Looking east from Lavaca Street at one of the Capitol Complex Phase II project’s new state office buildings. Image: TFC-CCP / HOK
You may have noticed there’s a couple of big holes in the ground over at the corner of 15th and Lavaca Streets in downtown Austin. They aren’t just digging those for fun, believe it or not! No, that’s the second phase of the Capitol Complex project, an effort by the Texas Facilities Commission to modernize the area directly north of the Capitol — a former downtown neighborhood that was unceremoniously demolished starting in the late 1950s and slowly replaced with an uninspiring collection of state offices, garages, and surface parking lots. On the bright side, we’re finally turning some of those parking lots into buildings thanks to this plan, even if the rest of downtown had to wait 60-odd years. There’s even some construction webcams to horse around with.
A view of the two new state office buildings under construction at West 15th and Lavaca Streets. Image: TFC-CCP / HOK
With this project, the Facilities Commission has inherited the unenviable task of threading the needle between the state’s clunky land use preferences and fetish for massive overparking with the more progressive New Urbanist principles of walkability and density typically embraced by the architecture firms they’ve hired to design the whole thing, and that’s exactly what makes the Capitol Complex a fascinating plan — on the one hand, you’ve got a big showcase pedestrian mall at the center of the action, and on the other hand the project will construct thousands upon thousands of new underground parking spaces. Still, it’s an incremental improvement from the surface lots and single-use garages sucking the life out of this part of downtown at the moment, so we’re counting the Capitol Complex as a refreshing step forward.
Image: TFC-CCP / HOK
Phase II of the plan, designed by the local office of architecture firm HOK, will build two new state office buildings, each with underground parking garage space, along West 15th Street. The project also completes the final block-sized chunk of the pedestrianized Texas Capitol Mall between 16th and 15th Streets. The renderings included in this article are the final design for the project now under construction, released by the Facilities Commission earlier this week.
Looking west at the new state office complex from the final block of the pedestrianized Texas Capitol Mall, which replaces the stretch of Congress Avenue north of the Capitol. Image: TFC-CCP / HOK
Another view of the new office complex and the pedestrian mall from West 15th Street. Image: TFC-CCP / HOK
A view of the Image: TFC-CCP / HOK
The Facilities Commission has also promoted a flyover video of the completed project produced by HOK — and let me tell you, they are extremely proud of this video, which apparently took hundreds of collective hours of work by more than a dozen designers. Please read this wonderfully sincere quote from the Facilities Commission’s blog, which sounds like a kid trying to convince you to put a drawing on the fridge:
The finished animation is so realistic that it is easy to believe you are actually watching a film. The animation even uses special effects technology used in the movie industry. Move over, Marvel; make way for the Capitol Complex Project!
And you know what? They’re not wrong. The video is really cool. But due to its privacy settings, we can’t embed it in this article, so you’ll have to click this link. Oh well. Anyway, this second phase of the Capitol Complex is expected to open in 2027.
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