The pedestrian barricades along Lavaca & 2nd Street are gone, and the W Hotel is looking damn fine. I love this pic from Photolitherland @ SkyscraperPage.
Above, you can barely make out the strip of LED lights running the span of the building. When I took the photo they were changing color: green to blue to red, etc.
Lance, good points. I, too, find the facade takes on different looks from different places. I was coming down Lamar one day – cloudy like in the photo Jude shows – and the view stopped me for a moment. It looked stunning!
Thanks for giving me credit on my photo. The W is a damned fine building. I cant wait for it to fill up and add more foot traffic to that part of downtown. This is a pretty sweet blog, Ill have to check it out more often for sure.
Can’t wait to stay there on the eve of the Austin City Limits grand opening Feb 24th. Just bought the tickets today. Austin’s downtown is tsill coming along nicely even in a sluggish real estate market.
Yes, there’s a strip of LED lights running the width of the building along the threshold between the hotel and residences. I just updated the post with a [bad] photo.
-Jude
Are they planning on adding any lights or anything to the W once it’s finally 100% complete? Right now the W looks really nice if you’re looking at it up close (or from no further than a few blocks away), but is really unimpressive from a distance. I get a great view of it taking S 1st into downtown each day, and it just seems so bland. Hopefully they will do something to improve it’s look as part of the city’s skyline.