- Year
- 2016
- Project
- The Backyard
- Type
- Commercial, Master Planning, Upcoming
- Area
- 32 Acres
- Location
- Bee Caves, Texas
- About
The Backyard is a multi-site masterplan, conceived as a creative campus where advanced technology, contemporary workplaces, entertainment, and live music coexist within a natural Hill Country setting. The project brings together work and culture in a landscape-driven environment, positioning architecture as both infrastructure and experience. From its earliest planning, the campus was envisioned as a model for a new kind of mixed-use development that balances intensity with openness and innovation with restraint.
The Backyard Offices extend this ethos into the workplace itself. Long, slender floor plates follow the contours of the land to maximize daylight, views, and connection to the surrounding landscape. A range of working environments is layered within an efficient structural framework, supporting both focus and collaboration. Even the parking structures are integrated into the architectural experience, with conditioned spaces woven into the garage and direct, shaded access to offices. Together, the buildings operate as a cohesive campus where landscape, infrastructure, and architecture reinforce one another.
Together, the full Backyard campus is composed of three distinct yet complementary projects, orbiting Bee Caves’ Central Park. The Backyard establishes the primary creative and technological hub, integrating offices, data centers, and energy infrastructure within a landscape-driven master plan. Terrace Offices at the Backyard extend this vision through a series of stepped office buildings that respond directly to topography, framing outdoor plazas and preserving views toward the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve. Ethan’s View completes the campus with a residential component that brings a quieter, more contemplative architecture to the site, orienting living spaces toward long Hill Country vistas and reinforcing the campus as a place where work, landscape, and dwelling coexist.
Sustainability is embedded at the scale of the site through a highly efficient Distributed Energy Center that dramatically reduces utility emissions. By capturing and reusing heat typically lost in conventional systems, the plant supports on-site power generation while also producing chilled water for cooling data centers. Rather than concealing this infrastructure, the design treats it as an educational and civic element. Energy systems are made visible and legible, transforming the data centers into architectural markers that communicate performance, technology, and environmental responsibility.
Work Performed by Bercy Chen Studio
