the portfolio better than the portfolio explains the clients.

The developer side runs through The Related Companies, SL Green, Two Trees Management, Kushner Companies, Forest City Ratner Companies and Edward J. Minskoff Equities — a roster that covers most of the categories of New York development at once, from REIT office holdings to Brooklyn waterfront conversion to large-scale rental.

Hospitality and boutique work comes through a different set of clients: the Ian Schrager Company, Fortuna Realty Group and Soho Properties. Institutional and public work brings in the New York City Housing Authority and JP Morgan. Designing for a public housing authority and designing a Schrager hotel are nearly opposite exercises in constraint, and keeping both on the books is a deliberate position rather than an accident of marketing.

Project leadership is published in detail. The firm names its president, two principals, five associate principals, four senior associates and four associates — fifteen named leaders in total. Principals are Manish Chadha, AIA, LEED AP and Leonard I. Vidrak, AIA. Founder Ismael Leyva holds FAIA, the American Institute of Architects’ fellowship, and serves as president.

Tenure is the part of that page worth noting. Associate principal Andy Chin-Cheung Lam joined in 2004; associate Juan Molina has been with the practice since 2000. On a development timeline measured in years rather than months, whether the person at the first meeting is still there at the certificate of occupancy is a practical question, and the answer here leans toward yes.

Three disciplines are practiced in house — architecture, interior design and urban planning — and the project archive is divided along the same lines, with a separate Work In Progress category for live commissions. For a developer, the useful consequence is that the base building and the interiors can be coordinated inside one contract rather than across two.

The office is at 30 East 33rd Street, fourth floor, in Midtown Manhattan, reachable at 212.290.1444.

One note for anyone browsing: the firm’s own site is somewhat dated, with a personnel page last stamped 2019, so current titles and staffing may have moved on from what is published.