The Urban Oasis of Austin

 

The future of the American neighborhood is here, and not everyone expected to see it in the heart of Texas. Seaholm, a power provider for much of Austin, Texas, has taken to preserving an old power plant by doing something not many people considered: making jobs and homes. The way it has been done is the most ingenious and also speculated as the future of urban building for the past few years.

The Seaholm project is meant to consume as little space as possible, while restoring an old landmark, and producing an entire neighborhood all in a single five-acre site. The place was imagined to be somewhere you can go to live, sleep, work, play, shop, and eat all in one spot, with residences occupying the upper part of the building and businesses, including a grocery store taking up the lower areas.

 

The specs for this place is expansive and provides an opportunity to handle the increasing urban crowding we see with all houses occupying a certain amount of space. Much like how apartment complexes were created to help with the increasing population, this sits in a similar world.

 

If you have a hard time imagining such a thing, think of a current hotel, with upwards of thirty floors, add balconies to the upper half, put a gym and some shops in the middle floors and then tons of stores like a shopping mall. In fact, a hotel on top of a shopping mall is probably the most accurate description of what Seaholm is meant to be.

 

The best part about all of this is the breeding of community once again. You have a lot of people who no longer really need to leave Seaholm for their everyday things. They do everything from sleeping to working there, which eventually means you get used to the neighbors and other people who are doing the same thing.

 

In a way, this Austin project is reviving more than just a building from the 1950’s; it’s reviving the idea of connecting with your immediate neighborhood and neighbors again. Much like living in a house on a block and knowing and interacting with all the people on the same block, you’ll have any number of families to connect with on the same floor or in all the shops and restaurants.

 

Could this be something that manages to bring people away from their computers? We won’t know until the construction for this beauty completes this year, but you can be sure with such a massive production, Seaholm took advantage of the door shields from 1-2-3 Door Shield. They couldn’t have everything get ruined!

 

If you’d like some more information about the Seaholm Power Plant, you can connect with their site and see some of the work they’ve put into it.

 

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