Austin, Texas, USA

Located at the intersection of West Sixth Street and Blanco Street in Austin, Texas, the 578 Sixth & Blanco Project is Herzog & de Meuron’s first Texas project, that will be developed along with Page Southerland Page and Ten Eyck Landscape Architects and will enclose a full city block of mass-timber, mixed-use development filling the site with a continuous horizontal wooden structure.

Adjacent to downtown and the Colorado River, the project’s location – combined with the existing vernacular storefronts, notable restaurants, stores, galleries, generous tree-lined streets, and the walkable character of the surrounding Clarksville neighborhood – has made it one of Austin’s most desirable districts.

The challenge and potential of the project are to propose an architecture that takes key ingredients from its surrounding context and distributes them throughout a dense yet permeable program: generous greenery, passively-cooled indoor/outdoor spaces, an active neighborhood storefront and the use of a materials palette “aligned with the historic fabric.”

The whole development will be characterized by a series of setbacks from the street front.

It will decrease in density as it rises so that the surface areas of the stepped form can be utilized for rooftop areas as well as breezeways to complement the “passive cooling” the firm has planned.

All pedestrians will enter through the street, under a series of elevated walkways, into a void within the structure that will serve as a thoroughfare and courtyard for the various aspects of the development.

This courtyard is lined with thick wood columns that support overhangs shading glass storefronts. It narrows on one end creating a series of more enclosed spaces that resemble city streets.

An “urban carpet of shops and restaurants occupies the full ground floor, offices on the second floor, a hotel on the third floor, and residences on the fourth and fifth floors. From a pedestrian vantage point, the building is perceived as a series of two-story structures organized around planted courtyards,” explains the firm.

According to Herzog & de Meuron, “the project steps back from the street and decreases in density as it grows taller, allowing for a network of exterior circulation spaces with gardens, courtyards, and porches on all levels.”

“The 578 Sixth & Blanco project brings a human scale and a sense of domestic comfort to all – instead of a singular uniform gesture, the project is a complex sum of its many individual parts,” states Herzog & de Meuron.

Project: 578 Sixth & Blanco
Architects: Herzog & de Meuron
Architects of Record: Page Southerland Page, Inc.
Lead Architects: Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Christine Binswanger
Partner in Charge: Simon Demeuse
Design Team: Lukasz Szlachcic, Bruno de Almeida Martins, Marta Benedetti, Javier de Cárdenas Canomanuel, Massimo Corradi, Catarina Croft, Casper Dam, Giulio Delle Sedie, Sahng O Lee, Veronika Mayr, Benjamin Muller, Maximilian Musiol, Richard Nelson-Chow, Alessandro Racca, Enrico Ricci, Martina Rotilio, Roel Schiffers, Philip Schmerbeck, Hugh Taylor, and Pablo Toubes-Rieger
Structural Engineers: Fast + Epp
MEP Engineering: Bay & Associates, Inc.
Landscape Architect: Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, Inc.
Civil Engineering: WGI Austin
Sustainability Consulting: Atelier Ten USA LLC
Façade Consulting: Front, Inc. and CDC Consulting, Inc.
Geotechnical Consultants: Henley Johnston & Associates Inc.
Renderings: Herzog & de Meuron