Austin’s Tallest Tower Gets a Tiny Bit Taller at Sixth and Guadalupe

Photo by James Rambin

UPDATE: We’ve heard from the tower’s developers that they’re ditching the “X” and rebranding the tower with the name Sixth and Guadalupe. As the preeminent media source for coverage of tower names in downtown Austin, we are fascinated to learn the rationale behind this change in the near future. 

Sixth and Guadalupe, the mixed-use tower now under construction in downtown Austin bringing a reported 66 floors of office, residential, and retail space in an imposing package designed by local architects at Gensler Austin to the corner of, well, Sixth and Guadalupe Streets, will be the tallest building in the city when it’s finished in 2023 — and it’s actually going to stretch just a little bit taller than previously announced by its co-developers at Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential.

Image: Gensler Austin

According to a representative from Kairoi, the tower has increased floor-to-floor heights in its residential section to “further enhance the resident experience” by offering units with higher ceilings, raising the building’s previously-reported height from 848 feet to an average of 865 feet, nine inches — owing to the changing grade of its tract at 600 Guadalupe Street, the height of the tower will increase to 873 feet, 10 inches when measured from the corner of West Sixth and San Antonio Streets.

Photo by James Rambin

An increase of roughly 26 feet doesn’t seem like much, but it’s more than the average two-story house, and certainly a lot higher than you’d like to fall — anyway, with more towers in the pipeline gunning for the downtown height record, every little bit helps.

Photo by James Rambin

And it’s not like the project doesn’t look tall already. According to Kairoi, the tower’s general contactors at JE Dunn are currently putting the finishing touches on the building’s last office floor, level 32, and will be installing the building’s first residential floor on level 34 in a couple of weeks — that’s where the tower narrows a bit, as seen in the snazzy rendering above. (Level 33 is an interstitial floor containing mechanical systems, the ventilation of which you can also see in the rendering.)

Photo by James Rambin

At least to us, it’s pretty remarkable that despite its record-setting height, Sixth and Guadalupe will likely not remain the tallest in town for very long if projects like Waller Creek’s “supertall” come to fruition, but because of its location on the west end of downtown near Republic Square and a few cherished parking lots it’s probably going to stand out on the skyline for years to come regardless of whether it holds the record. It’s not like the building stops working once something goes taller, but we’re sure its designers will enjoy the brief window — take that, Independent!