All the Same!

Midtown West Commons

(Courtesy of Trammell Crow Co.)

The Triangle:













Allaustin.com
The Domain:














(from glidingresidential.com)

5350 Burnet:













(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)

Post South Lamar:










(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)
Post West Austin:










(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)

These are six recent mixed use development projects in Austin all built (or being built) within a range of five years. The Triangle was finished in 2007, and the Domain will be finished in 2011, I think. They are spread throughout the city, but they are all new, upper class, and they look the same. Not exactly the same but they have a common central element: Each building has boxy, rectangular prisms of alternating neutral shades. All of them, except the Triangle, project their windows in an angular fashion.

I have only vague guesses as to how this came about, whether by accident or by design. There may be a grander Urban Design strategy afoot, trying to establish, perhaps, an “Austin Architecture” but that seems unlikely. Or possibly, there is a general country or region wide trend towards such architecture. If there is, I will feel quite foolish, but I assume there is not. So I started looking at the developers, which offered some clues. Let's start with Ardent Residential.

Ardent Residential is an Austin based company, responsible for the Four Seasons condos, and three of the above projects: the Post West Austin, the Post South Lamar, and 5350 Burnet. For those three, but not the Four Seasons, Ardent Residential employed LRK. So it makes sense that these three buildings all look similar, but did they influence the rest? The two posts and 5350 Burnet were built, chronologically, in the middle of these projects. So let's look at the Triangle.

The Triangle was developed in 2008 by Cencor Urban, a company that developed three other pieces of property in the Austin area. But those projects, such as Mueller Regional Retail and another retail parcel out by Lakeline mall, are both purely retail, and do not look like the mixed use buildings.

Likewise, Trammell Crow, who built Midtown Commons, also built The Shore (at Red River south of Cesar Chavez) and is working on the Austin Water Treatment plant. Neither of these buildings look like multicolored boxes placed side by side, so I'm not sure if the design of Midwest Commons intentionally looked like the others.

I think I'm going to write a separate post about the Domain in the next few weeks, whereat I may revisit this topic if I have any new insights, but otherwise it seems that the multicolored box formulation only affects mixed use developments outside downtown.

The upshot of all of this is mostly just that it's interesting and I'm not sure how it happened. All the buildings, taken individually, look good. If they propagate further, I might get grumpy, but as of now the phenomenon is just interesting.