Tall & Urban News

Supertall Building Proposed for Austin Site

Looking east towards the tower and its surroundings from Lady Bird Lake. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS.
Looking east towards the tower and its surroundings from Lady Bird Lake. Image: LPC / Kairoi / KPF / HKS.
06 November 2020 | Austin, United States

After 20 years of unrealized development plans for the approximately 3.3-acre (1.3-hectare) property at the southwest corner of Cesar Chavez and Red River Streets near the Rainey Street District of downtown Austin, the latest contender for a tower at the site could be the first in the city to qualify as a “supertall” skyscraper. 

Since 2019, WeWork and its Japanese parent company SoftBank Group Corp. were pursuing tower development in this area, having purchased 4.7 total acres (1.9 total hectares) on opposite sides of Red River Street back around the beginning of last year. The 3.3-acre western tract, with Waller Creek running down its west boundary, is where this tower’s headed—the other 1.4-acre (0.5-hectare) site east of Red River Street (and just north of the Quincy project) is currently a parking lot, and expected as the site of another tower project by WeWork sometime in the future.

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Plans for the western tract, also known by the address 98 Red River, were leaked on development website Houston Architecture Info, showing a 74-story tower containing a total of 2.7 million square feet (250,838 square meters). This development, like Austin’s current tallest tower project at 6 X Guadalupe, is a joint effort of firms Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential, with design from New York-based international architects Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates.

KPF has worked on projects such as New York City's massive Hudson Yards development, along with six of the world’s 11 tallest towers. Dallas-based studio HKS, Inc. will serve as the architects of record for the project, with local firms TBG Partners and Nudge Design respectively handling its landscape architecture and urban design.

Seth Johnston, a senior vice president for Lincoln’s Austin office,has confirmed that the details of the tower posted online are “relatively accurate” and generally reflect the developers’ current plans for the site—and although the project’s exact height isn’t entirely clear, Johnston also confirms that the building will indeed qualify as a “supertall” tower of 984 feet (300 meters) or taller.

According to the original post containing information about the building and generally confirmed by its developers, the project will be a mixed-use tower containing a 240-room hotel, 25 floors of office space, and 34 floors of residential space containing 363 total units. The first and second floor will include an office lobby, a hotel lobby, and retail space, with a 1,780-space parking structure occupying three levels below grade and 12 levels in an above-ground podium, likely above the ground-floor lobby.

It appears the parking podium, much wider than the tower above, will also contain the hotel section of the building. Atop the podium is an outdoor amenity deck space, possibly for workers in the office tower section above. The tower section also includes residential amenity spaces on levels 41, 42, 43, and 74—these are the deck-type areas providing outdoor access that can be viewed in the renderings. 

For more on this story, go to Austin Towers.