This article originally appeared on City Biz.
30-story apartment tower known as “Icon” will house more than 500 students in one of the neighborhood’s tallest buildings
Hoar Construction announced today the topping out of Icon, a 30-story, Class-A apartment tower in the West Campus neighborhood near The University of Texas at Austin, signifying construction has reached its highest point. Hoar is serving as the general contractor on the construction of the building alongside developer MDL Development. Icon broke ground in March 2023 and is expected to be completed in the summer of 2025, in time for students to move in for the 2025-2026 school year.
Icon will house 555 beds across 216 apartments ranging from one- to five-bedroom units. The student living complex will feature state-of-the-art amenities, including a rooftop pool, fitness center, game and lounge rooms, a media room, and a number of student work spaces, all located on the top floors of the building. Additionally, there will be four levels of below-ground parking. At 300 feet, Icon is now one of the tallest buildings in the surrounding neighborhoods.
“Completing a student housing project of this scale and magnitude, in a tight, densely populated setting is no simple task,” said Austin Schniers, project manager at Hoar. “During the construction of Icon, we have stayed on track to complete on schedule, thanks to our reliable trade partners and supportive neighbors around the project, while also maintaining a high level of cleanliness, critical to this type of jobsite.” Project superintendent Stephen Phelps said, “We are immensely proud of our team and look forward to delivering the state-of-the-art facility next year that is set to enhance the student housing offerings in UT Austin’s West Campus.”
Hoar’s team continues to work on this active site in a dense urban environment, with an incredibly tight jobsite of 100 feet by 100 feet and only one access lane on the southside and another to the east. To accommodate this, Hoar is requiring just-in-time delivery for its trade partners, eliminating the need to store materials on the jobsite. To ensure the safety of the construction team and the 60,000 students who walk by the jobsite every day, Hoar is utilizing deck-to-deck scrimming on all floors that don’t have walls in place yet, which fully encapsulates the floor with a netting system from floor to ceiling. Hoar is also implementing Cupix, a building information modeling (BIM) system that uses a 360-degree, hard hat-mounted camera to capture the entire jobsite and allow the construction team to navigate through a 3D model of the site to aid in quality control.
This project represents the first partnership between Hoar and MDL Group, a New York-based developer, owner and operator of large-scale, purpose-built student housing properties. Additional project partners include Rhode Partners as the architect, DCI Engineers as the structural engineer, Blum Engineering as the MEP engineer and Wuest as the civil engineer.
Hoar Construction has established itself as a leading student housing builder, completing over $500 million in student housing projects over the past five years. Hoar’s Austin division continues to be an active player across the market with recent projects including Inspire on 22nd, an 18-story student housing tower also located on West Campus. The division has also completed projects such as The Loren, a luxury hotel and condo in downtown Austin and The Richardson, a luxury multifamily building in the Tarrytown community. The firm also served as the general contractor on Inspire Atlanta, a two-building student housing complex on the campus of Georgia Tech, and a Greek residence hall on the campus of Samford University.
