Here’s Our First Look at the Condo Tower Headed for 17th and Guadalupe

We have to crop it so you’ll keep reading the article. Image: Rhode Partners

Hey, remember that 27-story downtown Austin condo plan by New York developers Reger Holdings that kinda came out of nowhere over at 1615 Guadalupe Street?

It’s just one of the many interesting projects going up in the overlooked northwestern region of the central city we’re stubbornly making everyone call “North By,” and now we’ve got ourselves a rendering — literally, just one — from local architecture outfit Rhode Partners, giving us our first good look at the tower currently only known by the very descriptive title of “17th Street Condos.”

A view of the planned 17th Street Condos looking south towards the rest of downtown. Image: Rhode Partners

Respect to the architects for putting out such an inspired initial view of this tower. Seriously, the image is very artistic in its off-center composition (somebody remembered their rule of thirds), and shows the building’s context against both the other buildings in its immediate district and the denser skyline further south.

That being said, we’re still going to throw all those stylistic decisions out the window by cropping the image and getting a more zoomed-in look — which also gives us an opportunity to compare the tower seen here with the more technical architectural illustrations for the building we looked at last time:

On the left, a view of the 17th Street Condos on the building’s north side. On the right, an earlier architectural illustration of the tower from the same perspective. As you might imagine, they are clearly the same building. Image: Rhode Partners / Kimley-Horn / Reger Holdings

Looks great! But we can’t ignore the elephant in the room, something we noticed from earlier illustrations of the tower and now made even clearer by this new rendering — the building looks an awful lot like a smaller version of the 70 Rainey condo tower on the other end of downtown. Seriously, check out these two buildings side-by-side:

On the left, the prospective design for the 17th Street Condos. On the right, the completed 70 Rainey condo tower. Images: Rhode Partners / Kendal Heath

It’s not really surprising that these two buildings look alike. For one, they’re both condo properties, meaning their parking and amenity needs are likely somewhat comparable. Our city’s current code encourages some specific design choices, which ends up creating a lot of vaguely familiar towers.

On a more abstract note, different architectural trends of the moment also lead to similar-looking buildings when they’re planned at around the same time — those dark vertical lines on 70 Rainey, which provide texture to the tower’s glass facade, also pop up on the upcoming Fifth and Brazos project. The shared traits between these buildings isn’t overwhelming, it’s just interesting to compare the two.

A current view of the insurance office at West 17th and Guadalupe Streets that will be demolished to make way for the new condo project.

Anyway, further coverage of the 319-foot tower plan indicates it will contain about 117 condo units, and might break ground as soon as October — we hope the developer sticks to that, since we’re always excited to see growth in our beloved North By neighborhood. (We’re seriously going to make that name happen.)

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