Utah's new tallest skyscraper offers a feature no other SLC building has

The 41-story Astra Tower, with air quality lighting and hundreds of luxury apartments in heart of downtown, is “truly stunning.”

Utah has a new tallest skyscraper, and along with luxury apartment living downtown, the 41-story landmark on Salt Lake City’s skyline will offer a color-coded air quality beacon to the valley.

Family owners with the Boston-based Kensington Investment Co. and key partners snipped ceremonial ribbons in front of the Astra Tower on Tuesday, declaring its vertical residential units rising from 89 E. 200 South officially finished, open for rent and on display.

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The environmentally focused building with glass-clad facades and three amenity decks soars 450 feet upward, surpassing by 38 feet the city’s next tallest building, the 422-foot, 26-floor Wells Fargo Center a few blocks away.

Lights on Astra Tower will be programmed as air indicators akin to the nearby Walker Center, which has displayed and flashed different hues to generations of Salt Lake Valley residents depending on weather forecasts.

In a collaboration with Utah Clean Air, the new Astra Tower features crown lighting at its top tied to live air quality monitors. Lights are primed to shine white, orange, red or purple, depending on prevailing pollution levels. That same lighting feeds into Astra’s elevators and common areas.

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Kensington CEO Ed Lewis said his firm, general contractor Jacobsen Construction, HKS Architects, 87 subcontractors and hundreds of other partners had “literally and figuratively changed the landscape of Salt Lake City, not just for us but for many generations to follow us.”

Remarkable not least for its height, modern design, luxury features and amenities, and an immense street mural facing west along 200 South, Astra Tower brings to Utah’s capital 377 high-end one-, two- and three-bedroom dwellings and two floors of penthouse suites.

Emir Tursic, a lead HKS architect on the project, called the tower “a timeless landmark that will stand for more than a century” and said it was “a vertical urban community, one that’s been designed to enrich lives and foster meaningful connections.”

In the works for almost seven years, the project saw some of its heaviest construction years during the pandemic. A massive drilling rig working on the site fell over in 2022 and into southbound lanes of State Street, injuring one man. That was part of what Lewis described as the many challenges the project faced.

“We went to some dark and ugly places,” Lewis added, “and we overcame more than our fair share of adversity.”

The new luxury apartment tower with a pool on the 23rd floor and an outdoor entertainment terrace on its top levels comes to market as the city continues to see a dramatic upswing in its downtown population.

Gary Ellis, CEO and president of Salt Lake City-based Jacobsen Construction, said his company was especially proud of completing the tower’s first 20 floors before the rest of the building, “so that they could begin providing housing for this community and provide a return on investment sooner.”

The tower’s high quality “represented the skill of the labor force here in Utah,” Ellis said, “and we’re grateful to be a part of it.”

Astra Tower is being marketed with an emphasis on its sustainability and environmental stewardship, with top ratings on its construction and functional standards, along with indoor features that include a sophisticated filtration system that returns cleaner air to the skyline than it takes in.

The tower was designed using wind-tunnel modeling to reduce the drag of its profile and lower the costs of building materials, informing the staggered shapes of its upper floors. Builders say Astra is also engineered to advanced seismic standards.

Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson said the air quality monitoring was “yet another amazing element of this project” and called the new urban living available in Astra Tower “transformative” for its impact on a rapidly changing downtown.

“This is my home, and I love this city,” Wilson said, “To see the tallest building in the state happen in such an incredible way, it’s truly stunning.”

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