It’s cranes on cranes in downtown Austin. Photo by James Rambin.
The weather’s great lately in downtown Austin, and that never lasts long — meaning now’s the time to hike around and take some photos of projects underway in the central city. You may have forgotten about some of them!
300 Colorado
Current progress on the 300 Colorado office tower. Photo by James Rambin.
Did you remember the office tower currently under construction at 300 Colorado Street? This 32-story development by Cousins Properties, Riverside Resources and Ironwood Real Estate will be occupied by a single tenant, oil and gas outfit Parsley Energy. It feels like the project is kinda under the radar — we hadn’t checked up on it for a while — and it’s made surprising progress in the last few months, now rising a couple of stories above the street.
The above photo shows some kind of funky angles on its support columns, probably to accommodate changes in grade or something like that, and it’s a slight bummer that their jauntiness likely won’t be visible once the shell of the building is complete. We love those weird columns on 70 Rainey, they give the design a lot of character.
Fifth and Brazos
The dual-branded hotel and apartment tower at Fifth and Brazos Streets by Magellan Development Group and Ryan Companies is well underway, as you can see from the tremendous pit doing pit stuff over there even as we speak. The crane’s finally up too, so this pit will likely soon be filled with an underground parking structure:
Looking east towards the excavation at the Fifth and Brazos site. Photo by James Rambin.
In case you’ve forgotten, the two hotel brands at this building will be Thompson Hotels and tommie, the latter of which is intentionally not capitalized because millennials don’t use capital letters, particularly on twitter — guilty as charged. Here’s what it’ll look like, a nice activation of a corner formerly occupied by a parking lot:
Image: bKL Architecture
Hotel ZaZa / Gables Republic Square
The ever-mysterious Hotel ZaZa / Gables Republic Square tower at 401 Guadalupe Street hasn’t shown much progress on its exterior in what feels like forever, though the triumphant banners on its exterior claim an opening date of “2019,” still giving them some time to finish up — in the below photo, you can actually see construction workers at the building, something we honestly weren’t sure about before:
Slow progress on the Hotel ZaZa / Gables Republic Square project. Photo by James Rambin.
From this angle, you can also see the assembly of vacant properties at the corner of Fifth and Lavaca Streets that will soon be coming down to make way for the 44-story Hanover Republic Square apartment tower. Judging by the latest city permits for this corner, that demolition could kick off any day now. We are fairly excited about it!
405 Colorado
It’s hard to see much from the street at this point, but work is clearly underway on developer Brandywine Realty Trust’s office and parking tower (or is it parking and office?) project at 405 Colorado.
Photo by James Rambin.
This building’s design comes to us from architecture firm Duda/Paine, which gave us Austin’s iconic Frost Bank Tower, the upcoming Republic tower, and Colorado Tower just across the street from the 405 site — still, the 405 design is pretty wacky, with as much parking as actual building:
A rendering of 405 Colorado. Image: Brandywine / Duda/Paine Architects
Maybe we should run a reader poll to settle whether the tower looks more like a molar, a car cigarette lighter, or one of those ring pop candies. Email me!
Block 71
Construction on the Block 71 office tower at 200 West Sixth Street has been underway for about a year, and we’re still excited about it. The project’s finally tall enough that you can see a small part of it rising above other buildings from a different angle than we’ve photographed it before — and check out that crane-on-crane action!
Looking north at the Block 71 site. Photo by James Rambin.
As far as we know, the tower’s still on track for “substantial completion” by April 2021 — and along with other expected projects including the Republic, 600 Guadalupe, and Block 185, it’s going to have quite a presence in the skyline when it’s done. Needless to say, it’s a whole new Austin out there!
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