The Employee Retirement System of Texas occupies one of the more creatively-designed buildings in the Texas Capitol Complex at 200 East 18th Street, but the agency seems to have outgrown its home, with plans for a major expansion underway. The main building, a five-story 1979 structure shaped like a Chinese wood puzzle, will remain as the agency's main office. However, ...
offices
Huh, These Towers All Kinda Look Exactly the Same, Don’t They?
Listen, we're not trying to cause any trouble here. But we also have eyes, so it's hard not to notice the subtext of today's Austin Business Journal first look at the design of the downtown office tower now known as The Republic, headed to 308 Guadalupe Street -- namely, that the building looks extremely similar to Block 71, the office tower planned ...
Looking Back at the Ads of Downtown Austin’s 1980s Tower Boom
Despite the current breakneck pace of development in Austin, the city's original tower boom took place in the 1980s, with at least 12 different buildings over 15 stories tall completed in downtown over the course of the decade. In fact, other than the Capitol and a few trailblazing outliers like the Austin National Bank tower, what many locals of a certain age consider the ...
Central Austin Development Roundup: It’s Tower Time, Y’all
Today, we're just going to casually chat about some towers downtown. That sounds nice, doesn't it? It's certainly a lot nicer than me trying to write an entire article about one of these projects, since the updates we're about to discuss are fairly small. Still, don't you like feeling informed? Of course you do. Hit it: Block 185 The mysterious Block 185 is back in the ...
Chasing the Ghosts of Towers Past at Downtown Austin’s 308 Guadalupe Site
It's a little odd to imagine just how different the skyline of downtown Austin would look if only a few things had happened differently. Projects change, or simply die on the vine -- they fail to secure their financing, they get significantly redesigned or "value engineered" to the point of being nearly unrecognizable from the original concept, maybe they even fall through for ...