A view from the top of the topped-out ATX Tower. Say top one more time, I dare you. Image: Tishman Speyer
You ever meet somebody who uses LinkedIn a little too much like Facebook? Downright haunting stuff, arguably some of the worst content ever posted. Us, we log in maybe once a quarter, and are hit within seconds by a wave of private messages inviting us to join various online executive MBA programs, at which point we log out. It’s an elegant system, but we should probably spend more time on there for the purposes of following local real estate news, which is ostensibly the point of this site.
Here’s a great example — a month ago, developers Ryan Companies and Tishman Speyer posted on LinkedIn announcing the ATX Tower was officially topped out, celebrating reaching the project’s maximum height with the standard quasi-pagan tree ceremony and autographed beam. That’s fairly newsworthy, especially since the current wave of towers under construction downtown (shifting into stage whisper) might be the last ones to break ground around here for a while. So, uh, let’s take a look!
This brings us to another important question — what is ATX Tower? Turns out that’s the final name for the 58-floor office and residential project headed for the southeast corner of West Sixth and Guadalupe Streets, known very conservatively by its address as 321 West Sixth back when it broke ground two years ago. This latest name is better, because when you Google “ATX Tower” at the moment you are hit with a bunch of shopping listings for computer cases sized for the “Advanced Technology Extended” motherboard form factor. Did the tower’s marketing team have meetings about this?
Why didn’t they make computer cases as sick as that pyramid when I last built a gaming PC in 2006? Image: Google
The project, which went through a pretty significant redesign before the final product broke ground, is the work of local architecture firm Page and national studio Handel Architects. Its mix of 140,000 square feet of office space topped with 370 apartment residences makes for an interesting building — the office levels and a rooftop amenity deck sit above the lobby and an 11-floor parking podium, with the residential units rising to the project’s full height in a more tapered section of the tower. For those of us on the ground, the building also includes a 1,000-square-foot retail space at the lobby level, described as an all-day cafe type tenant. (We tend to enjoy that sort of detail.)
A big ‘ol rendering of the ATX Tower. Image: Page / Handel Architects
The project topping out is noteworthy enough, but real Towersheads may also enjoy a recent article on the building in engineering publication Structure Magazine, which describes the project as “…the world’s first high-rise tower to incorporate the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Prestandard for Performance-Based Wind Design (PBWD).” Rather than trying to summarize what that means, we’ll recognize our intellectual limits and link the article here. Anyway, look forward to ATX Tower’s grand opening — you may see it announced on LinkedIn — sometime in 2025.
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