City of Austin to start building Jenga-like skyscraper next month

Austin is a city championed for being weird. In an effort to further the local development that’s permanently changing the city, Austin city planners have decided to throw something quirky into the mix: a Jenga-like tower known as “The Independent.”

Jenga is a game where players remove blocks one at a time from a tower consisting of 54 blocks. Each block removed is then balanced on top of the tower, which creates an increasingly taller but unstable structure. The game ends when the tower falls. The winner is the last person to successfully remove a block and stack it on top of the tower.

According to the existing government agreement, Constructive Ventures, Aspen Heights and CIM Group paid $14.5 million to the city of Austin for the site of the former Austin Energy Center. It’s located on West Third Street and West Avenue, close to the Seaholm and Green Water Treatment Plant redevelopments.⁽¹⁾

Constructive Ventures has a reputation for building residential condos in Austin. Aspen Heights is another Austin-based company, primarily involved in building student housing across the country. CIM Group, on the other hand, is based in Los Angeles, but has various properties in Austin.⁽¹⁾

New tower is stacked

The Independent will stack 58 stories high and hold 370 condos priced at $3 million per unit. Construction is scheduled to start next month. The project is estimated to cost $300 million and was announced last year as part of a plan to reshape the budding Seaholm District near Lady Bird lake. The local design firm is Rhode Partners. Balfour Beatty has been awarded as the general contractor.⁽²⁾

“This is going to become the beacon of the neighborhood,” Kevin Burns, CEO of Urbanspace, told sources.⁽³⁾

The Jenga-like skyscraper is by far the largest and most expensive project the city of Austin has undertaken. It is expected to bring in $2 billion in public and private investment to the district. Approximately 90 percent of the building’s units were sold the first week they were available. It will be the tallest building in Austin.

The tower will include a plaza, which will be connected to a foot bridge near 3rd street. The Independent may be connected to other towers someday. Since the county failed to pass a recent bond measure that would have purchased a prime lot close to the corner of Guadalupe and Third, it may soon be open to more commercial development.

What’s ironic is, although the mainstream media has touted the Independent as a real Jenga-like tower, one of the building’s architects says he’s never heard of the game. “I didn’t even know what Jenga was until I saw that in an article that came out,” said Brett Rhode, director of Rhode Partners.⁽³⁾

In accordance with the city’s motto, “Keep Austin weird,” Rhode said he and his team were simply trying to do something different. “We’re trying to get away from kind of a more generic building type that you might see a lot of, especially in Austin, and try to kind of shake, shake it up a little bit,” he said.⁽³⁾

Independent goes against the grain

A little known fact about Austin: Regulations centered around the history of the city and views of the capital have prevented menacing skyscrapers from flooding the area. Although there is no marked height limit, downtown’s floor to area ratio is marked at 8:1, or eight floors for a blocked sized building, which creates difficulties for developers that want to build high.⁽³⁾

These regulations have been called into question in recent years, as more people flock to Austin than the city can maintain. Sky-scraping residential condominium buildings would help harbor additional people in an increasingly dense environment.⁽³⁾

In the meantime, let’s just hope the folks at Rhode Partners and Balfour Beatty know what they are doing, and can assure the public this tower won’t come toppling down.

Sources include:

(1) BizJournals.com

(2) Curbed.com

(2) TheEpochTimes.com

(3) CapridgePartners.com^[PDF]