Water Street Tampa is the country’s first WELL Gold–certified community. It has also earned a LEED for Neighborhood Development Silver certification. Features intended to promote health, like a centrally located grocery store, strategically placed water-bottle-refilling stations, and outdoor programming for its 13 acres of public space, such as yoga classes and farmers’ markets, contribute to the development’s WELL status. Key to both ratings is the neighborhood’s walkability, as is the development’s centralized district cooling plant, which is 30 to 40 percent more efficient than individual building mechanical systems, according to SPP. But the plant provides other advantages, such as reductions in noise pollution. Many of the features that helped the development earn its LEED and WELL certifications also enhance resilience. For instance, the cooling plant is designed with redundant power systems to prevent storm-induced outages. Other critical building infrastructure is elevated to help it withstand flooding. The landscape also plays a water-management role: “Much of the public realm is designed to capture stormwater and return it to the ground in a measured way,” explains David Manfredi, CEO of Elkus Manfredi, which designed the master plan in collaboration with landscape architect Reed Hilderbrand.

The CookFox buildings have clearly embraced the district’s planning concepts: both have retail space at the base, deep overhangs to shield pedestrians and building occupants from the blazing central-Florida sun, and a profusion of greenery—not only on the ground plane, but on building ledges, canopies, and rooftops. Cook, whose own office in midtown Manhattan is known for its lush planted terrace, jokes, “we never saw a horizontal surface we didn’t want to put a garden on.”

Though the Water Street CookFox buildings share DNA, they each have their own unique expression. Thousand & One reads like a 20-story extruded rectangle with emphatically gridded facades. In certain spots, however, this prismatic volume, supported by a post-tensioned, poured-in-place concrete structure, has been carved out to create double-height sheltered outdoor spaces, which the architects refer to as “verandas.” There, office workers can informally meet, eat lunch, or simply take a break. The Cora, also with a structure of post-tensioned concrete, has a softer aesthetic. Its apartment terraces are projecting slabs, seemingly very thin, that wrap the building’s corners, their rounded edges creating an effect reminiscent of Miami Art Deco buildings of the 1930s.

Both Cora and Thousand & One have other refinements that put them well above the usual developer-led commercial or multifamily project. The grid of the office building facades, for instance, is made of sculpted precast elements that measure 30 inches from the face of the concrete to the glazing, creating deep shadows and visual interest. The components are further articulated with a subtle relief pattern inspired by the entangled root system of the mangrove—a native tree essential to the coastal ecosystem. At Cora, meanwhile, the corner insulated glazing units are curved, like its projecting balconies, allowing for uninterrupted views that include the downtown and surrounding waterways.

Water Street Tampa’s concept of smartly designed buildings set in an urban, people-centric neighborhood appears to be a formula for success. According to SPP’s Brad Cooke, senior vice president of development, the office space at Thousand & One is nearly fully committed and is “achieving the highest rents ever recorded in the Tampa Bay region.” And, he says, its residential buildings also “continue to perform at a robust pace.”

Local news outlets have reported that Vinik sold his share of Water Street Tampa to Cascade in late June. But the sale does not seem to have dampened the development’s momentum. Planning for the next phase of Water Street Tampa is under way, according to SPP, with 2027 as the target date for full build-out, when the neighborhood will encompass 9 million square feet of commercial, residential, hospitality, and cultural space.