KPF Completes Waterline, Texas' Tallest Skyscraper, in Austin

KPF has completed Waterline, a 1,025-foot (312-metre) supertall in Austin that now stands as the tallest skyscraper in Texas. The New York studio designed the mixed-use tower to slope up and away from Lady Bird Lake, producing a form its designers compare to a "cowboy boot".

KPF was not the first architect on the job. The original developer, coworking company WeWork, selected a competition-winning design by BIG, a frequent collaborator. After WeWork's failed IPO in 2019 and the governance scandals that followed, a new development team brought KPF back into the project, which had already begun early construction.

What survived from the WeWork concept?

KPF president James Von Klemmperer told Dezeen that the idea of a "we-building" — a mixed-use structure with overlapping functions — remained part of the tower's DNA under the new ownership.

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

The programme stacks hotel and office uses at the bottom, with luxury residences above. Double-height exterior floorplates carried on massive columns mark the programme changes from outside.

Deference to the waterway — a wide section of the Colorado River — drove the massing, alongside nods to regional heritage and a stated desire not to "strangle" the low-lying historic Rainey District southeast of the site. The project was originally planned as multiple towers; the studio concluded that concentrating the density in a single tower served those goals better.

"The project grew into the design, if you will, the way it inclines down like a cowboy boot at the base," said Von Klemmperer. "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."

How does the facade address the city?

Von Klemmperer contrasted Waterline's wide-grid facade with black-glass skyscrapers that block urban view corridors, referencing recent construction in New York. The facade carries rust-coloured details that reference Texas geology, and he described it as "lacy" and full of moments "where your eye can see through or see some depth or see pattern".

"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."

Working with landscape architecture studio TBG Partners, KPF stepped the podium up from the creek, with massive columns meeting the ground plane to form what Von Klemmperer compared to an amphitheatre that adds "urban drama". A stone-lined paseo runs from the city to the water through the stepped podium, making the lower floors — mostly retail and parking — more porous. Amenity spaces on top of the podium serve the 1 Hotel, which occupies the middle of the programme.

The base columns take oak trees as their reference, and V-shaped columns aid the structure where 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 crowns the tower, and the bulkhead carries a slight angle echoing the slope. Von Klemmperer called the facade shifts and tilted top subtle nods to the city's slogan, Keep Austin Weird: "It's not an exceedingly weird gesture that interrupts the skyline, but it's a bit of whimsy, which is in character with the rest of the skyscraper's geometries. It destabilises the conventional grid of the world."

The mixed-use programme solidified during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the feasibility of downtown cores was in doubt. The period intensified the studio's push for an open building with shared uses. "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.

Project credits list Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential as clients, HKS Architects as architect of record, DPR Construction as general contractor, Brockett Davis Drake as structural engineer, and Michael Hsu, Studio Mai and Ink & Oro on interiors. KPF's recent supertall output includes a "beaux-arts" tower nearing completion in Manhattan and a pair of skyscrapers in Istanbul — a run that positions the firm at the centre of the current supertall boom.