Lights, Camera, Action
Do you remember the Gershwin tune, “Someone to Watch Over Me?” For the hundreds of professionals working on the four-city-block Capitol Complex Project, someone is watching over them—and we hope it’s you!
High up above the 1601 Congress, 1801 Congress and Texas Mall construction areas, 4K high resolution cameras snap photographs of the project progress every 30 minutes, 24-hours a day. Since the beginning of construction, the cameras have been busy collecting the history of the project. All the photos are available for pubic viewing through clicking the project pictures on the homepage of www.texascapitolcomplex.org, the project website. In addition, if you would like to watch time lapse videos of the construction, just click the “house” icon in the upper left corner of your screen.
Look for the “house” icon in the upper left hand corner of your screen to watch time lapse videos of each project.
Viewing the project progress online is a great way to get a bird’s eye view of the construction, and if you are interested in seeing a large-scale concrete pour, you don’t have to be on site at 2 a.m. like our hardworking construction crews do. The construction crane on the 1801 Congress site has lights, which shine down on the construction site allowing the camera to capture all the nighttime action. 1801 Congress is the future home of the 603,000 square foot, 14-story George H.W. Bush State Office Building. The building has five levels of underground parking and the current concrete pours will be at ground level in the next week. Concrete pours will be ongoing for the next several months as the building takes shape.
The camera for 1601 Congress provides a northwest perspective of the construction of this 416,000 square foot, 12-story state office building rising from the ground. Day time views of the site show construction underway on the underground parking. Later this summer, you will be able to see the exterior façade of the building take shape.
The camera for the Texas Mall looks northward toward the Bullock Texas State History Museum and Blanton Museum of Art and provides a full view of the construction from MLK Blvd. to 16th street for the first phase of the project. Through the lens of the camera, you will see the new northern entrance to the Texas State Capitol emerge between the two buildings. Current views show the massive excavation and construction of the underground parking walls.
“These cameras will allow us to look into the past and watch as the landscape of the capitol grew and changed to match the exponential growth of Austin. They show us years of hard work and teamwork, and will one day be a photographic memory of what the Capitol Complex once looked like,” says Chelsea Maldonado, Senior Project Engineer, for Balfour Beatty, the Construction Manager Agent overseeing Phase 1 of the construction effort.
Please come along with us for this once in a lifetime journey and watch history in the making. You will have a great tale to tell and be able to say that you saw it all.
