Any chance the population, commuter and such discussion could have its own thread so this can be more focused on tall buildings? :)

Yes, what BevoLJ said. Need pictures of what's happening in Austin. :)

I'm ready to see some height on Bowie and some new pics of the lakefront with the Gables Tower finished.

I moved those posts to their own thread.

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=206535

That title is way generic, though. Anyone have a better idea for one? Maybe we can use it as our defacto population discussion thread for when estimates are released.

Lincoln Property plans downtown office tower
 

Lincoln Property plans downtown office tower

Jan BuchholzStaff Writer- Austin Business Journal

Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. is planning to build a nine-story office building on the southwest corner of West Fifth and Colorado streets in downtown Austin.

http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/bl...-downtown.html

Does that mean 6 above ground parking levels plus the 9 stories on top of the parking?

Only 9 stories for there!?!? What a waste.

That's what I'm thinking. Surely you wouldn't need 6 levels of parking for just a few floors of offices.

BoA building I'm in at 6th and Congress has 9 floors of parking at 16 floors of office...

Now the footpring looks smaller but I have to imagine with 6 floors of parking you'd have at least 9 floors of office... Will parking be above or below grade?

It has to mean 6 floors of parking with nine floors of office above. Ther's no way you could fit 179,000 square feet of office space on 3 floors with such a small footprint.

A fifteen floor office building with ground floor retail will be a huge improvement over the current surface parking lot.

They must have meant it'll be 9 floors of office over 6 floors of parking. They said the building would have 179,000 square feet of space. If that's not counting the parking garage that would mean the 3 office floors would have roughly 58,000 square feet each. I seriously doubt that would be the case. Most buildings typically have 20,000 to 25,000 square foot floor plates. That site is simply not large enough to have nearly 60,000 square foot floor plates.

173,000 square feet divided among 9 floors would be 19,222 square feet.

By the way, it was also Lincoln Property Co. that developed 100 Congress. They also teamed up with HKS, Inc. who designed it. They're both doing this tower as well. Hopefully it'll be something nice. HKS, Inc. does nice buildings. And this should obscure the fugly east wall of the Plaza Lofts a bit. This was the site of the planned and now canceled 1Hotel. That building would have been 215 feet tall with 17 floors. It would be nice to see something get built there since everything on that property had been demolished to make way for the unbuilt hotel.

And I would not be surprised to see a 15-story office building ending up being about the same height that the hotel was planned to be. I would imagine this will be around 200 feet tall.

Looks like they got heavy equipment at The Fairmont site. Can someone confirm this?

It was being used as a parking like normal with no heavy equipment as of Tuesday morning.

You can just make out that open lot above the roof of the Skyhouse from the OxBlue camera (http://oxblue.com/open/SkyHouseApartments) at Legacy, and it does not look full of parked cars as usual, but I don't see any equipment. Even zoomed in it's not clear enough.

ummmm so this happened...

http://xgames.espn.go.com/article/94...tin-texas-2014

Towards the end of the video in the link there's a sign with Austin's City Limits population that reads 650,something. LOL!

Downtown Westin
 

They enclosed the Westin site with construction barriers this morning. Hopefully they're getting ready to start the project.

My head is spinning at all the construction underway or imminent.

Thanks, I wasn't to sure.

I was looking at the webcam last night, and what I thought appeared to be construction equipment.

So here's one for the front page, BevoLJ. It's The Park. It has 9 floors.

So from the elevations the height is 106 feet to the mechanical roof and 96 feet to the main roof. The top floor (it has 9 floors) is 83 feet.

I'm sure they'll need a tower crane for this. And given the close proximity of the buildings on either side, it'll likely be around 190 feet tall. 811 Barton, the building to the west, (right in the rendering), is 143 feet tall. I'm sure they'll want to clear it by 50 feet or so to give the cable and hook clearance.

Although, they might not use a tower crane. I guess they might use a self erecting crane like the one they're using at Coldwater.

New plans have been filed with the city that show the building elevations for the Hotel ZaZa and Apartments.

Bottom of this link:

ftp://ftp.ci.austin.tx.us/ATD_AULCC/...ullPlanSet.pdf

The building elevations also do a good job of showing what the building will look like. They're planning to have 4 flagpoles on the mechanical roof facing Lavaca Street that will become the highest flying flags in Austin.

The first height we saw came from a conceptual plan that only showed the number of floors and not the design. That height was 295 feet to the mechanical roof.

This one is much more detailed and most recent.

The heights are:

329 feet 11 inches to the top of the 4 flagpoles.
305 feet 2 inches to the mechanical roof. (the official architectural height).
284 feet 11 inches to the main roof.
269 feet 7 inches to 24th floor (top floor).
269 feet 7 inches to 24th floor setback.
88 feet 10 3/8 inches to podium roof/hotel amenity deck.

Since this building will have a hotel and residential, there will be two pools. The hotel pool is on the 7th floor while the residence pool is on the 24th floor setback.

The south elevations also show that they are planning to incorporate the Gingerman/Ghost Room facade in the design. I think this will turn out to be a nice building. It looks like they're planning to pay attention to detail. If this building was completed today it would be the 25th tallest building in Austin.

http://i.imgur.com/OcCPWNx.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Wh7DQJ5.jpg

WOW Midland gets this?!?!?
http://www.energytower.co/

Sure is, I'm excited for them getting that beautiful iconic glass tower. I wish some developer would proposed a skyscraper like that for Austin. I can just imagine what the views will be like once it's completed. :cool:

Don't feel too bad. I noticed that the brochure called Midland "Oil Capital of America" I remember when I was a kid that Wichita Falls was "The Independent Oil Producing City of the WORLD." And look at it now!
Some time in the not too far future, Austin will unveil a plan for something that will blow our minds, and if Midland continues to outdo us, then I suppose we would all consider moving there.

But I wouldn't count on it. I think Austin has a lot more surprises in store for the future! And the views aren't that bad, at all.

There is also a difference between a single company building a tower and a speculative office building.

The only companies in Austin that are large enough to take on such an endeavor are tech firms, and they are nationally pretty fond of suburban office park campuses.

The Midland building site needs a little touch-up:
"(the) thriving community of Midland is just 20 miles NORTHWEST of Odessa." This is kind of amusing. I would have caught that error when I was six years old! Really!
And the developer is in Houston! I need to read some more, just to get a few laughs out of it.

Midland is northeast of Odessa, just fyi developers!

Have a sign up at the Westin (on 5th, across from Eddie V's).

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2815/9...d8b9a8b0_b.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7444/9...a536fdfd_b.jpg

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3822/9...c634ddc2_b.jpg

:previous: Very nice! Love what Austin is doing right now...:yes:

Well that's much much better than the Hyatt.

MUCH better

There is an ever growing impressive amount of big hotels around the convention center. The hotel capacity is finally catching up to the potential of our huge convention center. Austin should be seeing some major conventions in the future. I give props to former city leaders for having the foresight to expand the convention center beyond the needs and hotel capacity of the 1990s.

Actually our convention center is pretty small compared to others. It's 881,000 square feet. San Antonio's is 1.3 million and they're about to expand it further and add another hotel down the street.

The first number is exhibit space the second is total space.

Dallas Convention Center Dallas, Texas 1,000,000 sq ft (93,000 m2) 2,000,000 sq ft (190,000 m2)

George R. Brown Convention Center Houston, Texas 853,000 sq ft (79,200 m2) 1,800,000 sq ft (170,000 m2)

Reliant Center Houston, Texas 706,000 sq ft (65,600 m2) 1,400,000 sq ft (130,000 m2)

Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center San Antonio, Texas 440,000 sq ft (41,000 m2) 1,300,000 sq ft (120,000 m2)

Austin Convention Center Austin, Texas 246,092 sq ft (22,862.7 m2) 881,400 sq ft (81,880 m2)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...bition_centers

Wow! I'm pleasantly surprised by the rendering of the Westin. It looks way better than I was hoping for. Thanks for that update, priller.

Yes and this is why I think Austin made a big mistake in not buying the land on which the Fairmont is to be built. Now there is no way to expand the convention center. In a few decades, the city will have to build a new one outside of downtown.

You're kidding, right? The land where the Fairmont is to be built would have been chump change in sqft. The hotel is a much better use by every metric. If Austin wants to expand, they can build up pretty easily.

Speaking of building up, I wonder how feasible it would be to increase the size of the convention center by going up. Has any city ever done this? It seems most convention centers are built around the idea of having as much ground floor space as possible.

Don't forget the JW, Fairmont and Hilton have a combined 300k feet of exhibit space.......And all are close to the convention center.

I'm sure it would be possible to expand the footprint of the convention center to the west on the three blocks bounded by Cesar Chavez, Fourth, San Jacinto, and Trinity. That would almost double the size of the convention center.

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/479/7bq7.png

The city better do that quick then. That will already be some expensive realestate even when taken by eminent domain. I'm surprised those blocks haven't been developed into high rises already.

Here's a link to the largest convention centers in the U.S. Austin's is number 25, which isn't too bad. Chicago, Orlando and Las Vegas are the top three and have huge convention centers. Las Vegas in fact, has three convention centers larger than Austin's. But Austin benefits from having its convention center surrounded by maybe ~200 bars and restaurants within several blocks.

http://comicsbeat.com/which-us-conve...er-is-biggest/

The C.H. Johnson Consulting site says they created a masterplan that had the convention center with 450,000 sq ft of exhibition space in the future. I know that's old, but it hints that there may be plans to expand at some point.

http://www.chjc.com/austin.html

From that pic you can clearly see that the convention center was designed to go over to the 3 blocks across the street. Question is does the City of Austin already own those blocks?

Nope. I totaled up the appraised values of the properties, and excluding the Railyard Condos and the Christian Science properties (values weren't listed), it came to over $35.5m.

Moscone Center in San Francisco just approved a 500,000 s/f expansion underground at a cost of $500 Million to be designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, LLP, to be funded by an additional 1% hotel tax for 32 years. SF has only the 15th largest Convention Center in the country and is losing out on big Conventions. They are starting to schedule new Conventions for years in advance and also have a 25 year plan for further expansion.
I can easily see how Austin could use those 3 blocks across the street AND expand underground the street into the new 3 blocks for years to come. Sure, downtown Austin is being built up dramatically, but look at San Francisco! It can certainly be done in Austin.

Yeah, even if they were to close Red River to connect a new section of convention center on that block, they could only muster another 97,625 out of it with one level. And that's gross square feet. That block is 275 by 275 feet. Red River is 80 feet wide. So you would have an area of 275 by 355 feet to build on.

Does the convention center parking garage have exhibit space on the ground floor? Because if not, that seems like the most convenient expansion method. Even if they need to tear down and rebuild the garage, build it with 1 or 2 floors of exhibit space with the parking levels above it. Then maybe connect with a skybridge to the main building. It would be a lot cheaper than going underground.

Those city/convention parking garages west of San Jacinto were up before I moved to Austin in '93. Me think; the plan long ago...before the 1990's...was to use the 3 blocks in discussion for the convention center. Why else build the parking garages away from the convention center? Any long time Austinite have any info on why those garages were built west of San Jac [ok San Jacinto]?

AND why have no developers built on those three blocks across the street from the convention center? Me think again; others know something the public does not! Any thoughts?:D

Awwww...shucks! I was looking forward to more stucco on a hotel. [Hey Kevin...Where is the tounge-in-cheek emoticon?]

The building looks great!

The convention center was built in 1992. So yes, the white parking garage (for the convention center) was probably built around the same time. The reddish brown one next to it, though, is actually the garage for One Congress Plaza. So I'm wondering how that would go. It's one thing to tear down a city owned garage to expand the convention center, but the other garage is privately owned.

I was referring to the parking garage on land that the city commandeered via eminent domain (after the convention center was built):

http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/...ctory-at-last/

It's right next to the convention center.

Rendering of the new Sky Rio.

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2841/9...772294c4_b.jpg

This is located in the West Campus District, off MLK JR Blvd.