A view of construction progress at 44 East Avenue. Image: Flintco
Construction outfit Flintco, currently putting up developer Intracorp’s 44 East Avenue condo tower in the Rainey Street District of downtown Austin, is giving us another episode of its documentary series “Beyond the Fence” — providing an unusually inside look at the kitchen-sink process of developing a 49-floor building.
Image: Flintco
Episode 2 of the series, “Harmony by Design,” spends its more than 15-minute runtime exploring the many connections between local firms, individuals, and designers to eventually create a residential building that responds to its surrounding downtown environment — particularly the social life of the adjacent Rainey Street entertainment district and the budding parks and trail connections surrounding its site. Catch the whole documentary in the video below:
Produced by Flintco marketing director Tim Garbutt and videographer John Whitton of SteadyBuilt Productions, each episode of the series includes an original song, also written and recorded by Garbutt. We are particularly enthralled by this auteur-esque addition to what might otherwise risk being a dry piece of promotional material — it’s honestly one of the more full-tilt strange and wonderfully human marketing decisions we’ve ever seen from a company associated with a project of this magnitude.
This episode’s original song is entitled “Every Road I Take,” and serves as a posthumous collaboration between Garbutt and his brother Billy Garbs, an Austin musician who wrote the song in the 1990s but died in 2001 without ever releasing it. Garbutt recorded the track for the documentary — again, this is an unusually personal choice for Flintco’s marketing director, and it’s endlessly fascinating to us as tower enthusiasts and fans of interesting, dare we say “weird,” Austinites. If you like looking beyond the fence around town as much as we do, this series is must-see TV.