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Originally Posted by deerhoof
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Nice tower, but it appears quite a bit shorter than the rumored 36-story number we heard. I count 27 floors in the rendering. I'm betting the tower will be between 350 feet to 360 feet tall. If it's 30 floors as the article says, it'll probably be right at 400 feet. Cousins is developing it. They developed Frost Bank Tower. And Duda/Paine is designing it. They also designed Frost Bank Tower. Cousins doesn't mess around either, so I'm sure this will get built.
If it ends up being just 350 feet tall, it would be the 11th tallest in the city today. And with at least 14 planned buildings that will be taller than 350 feet, it would be around the 26th tallest in the city then.
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Originally Posted by Truck's Son
Don't hold your breath on a 50 story civil courthouse. It's just not necessary. Not even close. There are 10 or so civil district judges in Travis County. As an example, Houston has something like three times that many and has a 16 or 17 story civil courthouse. You could literally stack the Houston Civil Courthouse, Criminal Courthouse, and the 14th/1st Court of Appeals Courthouse all on top of each other and not get 50 stories. It's just not needed in Austin.
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The 50-story tower in the courthouse plan is not for the courthouse itself. The courthouse building itself will probably be around 18 floors. At least that's what we've been reading so far. The taller tower that was mentioned in the complex was planned as a private development, most likely for commercial office space with maybe some hotel or residential thrown in.
That said, I agree with you that Austin getting a 50+ story office tower is a ways off. Tim Hendricks with Cousins Properties was quoted in the recent article about Cousins' tower as saying that he believes the downtown market can handle about a million square feet in about 2 years time. So I think 500,000 and change is about all we'll see in a single office tower. Developers, and especially in this economy, are going to play it safe and not bite off more than they can chew. Until Austin starts seeing massive movement into downtown from major companies, I wouldn't expect a 1 million square feet/50-story office tower anytime soon either. By the way, the office occupancy rate for downtown is at 80 percent right now. That's pretty tight actually since it likely means there are few or no continuous chunks of office space in a building. Most companies want to consolidate their workers on as few floors as possible. It saves them rental space and reduces the possibility that they'll have to have space in another building, which saves them time (money) and also gas if they would have had to commute to another building.
I think eventually it'll happen of course, that Austin will see higher demand for office space downtown, creating the need for larger and taller office buildings. With all the residential development happening downtown, and the push for more hotels and supporting retail, downtown will be a more attractive location for companies.
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