Coworking giant WeWork to join SXSW in new downtown building

WeWork, the global company that developed coworking space into a major component of modern business, will open a 65,000-square-foot space in Downtown’s new SXSW Center when that building is complete.

SXSW Center, which broke ground in November 2017, will be the new corporate headquarters for SXSW. Designed by Yvonne Szeto and Bruce White of New York’s Pei Cobb Freed and Partners with Gensler as lead architect, the 12-story building will feature 145,000 square feet of office space, a 12,000-square-foot “garden in the sky” on the roof, five floors of parking, a lobby and retail on the ground floor, and a street-level outdoor pavilion located in a grove of heritage oak trees. SXSW will occupy the top three floors.

In consultation with experts at the longtime local Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems and the project landscape designer, DWG, owner CZ Properties is targeting LEED Gold Certification for the building. The developer is Victor Young of Greenbelt Commercial.

Since the building is “designed for collaborative work environments that allow the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts ... [and] their platform enables us to fulfill our goal of bringing in entrepreneurs and startups,” said Roland Swenson, CEO of SXSW and Co-Founder of CZ Properties, WeWork is a good fit for the building.

WeWork provides space and services to more than 400,000 members. Founded in New York City in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, the company currently has more than 425 physical locations in 100 cities and 27 countries around the world.

SXSW Center celebrated its top-out in August and is expected to be finished by June of this year. WeWork’s facility in the building is expected to open in late 2019.