Image: Texas Facilities Commission
Unless you happen to live in one of the lovely condo towers in the small northern pocket of downtown between 15th Street and MLK Jr. Boulevard, you might not be fully aware of what’s currently happening behind the fences of the Texas Capitol Complex Project, a multi-phase plan by the Texas Facilities Commission to transform the region of drab state office buildings and parking structures north of the Capitol into a more cohesive urban environment. Still, we’ve mentioned before that this project is being carried out with a surprising level of transparency for a state project, with the TFC website for the plan containing a virtual tour, live webcams, and frequent progress updates — considering the scale of the work, it’s a situation where you might actually get a better idea of what’s happening here online rather than wandering around the boundaries of its sprawling construction site in person.
A view of the parking garage excavation from summer 2020. Photo by James Rambin
At the heart of the plan — overseen by TFC and brought to life by a laundry list of design and construction firms including Page, HKS Architects, Kirksey Architecture, Balfour Beatty Construction, JE Dunn, Flintco, and many more — is the creation of a six-acre pedestrian mall spanning three blocks from 16th Street north to MLK Jr. Boulevard, which sits atop a 2,261-space subterranean parking garage.
The excavation and construction of this feature, reaching a depth of 60 feet and large enough to fit a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, has remained an impressive centerpiece of the project for years — but that’s no longer the case, with its general contractors at White Construction Company now topping the roof of the finished garage off with dirt in preparation for the planting of the green pedestrian mall:
Here’s a current view of the megagarage, now topped off. Photo by James Rambin
Despite our axe-grinding frustrations over local development patterns that prioritize parking over people to the detriment of the human-scaled urban environment, we’re actually fairly excited about the possibilities created by the Capitol Complex’s tremendous underground garage. For one, underground parking is always better than those damned podiums, but the scale of this garage also allows the state to consolidate parking space for its many employees at offices all over the complex.
My goodness, it’s huge! Image: TFC / Kirksey Architecture
. . . the primary land and building uses within the Capitol Complex are civic, office, and parking. The numerous surface parking lots and parking garages are prime development sites as new parking is constructed underground to replace them.
— Capitol Complex Master Plan, Texas Facilities Commission
If you’re familiar with the area, you’ll know that much of the reason it often feels so dead is its overwhelming number of surface parking lots and garage structures, which tend to empty out when nobody’s at the office — walking around here on a Sunday afternoon feels downright post-apocalyptic outside of hotspots like Scholz Garten, a deeply historic building which happens to be the oldest operating business in Texas and is literally surrounded on three sides by a state parking garage, a sledgehammer-subtle visual metaphor for misplaced urban priorities:
What’s really important about the project’s parking gigaplex is that it opens the possibility of the state redeveloping some of those scattered garages and surface lots into actual buildings. There are three phases planned for the complex, and if you dig into its master plan overview you’ll find that “State Parking Garage E” occupying a full block at the corner of 16th and Lavaca Streets is set to become half of a two-block office complex with street-facing retail during Phase 3, with the other building going up at 15th and Lavaca Streets — there’s a big surface parking lot there too.
Image: TFC
This comparison shows the Capitol Complex area before and after it’s fully built out according to the master plan — do you see the garages and parking lots getting replaced? Image: TFC / Illustration by James Rambin
The parking lot and small DPS office at the corner of West 15th and Colorado Streets — a site once home to Austin’s first apartment tower — is also on the chopping block according to the plan, set to be redeveloped with a building of some sort. Beyond the three anticipated phases of the complex, the master plan also lays out additional sites that could potentially contain future development, targeting even more parking for new construction including the two large garages to the immediate west of the new Waterloo Park — the Capitol Visitor’s Parking Garage appears to stick around even in this long-term plan. Honestly, this all sounds pretty good, but there is one caveat:
To the extent possible, garages with spare capacity will be used to accommodate new parking demand initially, and future parking structures will be developed as demand warrants. Parking structures will consist of both underground and above-grade structures that are sensitively integrated into new development in order to mitigate visual impacts . . . Additional parking facilities will be integrated into new building developments in order to provide close proximity for state employees and a continuity of urban fabric that is not interrupted by stand-alone parking structures.
— Capitol Complex Master Plan, Texas Facilities Commission
This means the monster underground garage might not serve the entire district when it’s fully built out, but even the idea of more underground garages or “sensitively integrated” above-ground parking would represent a massive improvement over what’s here now. The notion of this area actually becoming a place is almost too good to be true, and we’re still not sure how well our famously stodgy state government will pull off vibrant, “activated” urban space — but it’s kind of amazing that a concept like this, first imagined by presumably pretty optimistic planners back in the 1940s, actually made it out of the sketchbook at long last. The first phase of the Capitol Complex is currently on schedule to open in summer 2022.
Leave a Reply