[papertowelroll]

Originally Posted by urbancore

Not sure what I think about this.

The more I think about it though, I do believe these will be forever referred as our "twin towers". Not sure if I like that or not. Being across the street (couple hundred feet maybe?) from each other tells me, from a distance, they will look like 2 buildings of the same development.

They will be forever linked.

Regardless.....build it....asap. And I agree, the architecture is boring. Almost as boring as an urbancore post. But as I've said for years, we get value designs because we don't have money in this town that NYC, SF, Seattle, LA, etc, or the "slave labor" of the Middle Eastern cities. Not till condo median sale prices well exceed $1000/ft for basic downtown condos, will you see a "starchitect" design some outrageous design. Someone has to pay for it. No point in paying a big name, big bucks to design a boring blue box (starchitects probably won't do it anyway for reputation sake, I would guess) They tend to design buildings that need specialty materials, and builder expertise that is also hella expensive. We don't have that kind of demand yet....though I do think we can get there.

The other way I see us getting a SERIOUSLY cool tower, would be if Dell or some other homegrown company wanted a signature tower in their hometown. A Sears Tower if you will ("What you talkin bout Willis"...sorry...It will always be the ST to me)Those type companies have the money and I think could benefit from the urbanist movement of the last 20 years. Google's tower is amazing for Austin, but it's more clever than groundbreaking, and it's a bit too short....though the location makes up for that. It will always be front and center in most shots of Austin. 6X, BBVA and the others standing tall like the back row guys in the school photos with the hot chics down in front. And, I'm cool with that.

Unfortunately I don't think that homegrown company exists. Dell is a pretty frugal company, not to mention based in Round Rock, so they would definitely not build a signature downtown tower! The best possibility is/was Indeed, but they (intelligently, if I'm being honest) chose to go with a multi-site strategy, and as such their signature downtown building is "only" block 71. Google's building will be awesome, even if not super tall, and, if current growth trends continue, I could maybe see a Facebook or Amazon building their own version of that at some point. In the end I expect that residential buildings will remain our tallest for the foreseeable future.