Arrive Hotel East Austin

• The Arrive Hotel comprises eighty-three rooms and a multi-use podium, housing two restaurants, three bars, a coffee shop, leasable street-side retail space and parking. The owners commissioned Baldridge to question established anti-public hotel tropes – the grand entry, the sad hotel restaurant, the always-empty lobby. They preferred to minimize the hotel identity instead. While it is a statement structure with a design that swings for the fences, the street-level restaurants claim the pedestrian identity.

• The undulating façade serves as a dynamic response to one of the more form-directive requirements of Austin’s street-side guidelines, which requires a 20-foot x 2-foot notch to simulate brownstone articulation – in the drafters’ heads this would enhance walkability and scale. Baldridge turned this on its head, achieving the articulation by scissoring the plates, which in turn created balconies and covered porches for hotel occupants.

• Grappling with context, history, and appropriateness, we looked to the building and material typologies of the surrounding warehouses as well as the masonry and concrete construction found at Huston Tillotson University (an historically Black university that overlooks the property).

• Our ambitions were giant… this is what a small firm in Austin can do – this is what Austin (at its best) does. We were striving to justify (on a small scale) this city’s outsized myth