A view of the Alexan apartment tower from I-35, looking west. Photo courtesy of GDA Architects.
We’ve been following the ongoing saga of the apartment tower at 700 East 11th Street since long before we knew its identity as part of developer Trammell Crow Residential’s national Alexan brand of communities. Now, thanks to new filings with the city’s Design Commission, we’ve got a first look at renderings of the 30-story tower set to rise at the site of the Texas Trucking Association building at East 11th and Sabine Streets.
A full view of the Alexan apartment tower planned at 700 East 11th Street. Photo courtesy of GDA Architects.
It’s worth noting that, unless I’ve missed something, this tower will be the tallest in TCR’s Alexan portfolio at 30 stories, trailed only by a proposed 26-story tower in Los Angeles and a 22-story community under construction in Midtown Atlanta.
In fact, most Alexan-branded projects are mid-rise at best, with the Alexan building in Dallas sharing much of the proposed Austin development’s brick-like appearance but none of its height.
A street-level rendering of the Alexan apartment tower. Photo courtesy of GDA Architects.
It’s difficult to see in the renderings, but the tower’s northern elevation is built on a slight angle in order to avoid one of the city’s Capitol View Corridors. In the vertical rendering above showing the full tower, you can see the angle of the windows on the left side suggesting a bit of a wedge, though it’s more subtle than we might have expected from earlier plans.
Something we’re still a little unclear on is the building’s specific identity in the Alexan brand — the name “Alexan Capitol” showed up in the plans from a couple of months ago, but these newer filings use the slight mouthful “Alexan 11th & 35.” Which I guess is technically accurate enough, unless you really want to get more specific and call it “Alexan 11th & I-35 Frontage Road.” Let’s just stick with “Alexan” for now.
Let me plagiarize from myself for a second and recap what to expect from this tower’s design and unit mix:
The building’s podium includes three subterranean floors of garage, a lobby floor, three floors of parking above the lobby, then a fifth floor with roughly 21,000 square feet of office space. After that, it’s an average 16,500 square feet of residential units per floor as the tower component rises.
The plans describe 276 units in the building. The unit mix is as follows:
- 29 efficiencies
- 156 one-bedroom
- 75 two-bedroom
- 16 three-bedroom
Thanks to GDA Architects and these new city documents, we’ve also got a detailed rendering of the building’s extremely impressive 30th-story pool lounge:
A rendering of the rooftop pool lounge at the planned Alexan building at 700 East 11th Street. Photo courtesy of GDA Architects.
Color me excited about this project, and all the others in the area. I don’t care what anybody says in the comments, this section of downtown is insanely neglected considering its proximity to the Capitol — five blocks!
The project will go to a vote for approval in the Downtown Density Bonus Program at this Monday’s meeting of the Design Commission, and I don’t see any reason for the city to turn it down. If any drama ensues, I’ll make sure we’re the first to know.
Oh hey, one last thing. Someone at GDA Architects working on these renderings has a sense of humor:
Detail from a rendered view of the Alexan tower, looking west. Photo courtesy of GDA Architects.
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