Recent Articles
New Orleans Airport Named Best Airport in North America Three Years in a Row
The Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY) receives top award for Best Airport in North America for third consecutive year.
Adaptive Reuse Saves Embodied Carbon at Repositioned 20 Mass
Our integrated design team excels in complex adaptive reuse projects. The process of redesigning a building to support a new function utilizes our structural engineers, our systems experts, our architects and more. Our teams’ deep knowledge allows them to tackle even the most complex projects. These adaptive reuse projects create far less embodied carbon compared to demolishing and constructing a new building.
International Hotel & Property Awards Shortlist 20 Mass Royal Sonesta
LEO A DALY-Designed Royal Sonesta Capitol Hill at 20 Mass is shortlisted for the 2024 International Hotel & Property Awards.
Forbes Travel Guide Picks Two LEO A DALY Projects for 2024 Lists
Two hotels with major LEO A DALY design work have been ranked highly by Forbes Travel Guide.
Housing for Veterans Created in Tunnel to Towers Partnership
Tunnel to Towers partners with LEO A DALY to create housing for Veterans experiencing homelessness through projects in Florida and Georgia.
Co.Design features Intelligence Community Campus – Bethesda
LEO A DALY designs the future of U.S. intelligence
Intelligence Community Campus – Bethesda (ICC-B) is the future of U.S. intelligence: collaborative, transparent, and closer in character to a university than a government monolith. Co.Design interviewed LEO A DALY’s Andrew Graham and Tim Duffy about the design.
Excerpted from Co.Design:
The Architecture Of 21st-Century Intelligence
The modern intelligence agency hides in plain sight.
By Diana Budds
To anyone who doesn’t know what its name stands for, the ICC’s new 40-acre campus might look like a university or new tech office. It features a striking matte copper–clad building with floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Inside, there are multiple communal lounges where employees can collaborate, a cafeteria where they can get lunch, and a fitness center where they can stretch their legs. A 500-person auditorium accommodates large gatherings and there’s a courtyard for getting a bit of fresh air.
But this isn’t a startup’s office or school. “ICC” stands for Intelligence Community Campus. The new face of intelligence architecture is here–and it’s as familiar as it is novel.
When you think of the architecture of intelligence agencies, the operative word that comes to mind is “defense.” Structures like the Pentagon, the J. Edgar Hoover Building where the FBI is headquartered, and the George Bush Center for Intelligence, where the CIA is based, are all hulking, monolithic, and imposing structures. Their architecture intentionally evokes mystery and insularity–there’s sensitive, covert work going on inside these buildings that no one else is privy to.
When James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, commissioned the architecture firm LEO A DALY to design a new facility in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2012, one of his desires was to move away from the 20th-century notion of what an intelligence agency looks like architecturally. That shift stems from a new organizational structure, a new philosophy of intelligence operations, and the changing nature of security threats facing the United States in the 21st century–away from physical intelligence threats and towards cybersecurity.
“It really is more like a university campus environment,” Andrew Graham, the project’s senior architect, says. “You have public areas for informal gathering and exchange of ideas . . . The building and the lobbies have transparency and that’s somewhat of a metaphor for the agencies as well.”
Read more: