In the landscape for a new taqueria, Ten Eyck Landscape Architects preserves a slice of Austin’s history.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER 

Austin, Texas, has been the country’s fastest-growing metropolitan area for 12 years running. The steady growth, driven by a booming tech and venture capital sector, has utterly changed the fabric of the city—and not without consequences. According to one news outlet’s analysis of city data, at least 800 historic structures have been demolished since 2000. “I’ve seen, one by one, these beloved places torn down,” says Christy Ten Eyck, FASLA, the founding principal of Austin’s Ten Eyck Landscape Architects. “It makes these little jewels that much more important and rewarding to work on.”

Cosmic Saltillo is an anomaly in the city’s contemporary real estate gold rush. Designed by Ten Eyck and the architecture firm Clayton Korte, the roughly 18,000-square-foot restaurant space is the second outpost of Cosmic Coffee, whose stylishly ramshackle South Austin location opened in 2019. The new space, accessible from Austin’s Red Line commuter rail and the Red Line Trail that follows it, revives a pair of graffiti-covered, historically significant metal buildings in East Austin. First used by Texaco as a storage depot and later by artists and musicians as a venue, the property is among the last vestiges of the former railyard that is now the Saltillo mixed-use development.

The shells of the existing Texaco buildings were painstakingly preserved, right down to the graffiti, along with three towering elm trees and a collection of crumbling brick walls, which Ten Eyck used to create intimate, vine-shrouded seating areas separate from the main courtyard. Anything that could be was salvaged, says Paul Oveisi, the cofounder of Cosmic Coffee, including the buildings’ concrete slabs, which were jackhammered out and repurposed as massive, asymmetrical pavers for the entry. “Christy fought tooth and nail to make sure that we preserved all that old concrete,” he says.

Each irregular piece of concrete had to be placed by hand, says Billy Spencer, the founder of Spencer Landscape Company, who personally oversaw the creation of the entry and a custom fountain built out of salvaged pipe and a gravel crusher. Spencer grew up in Marfa, Texas, and worked with Ten Eyck Landscape Architects on the landscape for Marfa’s El Cosmico hotel (unrelated to Cosmic Coffee). At Cosmic Saltillo, the emphasis on preserving the “funky, organic, creative part of Austin” set the tone for the entire project, he says. “It’s rare that you have somebody that believes in this idea,” he notes. “They could have saved money and built this in [a] way where it would have taken a fraction of the effort. But there was a lot of care taken to save this material and reuse it.”

The result is the rare addition to East Austin that feels as if it’s always been there, in part because the team has allowed the vegetation that previously enveloped the back half of the site to resume its conquest. “We cut everything down because we had to, and [Christy] told me, ‘Paul, don’t worry, they’re going to come back,” Oveisi says of the existing vines. “And they indeed came back. And I think that adds to the [feeling that] this stuff has been around forever. Some of it has.”