Downtown Austin’s Defunct Tower 5C Was Too Weird for This World

Looking up at the iconic, yet deceased Tower 5C. Image: George Blume / Instagram / Gensler Austin

With the official announcement earlier this week that Texan private equity firm Stonelake Capital Partners recently purchased the half-acre assembly at the southeast corner of West Fifth and Colorado Streets and has taken over the task of developing a tower at the site from Ryan Companies, we are forced to acknowledge the untimely passing of the office project formerly planned here known as Tower 5C.

Looking west down Fifth Street at the Tower 5C design. That’s 6 X Guadalupe on the right. Image: George Blume / Instagram

Stonelake has elected to take the project in a different direction than the 41-floor design from Gensler Austin that first appeared under developer Ryan Companies’ tenure back in 2019 — a genuinely unique tower allegedly inspired by a sci-fi alien spacecraft and fashioned with the curved “squircles” of high-end consumer electronics, perhaps a little divisive (its detractors compared the look of the structure to an expensive air purifier), but a charmingly offbeat building nonetheless, running at glorious full tilt against the currents of Austin’s prevailing risk-averse downtown architecture. It was too weird to live and too rare to die, but it’s dead now anyway.

On the left, a view of Tower 5C. On the right, a view of the Stonelake tower now planned at the same site from approximately the same perspective, with the familiar-looking Austonian condo tower in the background. Images: Gensler Austin / Ryan Companies / Stonelake Capital Partners / Ziegler Cooper Architects

It’s not that there’s anything exactly wrong with Stonelake’s new proposal for the site, which comes to us from Ziegler Cooper Architects, the Houston studio behind the Quincy. If the building were announced anywhere else, we’d be thrilled to see it, but as a replacement for Tower 5C it’s difficult to avoid the unflattering comparison to the previous design. This new tower, named 5th & Colorado for the moment — and not to be confused with the other tower at the intersection called either Colorado Tower or, uh, 5th + Colorado — is now a mixed-use project with 318 residential units and 100,000 square feet of office space, its floor count increasing from 41 to 50 stories.

Additional perspectives of the Stonelake tower plan replacing the 5C design at the corner of West Fifth and Colorado Streets. Images: Stonelake Capital Partners / Ziegler Cooper Architects

However, despite its higher floor count we still believe this version of the project will actually be shorter overall than the all-office 5C design, since office levels have higher ceilings than residential buildings. This new design appears to lack Tower 5C’s ground-floor retail space, something we were pretty excited about for such an active corner — though the developers may see pushback on this issue from Austin’s Design Commission while seeking a density bonus. The new structure also takes less effort to hide its parking podium, an extra touch that took 5C’s looks a long way.

Another view of the previous 5C design, looking west down Fifth Street. Image: Gensler Austin / Ryan Companies

A plan for Tower 5C’s ground floor shows how the previous design situated the tower’s service core — containing elevator shafts along with other structural and mechanical elements — on the south end of the building rather than at its center, providing larger contiguous square footage on each floor. Image: Gensler Austin / Ryan Companies

Finally, the side-core layout of 5C, which pushed its elevator shafts, stairwells, and other mechanicals to the southern end of the tower instead of a central core like most tall buildings, allowed for more open floor plates — you can see how this worked in the site plan above, but the Stonelake tower doesn’t seem to keep this feature.

An aerial view of the Stonelake tower design replacing Tower 5C. Peep the similarities to the Austonian on the top left — Ziegler Cooper Architects designed both buildings. Images: Stonelake Capital Partners / Ziegler Cooper Architects

Ziegler Cooper is also responsible for the design of the nearby Austonian condo tower, and they’ve returned to a similar well for the Stonelake project — the tower has an “eyebrow” crown reminiscent of the Austonian along with other vaguely familiar exterior features, but it’s too chunky to capture that project’s elegance. To us the new building looks quite a lot like a hybrid of STG Design’s unused proposal for a tower at 308 Guadalupe Street (the site now hopefully hosting the Republic, someday), and the design from GDA Architects for a residential tower at 300 Colorado Street before plans changed and the development became an office building by a different architect.

A view of Tower 5C’s now-defunct plans for the corner of West Fifth and Colorado Streets, which included ground-floor retail. Image: Gensler Austin / Ryan Companies

A view of the same corner from Stonelake’s new tower plan — retail is not mentioned in current reports. Images: Stonelake Capital Partners / Ziegler Cooper Architects

The audacity of Tower 5C’s design makes it a hard act to follow for almost anyone, and with the market uncertainties of the pandemic we’re not surprised the folks that took the reins of this project decided to scale the office component down in favor of residential space — and, perhaps more crucially, scale the design down to something cheaper and safer. As advocates for economic growth and density downtown, we’re happy to set our superficial aesthetic disappointments aside and instead simply be glad a tower’s still planned here. We just wish we didn’t have to choose.