At Fatter & Evans Architects, Inc. we love keeping up with real estate development in Austin. Last month we attended BisNow's 4th Annual Austin State of the Market to learn more about the health and trajectory of the real estate market. As architects, we believe it's important to have an understanding of the trends and economic issues related to real estate so we can create better design for you.
Below is a fun infographic of what we learned at the BisNow event.
This morning I use the faucet many times to make coffee, brush my teeth or wash my hands. However, I never once thought about how that water made it to my personal sink. I'm pretty sure we use water from the tap everyday and never once think about how we have the privilege to access to it.
Today that ends! At our Manchaca site where we are developing an office studio complex, we are in the middle of all the site work that will give us access to this water. In the photo to the right, you can see the workers attaching the wet tapping saddle to the city's public waterline. When we officially tap into the city's waterline, there will be such an insignificant amount of water lost you could catch it in a coffee cup, even though water flow will not be interrupted. I do not presume to be able to explain the physics behind this but here is an infographic below that might help.
In the picture to the right is our fire line and water line that will be tied into the city's water. During the site plan approval process with the city, there was some back and forth with city officials on pipeline sizes and how best to save the trees (also shown in the picture). These have since been resolved but added time to the schedule. In the next couple of weeks, we'll also be adding a backflow preventer. This is important because our pipeline ends at the back of the site and we cannot have the city's potable water contaminated by any backflow. While we budgeted for these extraneous costs, a developer less experienced might run into some problems.
The moral of this story is the importance of doing your homework before you buy a piece of property to understand the city code on what is allowed on the site and having a team or architects or engineers to advocate for you.
You can always reach us at info@fatterevans.com if you have any questions about site development or feasibility studies.
We have some motorcycling enthusiasts at our firm who went to the Circuit of Americas track to check out MotoGP. If you haven't been yet, the complex is pretty amazing and worth the visit. Here are some moments from that weekend.
An artistic shot of the tower...
This is the picture right before he went into the turn depicted in the next photo.
The tower stands 251 feet in the air.
For emphasis, I've tried to show the fact that the rider is basically parallel to the ground in this turn. Pretty amazing.
The science and art behind MotoGP never ceases to amaze. The precision of shaving off tenths of a second off a lap time is incredible. We recommend going at least once to check it out. And if you opt for the adventure next year, then we highly recommend bringing a refillable water bottle, earplugs, and comfy shoes.
Also, it really got us excited about the X Games coming to COTA. It will be a blast!