Baldridge Architects, Austin, Texas

By Miriam Sitz

**Outdoor Learning Center**

An outdoor classroom, completed in 2012 for Casis Elementary School, exemplifies the type of small-scale, fast-paced, public design-build projects that the firm often pursues apart from its residential and commercial work. “It’s extremely fun to work with a program free of things like mechanical infrastructure and plumbing,” Baldridge says. “We were liberated from the codes that constrain design, and everybody got a taste of what the potential of architecture is.”

*Photo © Casey Dunn*

**The Pinwheel House**

The triangular multilevel residence with a sloping green roof has three wings, each meeting particular programmatic needs, that project from a central entertaining space. Public areas are connected around a conversation pit at the building’s core, while private spaces are seamlessly secluded. “The initial equilateral-triangle shape had to do with getting out of the critical root zone of the trees,” Baldridge explains. “How it pinwheels around a central node and cascades down is a function of the site.”

*Photo courtesy Baldridge Architects*

**Tracing the Line**

The firm completed the temporary installation Tracing the Line for the Waller Creek Conservancy last November, using LED lights to create a meandering path of luminaires. “Our goal was to make something stunning,” Baldridge says, “to provide a way for people to have a real physical experience of the entire length of the creek,” a once-forgotten waterway that is now being revitalized. “And to do that with a budget of $15,000 was just the world’s most perfect problem.”

*Photo courtesy Baldridge Architects*

**Burford Place House**

The simple, elevated gable of this south central Austin home covers the bedrooms and opens onto the roof deck and public spaces below, bringing an iconic, legible form to the structure.

*Photo courtesy Baldridge Architects*

Outdoor Learning Center Photo — **Outdoor Learning Center**

*Photo © Casey Dunn*

**Gardner**

The architects created a restrained, elegant restaurant in the shell of a 1960s, utilitarian post office building. Read more about Gardner.

*Photo courtesy Baldridge Architects*

**Hotel Rainey**

The 32-room, four-story hotel will be situated on an urban interstate site in Austin’s Rainey Historic District.

*Rendering courtesy Baldridge Architects*

Architects & Firms

Baldridge Architects

Although Burton Baldridge, 48, entered the profession later than some, he has made up for lost time since founding his eponymous firm less than 10 years ago. Following law school at the University of Texas in Austin, and a four-year stint as a commercial litigator in New York, Baldridge switched gears, graduating from Columbia University’s architecture program in 1999 and going to work for Peter Gluck. He moved to Austin in 2002 to serve as construction manager and on-site architect for Gluck’s ambitious Floating Box House, then stayed in the city after the project wrapped up, establishing his own shop in 2006.

A native Texan, Baldridge has spent roughly half his life in the capital city and witnessed its evolution over the years. He recoils at the idea that Austin has one singular identity. “We don’t embrace the faux narrative of an in-your-face, alt-country, hillbilly Frankenstein, Disney World version of Austin,” the architect says. Instead, the firm imbues designs with “an exuberant sense of sobriety”—treating each project’s site and program with a quiet reverence.

The 10-person office splits its time among residential, commercial, and institutional projects, with frequent forays into adaptive reuse. A focus on tailoring spaces to experiences and interactions drives Baldridge’s work. “We make sure there’s complete simpatico between what the client needs and what would improve the site to really take a project to the next level.”

Designs for ground-up commercial projects, like the forthcoming Hotel Rainey in Austin, consider the adjacent public spaces in order to integrate seamlessly with the existing and future environment. For the boutique hotel, the architect is working with the city to reimagine the service alley behind the building as a public street and to provide a secondary entrance. “It has unwittingly become a much larger and cooler project,” he says, “because now we’re talking about place-making.”

This attention to context is also apparent in the firm’s adaptive-reuse work. Baldridge Architects’ own office (a concrete-masonry building that was formerly a warehouse for a TV repair business) and the post office-cum-restaurant Gardner (architectural record, September 2015) retain details from the original structures but reinterpret them in new ways.

When the 2008 recession hit, small public jobs sustained the young firm—both creatively and practically. “We were faced with the problem of trying to carve out our identity and convey our ambitions in an environment where there wasn’t any money,” he says. “But you can do pro bono work no matter how bad the economy, since the mission of those projects is to lose money,” he jokes.

Lean days now past, the firm continues to pursue pro bono and public projects, including an open-air classroom for Casis Elementary School in 2012 and the temporary 2014 light installation Tracing the Line for the Waller Creek Conservancy. “We chase these small public projects,” Baldridge says. “They’re a chance to do more speculative work and are good exercises in getting the team to loosen up and see possibilities we could employ in larger projects.”

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Today, Baldridge says it’s a great time to be an architect in Austin. “I’ve found myself turning down projects that five years ago I’d have gnawed off my arm to take.” With out-of-town jobs in the pipeline, such as a desert-modern residence in the Texas Hill Country town of Fredericksburg, and plenty on its plate in Austin, the office finds itself pushed and pulled in new ways. “There’s a constant tension between our desire that everything be thoroughly detailed and considered, but also not letting that hold back the more ambitious thinking on the projects,” says the firm’s founder. “Overall, it’s the cohesiveness of the idea that always matters the most.”

Baldridge Architects

FOUNDED: 2006

DESIGN STAFF: 10

PRINCIPAL: Burton Baldridge

EDUCATION: Columbia GSAP, M.Arch., 1999; University of Texas School of Law, J.D., 1993; University of Texas, B.A. & B.B.A., 1990

WORK HISTORY: Peter Gluck and Partners Architects, 2001–05; a+i design corp., 2000–01; Deamer & Phillips, 1998–2000

KEY COMPLETED PROJECTS: Gardner Restaurant, 2014; Waller Creek, 2014; Baldridge Architects’ offices, 2013; Casis Elementary Outdoor Learning Center, 2012; Stubb’s Greenroom, 2011; Deep Eddy Residence, 2010; Avenue G Studio, 2009; Kimber Modern Hotel, 2009; Mohle House, 2006 (all in Austin, Texas)
Key Current PROJECTS: Branch House, Austin, 2016; High Road House, Travis County, 2016; Ledgecroft House, Fredericksburg, 2016; Hotel Rainey, Austin, 2017; Holy Cross Hall, St. Edward’s University, Austin, 2017; Arrive Hotel, Austin, 2017; Pinwheel House, Austin, 2018 (all in Texas)

www.baldridge-architects.com

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Miriam Sitz was a staff writer and editor for Architectural Record from 2015 to 2020, during which time she served as the web editor, then senior news & web editor.