It's an okay design. I wish the street-level portion was less foreboding, unwelcoming, alienating, monolithic, etc. It doesn't seem to fit with the whole "2nd Street District" culture. But that's typically what you get with office buildings; some generic, minimally-disruptive "upscale" restaurant non-entity and that's it. No real retail tenants to provide value to the city; those are too much of a hassle, I guess. And nothing any normal Austinite would patronize. In truth, this building doesn't really provide any value to the city at all other than the jobs it creates and the taxes collected from it. It's a vacuum. None of us regular people are going to grow to love and appreciate this building. I doubt any of us will ever even enter the premises. Contrast that with Block 1 which will have a multitude of uses and tenants. There are various different reasons we could foresee us ending up in that building. It will be lively and interesting; a worthy addition to downtown Austin.
But, to me, Block 23 is pretty indicative of the type of project that turns downtowns into ghost towns. Everybody's gone by 5 or 6 o'clock except for a small waitstaff and a small, economically-privileged restaurant clientele, which is gone by 10:30-11:00. Then, it's just a big hulking beast for people to walk by, be mildly creeped out by, and subtly resent for being a sterile husk of corporate culture rather than something valuable to the community.
Think about all of the office buildings in Austin and tell me which ones add to Austin's culture. Few do. Most follow the same basic archetype and do nothing but fill up space after sundown. They're what occupied downtown Austin in an era when most of downtown Austin itself was a ghost town. We gotta be careful about how many buildings like this we allow. It would be one thing if it were big, but it's really not.
Looking at this picture, I take some small solace knowing that Block 24 will be condos and very tall. Still, I wish these developers would think more outside the box when it comes to Austin (we expect to be treated differently than other cities) and give the people something they can patronize more often.