Austin | Railyard | Two Towers | Proposed
 

Filed for AULCC. These are going to be big.

ATX East Tower = 500 Apts. + 300 Condos + 15K Sq. Ft. Retail

ATX West Tower = 884K Sq. Ft. office + 15K Sq. Ft. Retail

ftp://ftp.ci.austin.tx.us/ATD_AULCC/.../200213/PLANS/

Holy shit. It's real.

Can someone do some quick calculations to estimate the heights?

Let’s just assume those spec renderings were in the right ballpark. Hell, they might even be real renderings of the actual current design. So... ~950’ residential and ~750’ office.

ATX Tower East:

https://i.imgur.com/dwXZz77.png


ATX Tower West:

https://i.imgur.com/RHAkEgP.png
ftp://ftp.ci.austin.tx.us/ATD_AULCC/.../200213/PLANS/

From 112 units to 800 units plus office and retail. Massive increase in density here.

If you want something a bit more specific, a quarter block in Austin allows around 15k square feet for a floor plate. For the office tower, that equates to 59 floors. Assuming a relatively conservative 12’ slab to slab height with no amenity floors and architectural flourishes and not counting the lobby or retail, that’s 705’ already.

For the condo + apartment tower, I’ll assume an average of 1000 square feet for the apartments and 1500 square feet for the condos. That’s 15 apartment units per floor and 10 condos per floor for about 30 floors of each. Again not counting amenities, retail, lobbies, variations in floor plans, architectural aspects, etc, which could all greatly affect height that gives you at least another 700’ tower.

Thanks! That's what I was looking for. 12' for office floors is pretty conservative, isn't it? Am I mistaken, or have I seen it estimated at 14' before?

Either way, add in the amenities/lobby and a crown, and this thing will be huge.

X-posting from the Update thread:

Yea, that’s conservative.

Although now that you reposted the renderings, I don’t think those are current. Notice that the east tower is labeled as having office, but the official filings do not have office in that tower

I don't really care to do the math, but for comparison sake, these lots are 130 feet by 272 feet with 800 units in the residential tower. 360 Condominiums has 433 units, and the 360's tower's footprint is 100 feet by 272 feet. 360's roof is 472 feet 6 inches.

Someone noted this in the econ dev thread, but it's worth repeating here. Just the fact that something this size is moving forward might indicate there's a client or clients with strong interest in it. The alternative -- which is presenting it on spec -- seems really far fetched.

So wwimv's estimate of around 950' would sound about right.

Bingo :)

That was you!

Based on this model, the residential tower should be between roughly 875' & 1,075' (depending on amenity levels & crown height).

Once again the W gets no respect in a rendering. It looks to be about the same height as the AMLI next door.

https://i.imgur.com/Tr4qlG2.jpg

It's a conspiracy. Someone out there doesn't like the W...

Whoa. This is crazy so this actually real? I thought this was just a fluff marketing thing with years out.

I know haha :)

If the building actually ends up reaching these heights, it wouldn't just be the tallest all residential building west of the Mississippi River. It would likely be the tallest outside of NYC and Chicago.

I'm telling you... If these towers actually happen with this level of style and detail they will be the absolute centerpiece for the city. Everything else will just be orbiting them...not to mention all the money it will make.

These properties are each 1/2 block or roughly 35,000 square feet. You also forgot to account for about 20 levels of parking.

Each tower is 1/4 block, not 1/2. The property itself is 1/2 block as a whole, extending from the alleyway to one street.

FWIW, I used google earth to measure the dimensions of the current buildings to estimate what floor plate square footage would be for each of two replacement towers.

And yes — I did forget parking, but it seems like parking might be mostly underground here.

This makes me wonder if those OTHER projects that are still in the development would go back to the drawing board to keep up with this..

Are you sure? Tract 1 is between the alley and 4th Street - Brazos and San Jacinto. Tract 2 is between the alley and 4 Street - San Jacinto and Trinity. That equals two half blocks or one whole block. That is how I see the site plans as they exist now for the Railyard Condos.

I forgot about the other half block.

The "renderings" on page one show around 15 levels of above-ground parking for each tower.

I'm estimating 885 ft for the office tower and 805 ft or the residential tower.

In my opinion the east tower looks like super tall status, while the west tower looks around 750’ or so. I’m too lazy to do FAR and any math since we don’t even know floor heights(residential typically 10.5’, commercial 15.6’ parking 8.5’). Either way these will make Austin in competition with some of the top few cities in the country.

I love this but I'm still processing 6X and BBVA

Supposedly the city and folks behind this project have a solution that will be able to accommodate the CC expansion. Not sure what it entails, but I'm told there will be a public announcement in the next week or so.

That's good to hear. Might add height to the project.

The currently proposed CC expansion will have little to no affect on the height of these towers. I believe this site is outside of the expansion zone.

The preferred expansion footprint includes the eastern Railyard condo building. It would go from the new Marriott all the way north to 4th street.

I don't know if there's a contingency for less than that . . . the plans I've seen (now at least a year ago) relied on that specific footprint for the square footage they were targeting.

Hopefully whatever is announced with Karlin allows for the whole thing to go go forward. If so, then the Railyard situation is actually a solution to one of the goals of the whole expansion, which was to allow development on top of or in addition to the exhibit space itself. The city has always wanted to be responsive to folks who point to convention districts as normally dead spaces in the middle of cities. If the Railyard towers can be built along with the expansion, you've gone a long way to mitigating that problem.

I can see this project working with the CC expansion. But I'm wondering about the Block 16 office tower? That one is probably dead.

From what I can glean from conversations on my end, the Block 16 developers were always assumed to be just trying to drive up perceived value; Karlin, on the other hand, has been much more serious from the beginning, and treated as a real player.

I think you're right about Block 16, for what it's worth. They'll take the buyout money and pretty much not look back.

Sandy Gottesman is not a developer - at least when constructing 500+ foot-tall towers is considered. This was (is) a money play similar to that of Tom Stacey (5th & Congress) and Mac Pike (WPP).

You're not correct. This is Phase 1 of the proposed expansion:

https://i.ibb.co/N9GPdGT/Convention-...V5-Page-04.jpg

Was scenario 5.1 from UT's report officially chosen as the model by the city? There were several models which had a westwards expansion yet left the Railyard properties either alone or had them listed as a PPP development at the north-end of the expansion.

Scraperwill, are you still out there? :)

Awesome!!

I don’t live in Austin so I don’t know much about the details.

Is this project also called Block 32? I read in the convention center thread that if they expand the convention center that this may not happen because the CC is trying to buy this land from them?

This is my favorite project in Austin and I wanna see this baby happen. It’ll fill the biggest gap in the skyline right now.

This was originally being sold as two adjacent parcels. The CC expansion will cover one of them, and I think you're right, it's Block 32.

Here was a juicy quote from Tower's most recent post about the expansion:

https://austin.towers.net/city-plans...ter-expansion/

Anyhoo, no one knows yet, but there's a good chance they still get developed in some capacity.

It'll be a long while before the final plans for the ATX Towers, Block 16 and the CC expansion are worked out. This one isn't even on my back burner. It's still in the freezer.

Someone already made this comment in a thread somewhere, but there is definitely a similarity between our two two-tower projects that each have one potential supertall.


ATX East & West:

https://i1072.photobucket.com/albums...psuehbgegk.jpg


98 & 99 Red River:

https://i.imgur.com/N14NBwh.png

Build both pairs so that way we’ll be able to compare and contrast IRL.

Well now. That’s pretty interesting, ATX. Pretty interesting.

I mean, that's really the only way we can know, right?