Eyesore, money pit, or romantic ruin, Intel's Ozymandias awaits its fate

Ozymandias I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817

Gripes and grackles love the Intel building, but the grackles know something the gripes ignore: Before it was an eyesore, a civic embarrassment, a symbol of Austin's high tech downturn and the costs of Smart Growth, or a sober allusion to other buildings' grimmer fates, it was a building -- what the Intel Corporation calls "AN-2."

What kind of building? Five stories of naked concrete, whose upper columns are tufted with rebar, AN-2 now looks like a cutaway illustration from some David Macaulay book on How Skyscrapers Are Built. Its raw bulk springs out in the sky, night or day. An architect would call AN-2's current appearance a "wireframe": a three-dimensional wire model of a structure that's been peeled apart to show its crucial innards. With the final four stories unbuilt and no exterior, AN-2 is so spindly it resembles a parking garage, a prepubescent one. AN-2, the flat-chested parking garage.

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