Residents, office workers and hotel guests in Austin now share a single 1,025-foot tower on the edge of Lady Bird Lake, after New York architecture studio KPF completed Waterline, the 74-story skyscraper that is the tallest building in Texas.
Dezeen reported the completion on October 28. The tower rises about 312 metres beside Lady Bird Lake, a wide section of the Colorado River that runs through downtown Austin.
Waterline is a joint development of Lincoln Property Co. and Kairoi Residential. It stacks a hotel and offices in its lower and middle floors, with luxury residences at the top.
The hotel part is the first 1 Hotel in Texas, according to the project’s designers quoted by Bisnow. A sky lounge crowns the building.
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A tower shaped like a cowboy boot
The most visible feature of Waterline is its lean. The building slopes up and away from the lake as it rises, instead of going straight up from the shoreline.
“The project grew into the design, if you will, the way it inclines down like a cowboy boot at the base,” KPF president James von Klemperer told Dezeen.
He said the slope tilts the mass toward the water and turns the tower into something closer to “a piece of landscape or geology” than a plain vertical block.
Deference to the lake was one of the main goals. The designers also wanted to avoid crowding the low-rise historic Rainey District, which lies to the southeast of the site.
It started as a WeWork project
KPF was not the first architect on the job. The original developer was coworking company WeWork, which picked a design by Danish studio BIG through a competition.
After WeWork’s failed public offering in 2019 and the governance scandals that followed, the project changed hands. KPF was brought in by the new development team after early construction had already begun.
The idea of a building with overlapping uses survived the switch. Von Klemperer said the “we-building” concept remained part of the tower’s DNA.
The plan was also meant to be several towers at first. KPF decided to pack the density into one tall building, which left more room at ground level for the creek and the lake.
Three buildings stacked into one
From the outside, the changes in use are easy to spot. Double-height floors held up by massive columns mark the points where the hotel ends, the offices begin and the homes start.
KPF added some V-shaped columns at those breaks. They give the facade its character and also help the structure carry loads as the floor plans shift from one grid to another.
“From an office grid to the residential grid, those misalignments along the perimeter were actually beneficial for getting a better column placement in the residential above,” said KPF design director Andrew Klare.
On top of the podium sit amenity spaces that serve the 1 Hotel, which takes over the middle part of the tower. The columns at the base and at each break were drawn with oak trees in mind.
Rust-coloured details and a nod to Keep Austin Weird
The facade uses a wide grid with rust-coloured details meant to reference Texas geology. Von Klemperer described it as “lacy”, with spots where the eye can see through to depth or pattern.
He contrasted it with black-glass towers with wide bodies that block views, a style he linked to recent skyscraper construction in New York.
At the top, the bulkhead is set at a slight angle that echoes the slope of the tower. Von Klemperer said both the facade shifts and the tilted top were subtle nods to the city’s slogan, Keep Austin Weird.
“It’s not an exceedingly weird gesture that interrupts the skyline, but it’s a bit of whimsy,” he said.
A creek pulled through the site
Waterline sits where Waller Creek meets Lady Bird Lake. The landscape team told Bisnow it treated the site as a gateway to the Waterloo Greenway, a park system that follows the creek.
Their idea was to pull the creek and the greenway through the site into the Rainey Street District, then carry that landscape up through the building as it changes from hotel to office to homes.
At the base, a stone-lined paseo runs from the city to the water. The lower floors, mostly retail and parking, are designed to be more open to people walking by.
Von Klemperer compared the stepped base and its large columns to an amphitheatre. “Cities should have places that support urban drama,” he said.
Thousands of people through one footprint
A tower mixing homes, offices and a hotel brings a lot of daily traffic to a single plot. Bisnow quoted the landscape architects saying it “draws thousands of people through a single footprint”.
That density is the reason the ground floor matters so much. The site also sits next to one of the city’s most used public spaces, the trail along Lady Bird Lake.
The project kept moving through the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when many developers doubted the future of downtown offices. KPF said that period strengthened its push for a building with many uses.
Austin’s skyline keeps climbing
Waterline is the peak of a building boom that has pushed Austin’s skyline higher in recent years. Bisnow described it as “the pinnacle of vertical density” in the city.
Across the lake, KPF is also involved in One Lady Bird Lake, an 18-story luxury project by Related Cos. on the South Central Waterfront.
Other cities in the Americas are racing upward as well, from Austin to the 400-metre tower that became the tallest building in Latin America.
What it means for the people inside
For residents at the top, the tower offers lake views from high above the downtown skyline. For hotel guests and office workers lower down, amenity spaces on the podium and a paseo to the water sit just outside the door.
“It’s not often or always that a tall building is also seen as a kind of supple building that is good for the community,” von Klemperer said.
KPF describes it as a tower that makes room for the creek, the lake and the street. Will Austin’s next supertall follow the same idea, or go back to plain glass?
