This grand view of the 5C project and its surroundings looks westward down Fifth Street, and thus also provides us with a pretty good look at Gensler Austin’s design for 6 X Guadalupe in the background. Image: George Blume / Instagram
Though it’s unclear exactly how the demand for physical office space will change in what we’ll have to start calling the “post-pandemic era” — assuming that era arrives sometime soon — it seems Minneapolis-based real estate development outfit Ryan Companies and its equity partners PGIM have sufficient faith in both the needs of Austin’s future and the depth of their own pockets, with the duo’s 41-floor downtown office project Tower 5C still moving forward according to recent city filings.
Image: Gensler Austin / Ryan Companies
Demolition permit applications filed last week by the project’s legal representatives at Armbrust & Brown PLLC indicate the developer plans to clear the 1920s-era buildings currently occupying the tower site at the southeast corner of West Fifth and Colorado Streets, including 415 Colorado Street and 107 West Fifth Street — commercial spaces respectively occupied by the restaurants Lonesome Dove and Chinatown.
A recent view of the corner at West Fifth and Colorado Streets where Tower 5C should eventually rise — you’ll also see the 405 Colorado office tower project rising almost directly next door, a building we’ve taken to calling “the Molar.”
Previous reports and another demolition permit dating back to the beginning of this year indicate the office space now occupied by Walmart Technology at 409 Colorado Street and the tax-stricken hot doggery Frank next door at 407 Colorado Street are also coming down to make room for the 5C project, with the City of Austin’s Historic Landmark Commission approving the certificate of appropriateness for these demolitions late last year — despite their age, the structures here were modified too heavily by numerous tenants over the years to retain sufficient historic merit.
Image: Gensler Austin / Ryan Companies
We’ve already dug into the futuristic “squircle” design of Tower 5C, allegedly inspired at least in part by the alien spacecraft in the 2016 film “Arrival,” thanks to the information included by its architects at Gensler Austin in the project’s successful Density Bonus application earlier this year — but we happened to notice some recent Instagram posts from our old pal George Blume, a design director at Gensler Austin working on the project, granting us a few new views of the tower and its striking appearance in downtown’s ever-expanding skyline.
Image: George Blume / Instagram
These views, as noted by George in some of the captions, are known as massings rather than renderings — they don’t have nearly as much exterior detail, but are simply used to visualize the building’s general shape and form in three dimensions. No matter what they’re called, we’ll take basically any new look at this project we can get — though Block 185 is a stunner in its own right, 5C’s curved corners and crown provide an appearance unlike anything else currently proposed or built downtown.
The notches you see in the facade of the building are balconies, presumably good amenity spaces for future tenants occupying the tower’s 465,900 square feet of office space — they break up the cohesiveness of the exterior a little, but tech companies and other corporate tenants really seem to like these features and they show up in practically every new office tower project around here lately.
Image: George Blume / Instagram
There’s currently no date listed on the 5C site’s demolition applications indicating when the corner’s actually getting cleared, and based on the timelines of other projects it could take a while. Still, by all appearances the wheels haven’t fallen off either 5C or Ryan Companies’ other tower project a few blocks away for BBVA USA, with permit filings and other signs of life showing up frequently enough to keep us breathing easy about their future viability — for the time being, at least.
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