AUSTIN, Texas—The Austin Museum of Art has postponed plans to build a new $23 million museum downtown, reports the Longview News-Journal. Citing the poor economy, the museum and representatives of Houston development firm Hines Interests LP announced that the new museum and a 30-story office tower on the museum-owned block at West Fourth and Guadalupe streets was on hold.

Designs for both the museum, a three-story, 40,000-square-foot modernist structure of transparent glass, and the office tower, are by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. The new building would have doubled the space of the current building at 823 Congress Avenue, which the museum rents.

Construction for the project was scheduled to begin later this year and be completed in 2011. While representatives of both the museum and the development firm say the project is merely on hold, a spokesperson for Hines said it would not renew an option to purchase half of the land the museum has owned since the early 1980s. Since that sale would have probably covered half of the $23 million needed to build the museum, it creates a huge financial hurdle for the museum, which has attempted three times in the past thirty years to build a downtown site, without success.