The Brooklyn Rail

It feels safe to say that Waterline, the City of Austin’s first supertall and the new tallest building in Texas, takes its name from its environs: Red River Street to the east, Waller Creek to the west, the Colorado River both west and south. It’s even located within the Rainey Street Historic District—don’t mind the extra “e.”

The 1,025 foot tall, Kohn Pedersen Fox–designed, privately funded behemoth contains multiple programs. From bottom to top, it’s a parking lot, a retail square, a hotel, an office building, and an apartment complex—all of which will open to the public in piecemeal fashion throughout the year. The building follows a previous attempt to manifest a similar mixed-use project in the same location—the biggest difference was that the previous project, Waller Center, would have entailed three towers instead of one.

The multiplicity and the backstory both help to explain why Waterline looks like a stack of three disjunct masses, mediated by dedicated amenities floors with prominent concrete columns. Or, three increasingly-svelte buildings in a glass-facade trenchcoat, complete with non-structural aluminum extrusions that privilege horizontality and create a matrix of “playful partitions” (KPF’s own words).

Building number one features a west-facing facade that follows the curve of Waller Creek; it houses the hotel, the retail space, and the parking lot. The middle building, which gently narrows as one ascends, holds the office units. The top building, a straightforward rectangular prism, is home to the luxury apartments. Taken altogether, Waterline’s geometric irregularity invokes Austin’s Downtown Density Bonus Program; under certain conditions, there is no limit to a skyscraper’s height within the Rainey Street Historic District, though there is a limit on its floor-to-area ratio.

Sleek and shiny, and tall enough to create its own private cloud cover, Waterline seeks to be “a building for our time.” I take this declaration as an invitation to question the assumptions being made about my hometown. What versions of past and present Austin would allow such an unequivocal claim?

To hear it told, Texas’s capital city had little to brag about economically beyond the state government and the university until the mid-twentieth century. By the 1980s, and thanks to an influx of novel industry, Austin was shedding its boondocks reputation, and nostalgic residents grew nervous that economic and demographic growth would dilute the city’s unique character.

In 2000, Austin received a catchphrase that captured both the love and the latent anxiety. A throwaway radio appeal from librarian Red Wassenich to “Keep Austin Weird” became an omnipurpose talisman against corporatism and squares. Such a contrarian municipal motto aligned neatly with the city’s general reputation as a blue oasis in a red desert.

Then, everything changed when the Tech Bros attacked. The city was inundated with shiny global headquarters. Vertical Mixed-Use was in. The vertical city was in. The Downtown Density Bonus was in. Rainey Street as it had been—Chicano, bungalowed—was out; old residents were replaced with new ones, and the bungalows were replaced with a bar called Bungalow. Across the city, duplexes and other “missing middle” typologies were all but eradicated. The haven for weirdos—aesthetic, political, or otherwise—had become “Silicon Hills.” Weird was dead, rest in pieces.

In this rendering of Austin, Waterline becomes the architectural representation of an economic and social trajectory that buffed out the city’s rough edges. Post-techification, it’s logical, reasonable even, to create 24,000 square feet of landscaped outdoor amenities so that the remote laborer can visit the great outdoors without ever leaving their cosmopolis in the sky. “A building for our time” is one whose Jenga-like contours memorialize an aesthetic and social strangeness that now only exists in memory, but whose raison d’être is to embrace the strangeness of optimization and affluence.

But timelines aren’t that neat. Our municipal tech boom is not a recent phenomenon; it began with companies like IBM and Dell in the back half of the twentieth century. And belying Austin’s reputation as a longstanding blue oasis only recently corrupted by the tech industry, the city’s Black population has been in steady decline for over a century—the long-tailed consequence of racial zoning in 1928 (i.e. a “Negro District” in East Austin). Zooming in, Rainey Street’s conversion from a strictly residential neighborhood to newly minted home to the Tower of Babel began with 2005 rezoning which predates the city’s more recent tech turn.

In this alternative reading, Waterline is not the conclusion of a journey, but a manifestation of consistency. Tech has been raising the skyline for upwards of fifty years. The political will to remake Rainey Street has similarly existed since the 1970s, at least. The set-apart, amenity-filled cosmopolis in the sky isn’t that exceptional in a city that was cleaved on classed lines by Interstate 35 long ago.

This city and this supertall are each one of many. The former insists upon its own uniqueness at the expense of acknowledging the ways in which it is quite normal, even occasionally predictable. The latter’s bombastic branding is just that—branding, carefully crafted to imply significance that isn’t self-evident. “Our time” is all time. And despite Waterline’s efforts to literally rise above the fray, there’s nothing truly new under the sun.