So, I finally got at least a couple of my building elevations laminated. The City of Austin has most of the building elevations/site plans posted online, but not all. They also weren't required to archive them before 1975. It also seems that they've only just started digitizing the plans and posting them online during the last 15 years or so.
As a way of collecting building heights, we've gone through the City of Austin pulling site plans from the internet to view the elevations, but for some reason, some projects that aren't even that old don't have their plans online.
So, a few years ago I contacted the planning department to do a records request so that I could see what they had. I sent them a list of everything I was looking for, and the guy gathered as much he could.
For most of the plans, I just snapped photos of them and jotted down the heights on a notepad.
But there were three in particular that I was most interested in since I hadn't been able to find them online. The Frost Bank Tower, One American Center and One Congress Plaza.
I also found out that I could purchase copies of them, which I didn't even realize until I got there.
I'm planning on maybe getting these framed also and putting a couple of them up on the wall, but they're pretty big. The one of the Frost Bank Tower here is 39 inches wide.
I haven't gotten the one for One Congress Plaza laminated yet. It's smaller than the other building elevations. I had to go to the Office Depot on West 5th because none of the locations had laminating machines big enough to accommodate the other elevations.
One Congress Plaza was another building we didn't have a good height for. We had always seen 391 feet listed for it. This is a copy of the original building elevations, and it shows it as 497 feet, but you have to subtract 100 feet from that number to get the actual height. So it's not quite 400 feet tall, but it's taller than we thought it was.
This shows the street level and plaza level. The sunken plaza drops 14 feet below the street level. So technically, counting from the plaza level, the building is 411 feet tall. It also "technically" has 31 floors when measured from the plaza level, although the floors aren't numbered that way.
Probably the one I was most excited about was the One American Center since it was always my favorite building in Austin as a kid and still is.
For a long long time the height we had always seen listed for the One American Center was 395 feet. I always assumed it was right, but after I was able to view the original building elevations for the building, I noticed that the "395 feet" people had been seeing was actually the sea level elevation of the top of the building, which is actually 895.50 feet. The sea level elevation of the southeast corner of the building at the street is 494.67 feet, meaning it's actually 400 feet 9 61⁄64 inches tall. It meant that Austin had already had a 400 foot tall building for about 30 years, and we didn't even realize it. The One American Center was the first building in Austin over 400 feet.
The elevations also showed what looked like either a lightning rod or maybe a mast structure for communications equipment that looks to be around 25 feet tall. I know there are several antennas up there, but I'm not sure if this structure is still there or not.
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