We were pretty tickled to dig up the news last year that Dallas-based developers Trammell Crow Company and its subsidiary High Street Residential were planning a mixed-use redevelopment of South Austin’s largely vacant Twin Oaks Shopping Center at 2315 South Congress Avenue on behalf of the 10-acre center’s owners at H-E-B. Although the finer details of the plan remained a little fuzzy around the edges, it was yet another promising sign of an ongoing transformation among Austin’s laundry list of overparked strip mall shopping centers, a long-awaited cleansing process we like to call Brodie Oaksification after perhaps the best sprawl-busting plan of them all.

Here’s the Plan for Transforming South Austin’s Twin Oaks Shopping Center

A year later, the real estate market around here has cooled off a bit, and combined with ongoing land use changes and the potential decade-spanning construction timeline of Project Connect in our future, we think a lot of the people in charge of these large-scale redevelopments might hold off a few years just to see what happens. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy some slick visuals of the Twin Oaks redevelopment’s potential, with the first renderings of a possible future for the site now available in the portfolio of Minneapolis-based architecture studio ESG:

Image: ESG / TCC

Located at a high-profile intersection in Austin, Texas, the parcel has served as a strip commercial center since the 1950s. The redevelopment will transform the site into a series of courtyard buildings with a new network of streets and sidewalks that break up the scale of the site. The site perimeter will include significant public setbacks with gathering spaces and landscaping to complement the retail, residential and workplace uses proposed. A number of existing live oak trees will be relocated to new feature locations within the site.

— ESG

Image: ESG / TCC

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The project concept shown off here, which doesn’t seem hugely different from the plans we saw last year but seems to have a slightly different arrangement of buildings, would contain a total of 300,000 square feet of residential space, 550,000 square feet of office space, and 25,000 square feet of retail. To us, that seems light on retail and way too heavy on office space considering what’s going on around here lately, but would you look at those green roofs and solar panels? (Waving keys at you)

Image: ESG / TCC

The entry in ESG’s portfolio containing these renderings describes the project’s status as “in development,” and it doesn’t include any date for when this concept was put together, so keep in mind that we could be looking at a years-old plan here. 

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Image: ESG / TCC