A rendering of one of the Marathon office building’s indoor-outdoor spaces at the front of the structure, with those nifty stairwells also visible. Image: OLA Architects
Marathon Boulevard might not ring your bell. It runs parallel to North Lamar Boulevard, just one block west — which is right on the edge but still inside the area I’m led to believe is okay to call Rosedale, near Medical Drive and the excellent Draught House Pub that’s been brewing beer since before it was cool in 1995. I should just show you on the map, shouldn’t I?
Looking vaguely eastward at the 4009 Marathon Boulevard site. Image: Google Maps
The .26-acre site at 4009 Marathon Boulevard seen on the map above, owned by a corporate entity associated with local real estate investor David Kahn, will soon be home to a five-story office building designed by OLA Architects.
Looking south at current progress on the 4009 Marathon site. Photo by James Rambin.
The project, which appears to simply go by Marathon, is in a fairly advanced stage of construction as we speak.
The front of the 4009 Marathon project, facing the street. Photo by James Rambin.
Kahn hasn’t responded to our requests for comment at this time, so we don’t know anything about the building’s future office tenants for now, but that doesn’t really matter — what we’re here for is the design, so this is how the building’s gonna look:
A straight-on view of the Marathon office project, looking east from this perspective. Image: OLA Architects
A street-level rendering of the Marathon office project, looking sort of northeast from this perspective. Image: OLA Architects
To call this design “warehouse-inspired” doesn’t do it justice. Lots of architects in town recognize the current popularity of industrial interior design cues, particularly in new office projects, but this building’s really committing to the bit by replicating the specific usage of reinforced concrete framing, masonry, and steel-framed casement windows present in the design of many American warehouses and factories built around the early 1900s by companies like Turner Construction.
On the left is a rendering of the 4009 Marathon office building. On the right is a historical photo of the Cheek-Neal Coffee factory in Houston, built in 1917. Images: OLA Architects / Houston Public Library
This 1929 collage of buildings designed by the Turner Construction Company shows plenty of structures that resemble the Marathon office project, but I think number 72 is a dead ringer. Click for a better view. Image: National Building Museum
Building a brand-new office intentionally designed to look like an older factory building, which to the casual observer might appear to have only been adapted after decades of industrial use, is certainly fascinating — not to mention more than a little postmodern. To me, it indicates that the common signifiers of historical context and gritty authenticity usually supplied by adaptive reuse projects of actual industrial properties can be successfully reverse-engineered, creating buildings that grant their surrounding an increased sense of place compared to more common, and arguably generic designs.
Elevations of the Marathon project showing details of its design. Image: OLA Architects
Other interior design fads for homes and offices come and go, but until Brooklyn loft conversions stop being so cool we’re going to keep seeing popular demand for industrial-style materials and fixtures. Why bother hunting down an old space to adapt when you can just buy caged pendant lamps and factory windows online?
On the left, a refurbished industrial light fixture intended for home use. On the right, a mirror designed to resemble the design of a steel-framed factory window. Images: Industrial Interior CPH / Bellacor
It’s obnoxious to care too much about authenticity in this case. Sure, we can get excited about historical context, but I think people just like this stuff because it looks cool, not because they’re necessarily familiar with early 20th century industrial vernacular architecture or whatever — either way, I’ll take this over another bland glass office or stucco mid-rise any day of the week. Plus, if Austin experiences another industrial revolution a few hundred years down the line, we can easily adapt the Marathon building into a factory.
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