An aerial view of the Twin Oaks shopping center. Image: Landers Brannon / Vimeo
We were pretty tickled to dig up the news last year that Dallas-based developers Trammell Crow Company and its subsidiary High Street Residential were planning a mixed-use redevelopment of South Austin’s largely vacant Twin Oaks Shopping Center at 2315 South Congress Avenue on behalf of the 10-acre center’s owners at H-E-B. Although the finer details of the plan remained a little fuzzy around the edges, it was yet another promising sign of an ongoing transformation among Austin’s laundry list of overparked strip mall shopping centers, a long-awaited cleansing process we like to call Brodie Oaksification after perhaps the best sprawl-busting plan of them all.
Here’s the Plan for Transforming South Austin’s Twin Oaks Shopping Center
A year later, the real estate market around here has cooled off a bit, and combined with ongoing land use changes and the potential decade-spanning construction timeline of Project Connect in our future, we think a lot of the people in charge of these large-scale redevelopments might hold off a few years just to see what happens. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy some slick visuals of the Twin Oaks redevelopment’s potential, with the first renderings of a possible future for the site now available in the portfolio of Minneapolis-based architecture studio ESG:
Image: ESG / TCC
Located at a high-profile intersection in Austin, Texas, the parcel has served as a strip commercial center since the 1950s. The redevelopment will transform the site into a series of courtyard buildings with a new network of streets and sidewalks that break up the scale of the site. The site perimeter will include significant public setbacks with gathering spaces and landscaping to complement the retail, residential and workplace uses proposed. A number of existing live oak trees will be relocated to new feature locations within the site.
— ESG
Image: ESG / TCC
The project concept shown off here, which doesn’t seem hugely different from the plans we saw last year but seems to have a slightly different arrangement of buildings, would contain a total of 300,000 square feet of residential space, 550,000 square feet of office space, and 25,000 square feet of retail. To us, that seems light on retail and way too heavy on office space considering what’s going on around here lately, but would you look at those green roofs and solar panels? (Waving keys at you)
Image: ESG / TCC
The entry in ESG’s portfolio containing these renderings describes the project’s status as “in development,” and it doesn’t include any date for when this concept was put together, so keep in mind that we could be looking at a years-old plan here.
Image: ESG / TCC
In fact, something about the project depicted in these images feels rooted in a more optimistic development environment from a year or more ago, particularly in its depiction of vast, beautifully curved office spaces. You hear quite a bit lately about the cultural markers of “Zero Interest Rate Policy,” and although the Twin Oaks concept isn’t quite as over the top with high-end finishes and tasteful, expensive curves as something like (RIP) The Perennial, the notion of building a half-million square feet of new office space in 2024 suddenly sounds like an impossible fantasy. Perhaps we could cut the office space in half and double the housing? Either way, we’d be happy to see it built in place of the ocean of empty parking that’s there now — it’s just unclear how long we’ll have to wait to see anything break ground here.
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