Texas Towers

Urban Residential Building in Popularity

By Sheila Bacon

Upscale living circles back to Texas’ center cities as the demand for luxury high rises shoots through the sky and New Urbanism roots itself as the state’s new trend.

San Antonio is making room in a tight site near the River Walk for visitors and future residents to enjoy a 33-story Grand Hyatt hotel/condo tower.

Charles Gromatzky, founding partner of Dallas-based Gromatzky Dupree and Associates, estimates that there are at least 20 high-end residential towers in Dallas alone, and the trend toward downtown living is becoming just as popular in  other major Texas cities. The firm is the design architect of the $60 million Cirque, a new 28-story luxury apartment tower in Dallas’ Victory Park development.

“At the moment, the most active type of development we are seeing is the mixed-use, urban, high-rise apartments and condominiums,” Gromatzky says. “People want to live close to where there is a quality of life, and quality of life does not mean an hour commute to the office and back home.”

Urban living appeals to young professionals and older people alike, he adds. Benefits include the ability to walk to nearby entertainment venues or having meals delivered to home from dozens of nearby restaurants.

“People are looking to live where they work,” says Bernardo Fort-Brescia, principal with Miami-base architecture firm Arquitectonica and designer of the new, $286 million San Antonio Grand Hyatt hotel and condominium tower. As with many combination hotel/residential buildings, the new Hyatt offers residents room service, cleaning service and other hotel amenities, as well as the opportunity to live just steps away from all a busy city’s downtown core has to offer.

San Antonio Grand Hyatt  The Grand Hyatt’s cramped location in downtown San Antonio has required project team members to plan ahead throughout its construction. The 33-story hotel/condominium tower is surrounded by the newly expanded Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, a historic performing arts center, a busy thoroughfare and the popular San Antonio River Walk.

Crews are utilizing a laydown site 5 mi from the jobsite for functions such as tying rebar and storing mechanical equipment because downtown space is at such a premium, says Josh Leen, project manager for the tower’s general contractor, Austin-based Faulkner USA.

The concrete tower features 1,000 hotel rooms on the first 19 floors with 147 condominium units on nine levels above. Five levels of ground-floor accessible space include retail space, restaurants and a ballroom. Five levels of parking are below-grade.

The tower’s size influenced its design, says Arquitectonica’s Fort-Brescia,

“We chose to split it and divide it into two thin buildings to give it a sense of verticality,” he adds. “It lends a certain slenderness to what is really a large structure.”

The building’s bulk is further reduced through its innovative use of materials. Its base is a combination of glass and limestone suspended over the porte-cochere. The hotel level’s exterior is a mix of mainly precast with glass, and as it transitions into the residential portion, the ratio of precast to glass slowly reverses.

The interaction between the building’s base and the San Antonio River Walk in which the structure is located is heavily emphasized, Fort-Brescia says. Its podium is a series of terraces that descend as they get closer to the river, with restaurants and bars overlooking the busy pedestrian path. At its lowest level, a portion of the river actually enters the building’s lobby.

Besides the tight site, the project team had to deal with a considerable amount of existing underground utilities, which were not shown on the drawings and discovered during foundation work.

“Sanitary, storm, gas electric – you name it, we found it,” Leen says. “Every time we thought we uncovered the last utility, we found another.”

Discovery of the undocumented utilities slowed construction slightly while crews adjusted their construction sequencing.

With a performing arts theater immediately next to the jobsite and an existing hotel across the street, keeping noise to a minimum has been an issue. Leen says the project team has been working closely with both the theater and the hotel to schedule noisy work around sensitive activities.

Work on the tower started in June 2005, and the hotel portion of the job will be complete and open to the public in February. Phased condominium completion will follow.

While FaulknerUSA is the general contractor for the entire hotel portion of the project, it is performing only shell work for the condominiums. San Antonio’s Tower Construction LP is the contractor for the condominium’s finish work.

Cirque at Victory Park  To maximize views of downtown Dallas, designers of the Cirque apartment tower in Dallas’ growing Victory Park development created a curved glass façade wrapped with a protruding layer of balconies, glass railings and precast concrete panels.

SA view of the 28-story Cirque apartment tower exterior located in Dallas’ downtown Victory Park development. (© John W. Davis, ASMP.)

The Cirque is directly across the street from the American Airlines Arena and the arena’s two new open-air plaza buildings. Cirque residents can watch Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars basketball and hockey games on the plaza’s “JumboTron” screens from their balconies, Gromatzky Dupree and Associates’ Gromatzky says.

PageSoutherlandPage of Dallas is the project’s architect of record and the design architect for the clubhouse and lobby interior spaces.

The tower sits on a six-story base that is clad in fossilized limestone and the garage above features a multi-colored glass panel façade that is back-lit at night. A high-end restaurant will be included in the 10,531 sq. ft. of retail space at street level.

Capping the base is the building’s amenity level, which includes a 25,000-sq-ft urban roof garden, swimming pool, aerobic area, sun deck, fire pit and numerous water features and seating areas.

The 310-ft-tall, 28-story Cirque offers 265 apartment units; each approximately 1,150 sq ft.

The extensive use of glass enhances views overlooking downtown Dallas. Its contemporary design compliments other new development in the area.

 “We wanted it to be striking and contemporary in form, but sympathetic to other buildings being designed out there,” Gromatzky says.

The construction site’s proximity to the busy arena requires crews to shut down activities two hours before entertainment events, says Bart Dansby, senior project manager with the Hanover Co., the project’s developer/builder. The project team’s schedule is further impacted by Dallas’ strict noise ordinance, which limits noise-producing building activity to the hours of 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Despite the limitations, the project remains on schedule.

Crews ran into difficulties while driving 100-ft-deep piers for the foundation, Dansby says. Many of the piers hit fissures in the rock formations, which served as natural conduits for underground water. Crews never knew which holes would require the use of pumps to drain the water.

“We hooted when we got a dry hole and cried when we got a wet one,” Dansby adds.

The curved shape of the glass and precast façade kept construction crews on their toes. The segmented glass and precast exterior was fabricated offsite and assembled at the jobsite. Victory Park is a master-planned urban development in the heart of Dallas. In addition to Cirque, the new neighborhood includes a number of residential, office, retail and dining venues. At full build-out, Victory Park will encompass 12 million sq. ft. and offer more than 4,000 residences.

A rendering shows the east elevation of Austin’s Block 22 residences near the new Austin City Hall in the city’s booming warehouse district

AMLI Block 22  In Austin, crews are preparing for a January completion of the $40 million AMLI Block 22 project, an 18-story, 231-unit apartment building kitty-corner to Austin’s new city hall building.

Its downtown location - on West Third Street between Guadalupe and San Antonio streets - puts the jobsite in one of downtown’s busiest and most crowded areas, says Jay Darwish, AMLI project manager. The construction site has little laydown room, which meant deliveries during the structural phase of the project had to be carefully scheduled and materials were put in place as they arrived.

Darwish says crews have had to work closely with the city to schedule necessary road closures for utility work, and entertainment events scheduled downtown throughout the summer weekends made the window of opportunity even smaller.

The unusual discovery of an underground vault once used to store beverages for a long-demolished warehouse delayed crews during site excavation, says Taylor Bowen, senior vice president of AMLI Residential Properties. The historic vault, which encompassed approximately 2,000 sq ft of space, was photographed and documented, then encased in concrete. The concrete case has a door so the vault can be accessed, Bowen adds.

The Block 22 project is being designed and built to follow Austin Energy’s Green Building Program, a commercial and residential building program that encourages sustainable building practices.

Block 22 is seeking a three-green-star rating, an environmental rating system for residential buildings, for its inclusion of programmable thermostats, concrete flooring, low-VOC paint and other sustainable efforts. The building also is tied in to the city’s chilled-water system to support its HVAC needs.

The project’s exterior is designed to be long-lasting, says Sylvan Schurwanz, project designer with Austin’s PageSoutherlandPage. The façade includes aluminum shingles and storefront glazing, stone elements at ground level and ipê battens on wall surfaces to provide character and shading, Schurwanz adds.

The project’s metal siding is a nod to the copper elements on the nearby convention center and two neighboring Computer Sciences Corp. buildings.

The building is oriented to take advantage of urban views, says Bob Burke, PageSoutherlandPage’s project manager, with the tower’s long sides facing to the north and south. The building’s orientation also minimizes heat gain and lessens energy costs.

The design of the project’s surrounding pedestrian areas follows Austin’s Great Streets master plan, which encourages multifunctional, pedestrian-friendly roadways. Along the south side of the building, Second Street is shifted slightly to the south for the inclusion of an expanded pedestrian area, Schurwanz says.

AMLI Block 22 is scheduled for initial occupancy beginning this month.

Useful Sources

Victory Park, Dallas: victorypark.com
San Antonio Downtown Development
Charrette: sanantonio.gov/pdf/ddc.pdf
City of Austin Downtown Redevelopment: ci.austin.tx.us/downtown/
World Green Building Council: worldgbc.org
Council on Tall Buildings and Urban
Habitat: ctbuh.org

Key Players
San Antonio Grand Hyatt

Owner : FaulknerUSA, Austin
Architect: Arquitectonica, Miami
General contractor: FaulknerUSA, Austin
Interior contractor (condominium portion): Tower Construction, San Antonio
Structural engineer: CBM Engineers, Houston
MEP engineer: Schmidt & Stacy, Dallas
Electrical contractor: Schmidt Electric, Austin
Mechanical contractor: Cobb Mechanical, Austin
Plumbing contractor: KS Persyn, Hondo, Texas

Cirque at Victory Park

Developer/builder: The Hanover Co., Houston
Design architect: Gromatzky Dupree and Associates, Dallas
Architect of record: PageSoutherlandPage, Houston
Structural engineer: SCA Consulting Engineers, Houston
MEP consultant: SEi Companies, Houston
Civil engineer: Carter & Burgess, Dallas
Design-build electrical contractor: Fox Electric, Arlington
Design-build air conditioning contractor: Atlas Air Conditioning Co., Houston
Design-build plumbing contractor: TDIndustries, Dallas
Design-build fire sprinkler contractor: Oasis Fire Protection, Houston

AMLI Block 22

Owner: AMLI Residential Properties, Austin
Architect: PageSoutherlandPage, Austin
General contractor: AMLI Residential Properties, Austin
Structural engineer: Jaster-Quintanilla, Austin
Mechanical engineer : PageSoutherlandPage, Austin
Electrical engineer: PageSoutherlandPage, Austin
Electrical contractor: Titus Electrical Contracting Inc., Austin
Mechanical/plumbing contractor: Wattinger Co., Austin