[austlar1]

It is just a butt ugly design. I doubt it will get built. The renderings are supposedly from the marketing realtor rather than the architecture firm involved. The design speaks to everything that is wrong with placing office park sized office buildings atop huge parking podiums in the heart of downtown. It is a trend that creates all kinds of problems with traffic and needs to be controlled through zoning changes. Unfortunately there is a belief that these buildings must have huge parking ratios in order to attract top tier tenants. I am not sure I believe that to be the case as Austin's downtown office market becomes more driven by non-traditional tenants. That area is already so congested with cars at rush hour. It seems like adding a zillion new parking spaces will just contribute to the traffic nightmare. At the very least they need to submerge half of that garage, but that would blow the budget. This is, after all, just a 200,000 square foot office building.