For 33 years, the City of Austin's Art in Public Places program has worked with artists -- some local, others national -- to create eye-catching works of public art around the city. Along with permanent installations like the variety of art pieces planned or already in place at our new Central Library (check out those glowing-eyed owl statues at the bottom of the page), ...
placemaking
We’re Getting an East Side Pedestrian Bridge Near Longhorn Dam, Eventually
If you've hoofed or pedaled around the section of Hike-and-Bike Trail surrounding Lady Bird Lake east of Interstate 35, it's no shock to you that the area has some issues, namely the "bottleneck" of poor connectivity along Longhorn Dam at the eastern edge of the lake. As part of a larger assortment of improvements in the planning stages at the Holly Shores / ...
A Modest Proposal for Connecting Four Blocks in Downtown Austin
Remember when there weren't any major Austin condo or office towers west of Guadalupe Street in downtown? It's kind of quaint to look back on now -- I'm not old, but I'm old enough to remember the opposition to the 7Rio condo tower proposal at Seventh and Rio Grande Streets back around 2007, which eventually lost about half its height and became the SEVEN Apartments. Back ...
Congress Avenue’s Pocket Patio Transformation, Mapped
The annual PARK(ing) Day event creates public space in downtown Austin by converting, for a day, many of Congress Avenue's street parking spaces into temporary parklets. It's a fun time, but perhaps more importantly, the event serves as a reminder of how much space we've sacrificed to parking in the public realm of our most famous street -- space that, in many cases, can be ...
CodeNEXT Is Dead, Long Live CodeNEXT!
CodeNEXT, Austin's long-awaited rejiggering of the land development code, is dead. Mayor Steve Adler was the first politician to acknowledge the reality that "something has gone horribly wrong" and the project had been "poisoned" by "misinformation, hyperbole, fearmongering, and divisive rhetoric." The news cycle moved from breaking news to roundups and ...