Austin's current tallest building, Sixth and Guadalupe, has topped out at its final height of 865 feet. The mixed-use building at 400 West Sixth Street has been under construction downtown for a little over two years and hit its halfway mark when it topped out its lower commercial section about this time last year.

Developed and owned by the familiar team of Lincoln Property Company, Kairoi Residential, and DivcoWest — which recently broke ground on the nearby Republic building — Sixth and Guadalupe is, for the moment, the tallest tower in Austin. That title will eventually be usurped by Waterline, the 74-story high-rise planned for 98 Red River Street. At 1,022 feet high, Waterline will be Austin's first supertall skyscraper and the tallest building in Texas.

But back to Sixth and Guadalupe. Designed by Gensler, the 2.2 million-square-foot, 66-story tower stacks a 14-story parking podium, 19 floors of office space, and 32 floors of high-end residences on a full downtown block. The high-rise will also have 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space. JE Dunn Construction is the contractor.

In the coming months, the builders will install the remaining curtainwall system for façade, then focus on the interior buildout of residential units, amenity areas, lobbies, and streetscapes. Developers expect the building to be completed in summer 2023.  

"There are a lot of firsts with this project," said JE Dunn's Forrest Wilson. "It's the tallest for Austin, it's the tallest JE Dunn has ever built, and this entire team is really pioneering this level of design and construction." (It will also have the "largest elevated outdoor amenity space in Austin," according to materials provided by the construction company.)

While project partners and workers celebrating the topping-out of Sixth and Guadalupe, they also faced a potential setback. Facebook parent company Meta, slated to rent 589,000 square feet of the tower, plans to sublease that space instead, Manhattan-based real-estate site the Real Deal reported.

When Meta signed a lease for all of the available office space in Sixth and Guadalupe late last year, it was reported as the second-largest office lease in downtown Austin — topped only by Google's renting the 723,000-square-foot building under construction at 601 West Second Street.