KPF Completes Waterline, Texas's Tallest Skyscraper, in Austin

New York architecture studio KPF has completed Waterline, a 1,025-foot (312-metre) supertall skyscraper that is now the tallest building in Texas. The mixed-use tower rises above Lady Bird Lake in Austin and slopes away from the water as it climbs.

Its designers describe the form as a "cowboy boot". KPF president James Von Klemmperer told Dezeen: "The project grew into the design, if you will, the way it inclines down like a cowboy boot at the base."

How did KPF land the project?

KPF was not the original architect. The first developer was the coworking real estate company WeWork, which selected a competition-winning design by its collaborator, architecture studio BIG. After WeWork's failed IPO in 2019 and its governance scandals, KPF was brought back in to take up the mantle on the project, which had already begun early construction.

Von Klemmperer said the concept of a "we-building" — a mixed-use building with overlapping functions — remained part of the tower's DNA when the new development team awarded the project to KPF.

"Space isn't as proprietary," he said. "No, it weaves together with other things, and with the spaces that are shared at the rooftop of the base of the building."

What does the building contain?

The tower stacks hotel and office programmes at the bottom and luxury residences at the top. Double-height exterior floorplates supported by massive columns mark the programme changes from outside. The 1 Hotel occupies the middle of the building, with amenity spaces on top of the podium. Retail and parking fill the lower levels.

Deference to the waterway was a main goal, as were nods to regional heritage and a desire not to "strangle" the low-lying historic Rainey District southeast of the site. The project was originally supposed to be multiple towers, but the studio decided that consolidating the density into a single tower achieved these goals.

"It inflects towards Lady Bird Lake, and I think that was a powerful profile in everybody's estimation, because it says something about a vertical structure becoming a piece of landscape or geology," said Von Klemmperer.

He contrasted Waterline's wide-grid facade and columns with black-glass skyscrapers that block urban view corridors, referencing recent construction in New York. The facade features rust-coloured details referencing Texas geology and is, in his words, "lacy". "It's not often or always that a tall building is also seen as a kind of supple building that is good for the community," he said. "We hoped to make a beautiful little piece of waterway facade."

What happens at street level?

Working with landscape architecture studio TBG Partners, KPF stepped the base up from the creek, with massive columns meeting the ground. Von Klemmperer compared these to an amphitheatre adding "urban drama". "Cities should have places that support urban drama, and I think already this has shown it really works," he said.

A stone-lined paseo runs from the city to the water through the stepped podium, making the lower structure more porous. The columns were designed with oak trees in mind; V-shaped columns aid the structure as floorplates shift between programmes.

"From an office grid to the residential grid, those misalignments along the perimeter were actually beneficial for getting a better column placement in the residential above," said KPF design director Andrew Klare.

A sky lounge sits at the top, and the slightly angled bulkhead echoes the tower's slope — a nod, Von Klemmperer said, to the slogan Keep Austin Weird. "It's not an exceedingly weird gesture that interrupts the skyline, but it's a bit of whimsy," he said. "It destabilises the conventional grid of the world."

The programme solidified during the Covid-19 pandemic, a period of doubt about downtown cores. This intensified the studio's desire to "multiply" the uses of the podium. "It restores your faith in the urban agenda of development – to make such a mixed-use project with levels of shared use throughout," said Von Klemmperer.

KPF's other recent towers include a "beaux-arts" supertall nearing completion in New York and a pair of skyscrapers in Istanbul. Waterline's clients were Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential, with HKS Architects as architect of record and DPR Construction as general contractor.