Current Events Aside, Downtown Austin’s BBVA Tower Plan Is Extremely Narrow

It is! Image: Ryan Companies / Kimley-Horn / Page

If keeping up with the news over the last week has you more than a little burnt out, we’re here with a welcome distraction — the 60-story apartment and office tower planned by BBVA USA and developer Ryan Companies at 321 West Sixth Street in downtown Austin is extremely narrow. How narrow, you ask? Very.

Image: Page

But you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell that from the perspective of the rendering above, which comes from the tower’s designers at local architecture firm Page. That’s because we’re looking at the building’s southern side up there, and it’s only noticeably narrow on the eastern and western sides — new architectural drawings recently filed with the city for the project reveal more of its secrets:

Architectural illustrations of the 321 West Sixth tower show its scale and surprisingly narrow eastern and western elevations. The wider podium of the structure contains retail, parking, and office space, while the thinner tower section contains its approximately 360 apartment units. Click for a larger view. Image: Ryan Companies / Kimley-Horn / Page

As you can see from the illustrations above, the podium of the tower seemingly fills the site’s 0.47-acre footprint, but tapers off after that — that podium contains, according to the developers, two levels of retail at the ground floor, parking up to level 12, office space on floors 12 through 17, residential amenity space on 18 and 19, and apartment units in the skinnier levels above that all the way up to the 60th floor. 

Yeah, that’s narrow. On the left is the tower’s western-facing elevation, with the southern-facing elevation on the right. Image: Ryan Companies / Kimley-Horn / Page

So just how narrow is that upper section of the tower? Based on the scale and measurements provided in the drawings above, we estimate the tower’s upper section is approximately 73 feet wide, give or take a few, on those western and eastern sides. New York’s Steinway Tower, which currently holds the record for the thinnest skyscraper in the world, is 60 feet wide at its base — so although the BBVA tower has a fatter podium, that tower section is still pretty slim!

A rendering of the Hyatt Centric hotel project bound for 721 Congress Avenue, which is also “notably narrow” on its eastern and western sides. Image: Nelsen Partners / Hyatt Centric

Still, it’s not even the narrowest tower expected in town at the moment, with the Hyatt Centric Hotel planned for 721 Congress Avenue clocking in at less than 50 feet wide on its eastern and western sides. The Royal Arch tower plan is pretty slim too, even though its chances of getting built are equally quite slim due to the carryings-on of our backwards-ass Historic Landmark Commission. Anyway, the mercurial state of the global economy due to some unfortunate current events means we don’t precisely know what’s getting built around here and when, but the BBVA tower was last expected for groundbreaking sometime later this year. Either way, it’s narrow!

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