Photo courtesy Clark-Balfour Beatty, A Joint Venture

The $1.5-billion project earned LEED Gold certification.

NGA Campus East is the consolidated eastern headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a unit of the Dept. of Defense that provides geospatial intelligence, such as satellite imagery, for national security objectives.

The nearly $1.5-billion Fort Belvoir project, built by a joint venture of Clark Construction Group and Balfour Beatty Construction, includes a 2.2-million-sq-ft office building that accommodates 8,500 workers, a 105,000-sq-ft central utility plant, a 5,100-space parking garage and a 7,300-sq-ft visitor control center.

NGA is the largest federal project registered with the U.S. Green Building Council, and was designed and built to achieve LEED-Gold certification. The construction team reached substantial completion more than six months ahead of schedule.

Keith Couch, senior vice president with Clark, credits teamwork for the project's success and suggests a hands-off management approach kept it rolling.

“We segregated responsibilities into manageable pieces, matched assignments to the capabilities of the team member, then gave that team member the authority to execute without checking with the boss on every decision,” he says. “This structure and autonomy worked. People functioned in extraordinary ways at all levels.”

Owner: National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Springfield, Va.

Contractor: Clark-Balfour Beatty, A Joint Venture, Bethesda, Md.

Construction Manager: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bethesda, Md.

Architect/Engineer: RTKL/Kling Stubbins, Baltimore

Submitted by:

Clark-Balfour Beatty, A Joint Venture