At a Glance

Sector:  Federal / Defense

Location:  Alexandria, VA | Washington, DC | Fort Meade, MD

Delivery:  Design-Build

Scale:  Combined 3.8M+ SF (Across 3 Facilities)

Result:  Successfully Delivered 3 of the 10 Largest Office Buildings in the Mid-Atlantic Region

The Situation

Over the course of a decade, Donald Gibson led the design and planning effort on three large-scale federal buildings — each for a different agency, each carrying a different set of institutional and security constraints, and each among the largest and most complex buildings delivered in the Mid-Atlantic region. 

All three were design-build projects for the federal government, and all three shared a common challenge: an extraordinary number of stakeholders, highly sensitive programmatic requirements, and no existing playbook for how to coordinate a building of that scale and complexity from concept through construction.

The Projects

1 - Washington Headquarters Services — BRAC 133 | Mark Center, Alexandria, VA

Completed in 2011, this 1.75 million square foot complex is the second largest building in the state of Virginia after the Pentagon. Built as part of the Base Realignment and Closure initiative, it consists of two towers housing over 6,000 Department of Defense employees. The facility is heavily fortified and secured, designed to accommodate personnel and operations that no longer fit within the Pentagon itself. The design and planning process required coordination with seventeen separate Pentagon agencies, each with its own requirements, security protocols, and organizational culture.

2 - US Coast Guard Headquarters — Douglas A. Munro Building | St. Elizabeths West Campus, Washington, DC 

Completed in 2013, this 1.2 million square foot facility covers nearly twelve acres and features one of the largest green roofs in the United States. It was the first phase of the Department of Homeland Security consolidation at St. Elizabeths, and its planning had to navigate the complexities of an agency that was still forming as an organization. The architectural ambition of the project is significant — elaborate courtyards, landscaping, and design detail that make it one of the more striking federal buildings in the country — though much of that work sits behind a secure perimeter the public cannot access.

3 - East Campus Building 2 | Fort Meade, MD 

Due to the classified nature of this project, details that can be publicly shared are limited. This approximately 860,000 square foot building, completed around 2020–2021, serves as a significant component of the National Security Agency's expanded campus at Fort Meade and has become a hub for agency leadership.

Managing Stakeholder Complexity

On projects of this scale, the stakeholder landscape was unusually complex. Each project involved dozens of groups operating within their own bureaucratic frameworks, with their own requirements, their own internal politics, and their own ways of working.

On BRAC 133 alone, seventeen separate Pentagon agencies had to be consulted throughout the design process. The Coast Guard project carried its own layer of complexity — DHS was an organization that was still forming at the time, and its internal structure was unclear even to the people working within it.

Large federal organizations operate within highly structured procedural environments. That is the nature of how they function, and any process built to serve them has to account for it. Learning how to work and communicate within that language, and to set things up so that people within those structures could effectively engage with the project was a significant part of the work.

The challenge was not just getting input from these groups. It was making sure that what each agency needed was being accurately communicated to the design-build team, and that the team's response actually addressed the need. On every project, that translation work — bridging the gap between what stakeholders were asking for and what the on-site team was delivering — was what kept the process moving and the project aligned.

Shaping the Process

On each project, a structured process was built from scratch to fit the specific conditions at hand.

Dedicated conference space was rented and configured — not a single room, but a full working environment with presentation areas, breakout rooms, and collaboration zones. On BRAC 133, all key stakeholders and design team members came together every week. On the Coast Guard project, it was every two weeks. These were not status meetings. They were organized working sessions where the design was actively developed, reviewed, and advanced with the people who would use the building in the room.

People who had never worked together and needed to become a team were now in the same room on a regular basis. Architects, engineers, contractors, and agency representatives, many coming from very different professional cultures, working through the same problems side by side.

Lunch was budgeted into every session, and while that may seem like a small detail, the effect it had on these projects was significant. Eating together builds rapport, rapport builds trust, and trust changes how people interact, communicate, and work together. Over time, problems that would have taken weeks to resolve through formal channels were being worked out over a meal. That was deliberate.

The impact of that approach showed in the results. Despite their extraordinary size and complexity, all three projects moved through design and planning at a pace that consistently surprised the agencies involved. Decisions that would normally take months were being made in days, because the right people were in the room, the right information was on the table, and the trust was there to move forward.

What These Projects Revealed

One of the things that stood out most across all three projects was the commitment of the people involved. These were federal employees working long hours, often for modest pay, within some of the most difficult bureaucratic environments in the country. But they showed up because they believed in the mission, whether that was national security, defense, or public service. That sense of purpose was visible in how they worked and what they were willing to put up with to get the job done.

Our process was designed to honor that commitment by giving everyone a real seat at the table and making sure their contributions actually shaped the outcome. From there, a genuine sense of ownership developed across the teams. When people feel that what they are contributing actually matters, they engage at a completely different level. That was true on all three of these projects, and it made all the difference in what we were able to accomplish together.

The Bigger Picture

These three projects, spanning a decade of work and nearly 4 million combined square feet, represent some of the most complex federal development work undertaken in this region's history. The experience we gained managing projects of this scale and complexity has been invaluable, and the lessons from that work are now deeply embedded in how we approach every project at Edgemoor. We are incredibly proud of what our teams accomplished on each one and the relationships that were built along the way.

Every one of these projects required bringing together people and organizations from very different professional cultures and institutional backgrounds, most of whom had never worked together, and helping them operate as one cohesive team. On each one, we were trusted to help build facilities worthy of the missions and the people they serve, and that trust drove everything about how we approached the work.

The buildings matter because of what happens inside them, because of the people whose working lives they shape and the missions they support every day. Getting to be part of that, project after project, is what drives us and something we never take for granted.