The Daily Dig
DPR Construction has finished building Waterline, the 74-story mixed-use tower in downtown Austin that now stands as the tallest building in Texas. The tower rises 1,025 feet and took 48 months to build, two months ahead of its planned 50-month schedule.
A tower this size finishing early is rare enough to notice.
Stacking the Deck
Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential co-developed the project. Waterline spans 2.7 million square feet on a footprint of more than three acres. The building stacks residential, hotel, office, retail and parking into one tower, described by one project partner as "a city within a city."
The design team includes KPF as design architect and HKS, Inc. as architect of record. Brockette Davis Drake, Inc. handled structural engineering, and Alvine & Associates, Inc. handled MEPF.
Keeping It In-House
DPR's self-perform team gets much of the credit for the early finish. Project Executive Brett Bickford said keeping critical scopes in-house gave the team tighter control over quality and schedule. That control is what turned an early finish from a goal into a result.
Taming the Concrete
The numbers on this project are hard to ignore. Crews placed 150,000 cubic yards of concrete, enough to fill 46 Olympic pools. They also built 92 sculptural columns, including 15 on the roof.
More than 150 trade partners and 6,800 skilled workers logged roughly 4.5 million worker hours. About 1,000 workers were on site at peak.
Street-Level Payoff
The tower connects at street level to Waterloo Greenway's 13-acre Confluence park, which opened in June 2026.
"Delivering a project of this size, scale, and technical complexity requires trust, collaboration, resilience, and relentless commitment," said Bryan Kent, DPR's Central Texas Business Unit Leader. "And to get it done ahead of schedule is almost unheard of."
Snapshot:
Project Name: Waterline
Location: 98 Red River Street, Austin, Texas
Developers: Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential
General Contractor: DPR Construction
Design Architect: KPF
Architect of Record: HKS, Inc.
Structural Engineer: Brockette Davis Drake, Inc. (BDD)
MEPF Engineer: Alvine & Associates, Inc.
Height: 1,025 feet
Floors: 74
Size: 2.7+ million square feet
Footprint: 3+ acres
Completion: July 2026
Schedule: 48 months, 2 months ahead of the planned 50-month schedule
Concrete Placed: 150,000+ cubic yards
Worker Hours: 4.5+ million
Total Workforce: Approximately 6,800 workers
Peak Onsite Workforce: Approximately 1,000 workers
Trade Partners: Approximately 150
Sculptural Columns: 92 (15 on the roof)
Residential Units: 352 units across the top 33 floors
Hotel: 252 rooms across 13 floors
Office Space: 703,000 square feet across 24 floors, Class AA
Dining & Retail: 24,000 square feet
Elevators: 30
TheJobWalk Thoughts
The real story here isn't the height record, it's the self-perform strategy behind the early finish. DPR says its own self-perform team was what made delivering ahead of schedule possible, by giving them tighter control over quality and schedule instead of relying entirely on subs. That's a meaningful signal for how self-perform GCs are approaching complex vertical builds right now.
A five-use tower like this, residential, hotel, office, retail, and parking, is also a good reminder of how many different delivery timelines get compressed into one schedule. Getting all five to substantial completion together, ahead of plan, says as much about sequencing discipline as it does about the self-perform work itself. That discipline is worth studying more than the height record ever will be.
Source: KPF
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