Texas’ Tallest Tower Could Break Ground on Waller Creek in 2022

An aerial view of the Waller Creek tower site, showing its location in comparison with the surrounding district and Waller Creek itself. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS / WGI

If you’ve ventured outside much lately in downtown Austin, you might have noticed some new decor installed on the fences around the corner of East Cesar Chavez and Red River Streets at the de facto entrance to the Rainey Street District — banners featuring the logos of none other than Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential, the development partnership currently spinning its wheels to bring us the tallest building in Texas at this corner tract, the “supertall” mixed-use tower project known for the moment only as Waller Creek.

Looking east towards the Waller Creek tower from Lady Bird Lake. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS

Planned on a 3.25 acre assembly containing tracts addressed from 92 to 98 Red River Street, the tower designed by New York-based architects Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates will replace a defunct previous plan for a different tower complex at this site once proposed by developers the Sutton Company. Dallas firm HKS, Inc. will serve as the project’s architects of record, with local outfits TBG Partners and Nudge Design respectively handling landscape architecture and urban design.

One of the few leaked renderings of the Waller Creek tower we’ve managed to confirm as “generally accurate” with its developers — this one shows the tower’s ground-level landscape features on the banks of the creek. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS / WGI

We’ve followed the breadcrumbs of this emerging development with obvious interest since its appearance last November, and in the context of a general pandemic-related downtown development slowdown in the past year, the installation of brand assets around the future tower site feels less like an “Another One”-style flex and more like reassurance from this project’s twin developers that yes, they’re actually serious about building this thing in the near future — it might sound silly, but many developers don’t slap up the banners until the project’s already broken ground.

A ground-level floor plan of the Waller Creek tower shows some elements of its layout. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS / WGI

But banners aren’t the only thing convincing us this project is a go, with city development filings and other permit documents emerging at a regular clip. Recent site plans for the tower finally include genuine architectural elevations, which aren’t nearly as flashy as the renderings we’ve already seen, but provide a much more technical view of the project — not to mention finally appearing to nail down its height, which you’ll recall was tough to figure out precisely last year with a few different numbers floating around.

Western and southern-facing illustrations of the tower. Don’t let those tricky height numbers fool you — the final proposed tower is clocking in at 1,022 feet, though that could possibly change. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS / WGI

According to these latest plans, the tower now in formal review with the city rises 1,022 feet, making it the tallest building in the state by 20 feet.

Eastern and northern-facing illustrations of the tower. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS / WGI

The approximately 2.3 million-square-foot tower will contain a 240-unit hotel, nearly 700,000 square feet of office space, 332 residential units, and 43,000 square feet of general retail space. The building’s parking podium will contain an estimated 14 levels with approximately 1,979 spaces, according to recent documents. This all generally tracks with what we’ve seen in previous plans, but the site plan advancing through the approval process with the city should bring us more info (and more views) of this project over the next few months.

A previous illustration of the Waller Creek tower. It’s still fairly accurate to the tower’s shape and layout. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS / WGI

For what it’s worth, these latest documents indicate a possible start date of construction in April 2022 — and if that schedule holds, we’ve got more then a year to learn all we can about this tower as it inches closer to the real world.