Rendering of Virginia Tech Innovation Campus Academic Building One
For the last three years, many people zipping by on the Metro or driving on the George Washington Parkway have commented that the glassy, oddly-shaped building rising just north of Alexandria’s Potomac Yard Metro Station looks like a cruise ship. Others describe it as “gem-shaped.”
Its rather bland name – Academic Building One – belies the complexity of its offerings. It sits on Virginia Tech’s 3.5-acre Innovation Campus, a 300,000-square-foot, 11-story building at 3000 Potomac Avenue that will open in January to graduate students and focus on studies and research in several cutting-edge computer science and computer engineering fields.
The lead architect, Sven Shockey of the SmithGroup, who earned a master’s in architecture degree from Tech, said in an online video that the building is shaped “to adapt to the movement of the sun,” to maximize light exposure for solar cells. Photovoltaics are typically put on roofs, he noted, but on this building, they are on the façade and the roof and they generate electricity. The building’s base is made of Hokie stone, the signature limestone rock on Tech’s Blacksburg home campus. The building is a “calling card for Virginia Tech in Northern Virginia,” Shockey commented.
To Nourish Curiosity
Shockey “wanted the building to invoke curiosity,” he said. Students will put their curiosity to the test in four areas: artificial intelligence-machine learning; wireless-next generation technology; intelligent interfaces; and quantum architecture and software development, explained Shannon Andrea, Director of Communications. She reported that currently 455 master of engineering students are enrolled and by 2030, there will be between 700 and 800. The faculty will grow from 17 today to 50 by 2029. Tech will not offer undergraduate courses on this campus.
The university’s press announcement said, “We are committed to equipping graduates to become leaders in their careers while helping them gain real-world experience solving urgent challenges alongside researchers, industry executives and national policymakers.” When asked to clarify the “urgent challenges,” Andrea wrote, “A major component of Innovation Campus courses is project-based learning, in which industry and government bring actual problems they are trying to solve to students, who work together on them in teams over the course of the semester or year.”
Inside the building, among other features will be a 3,000-square-foot classroom-auditorium for 200 people classroom style or 300 auditorium style; 14 classrooms with 25 to 90 seats; three studios for online teaching and learning; and 32 “huddle rooms” for student-faculty collaboration; a 1,340-square-foot cyber physical lab; and a two-story drone testing “cage.” The roof will have a 4,500-square-foot deck for up to 300 people with views of the Washington, D.C., skyline.
Tech is partnering with its south Arlington neighbor Amazon HQ2 in machine learning programs. Amazon’s 2023 move to the area, announced in 2018, was a catalyst for Tech officials’ choosing the Alexandria site. The aerospace company Boeing made a $50 million investment to create scholarships, help recruit faculty and researchers and fund STEM programs for kindergarten through 12th-grade students. Northop-Grumman committed $12.5 million for quantum information science and engineering.
Students will commute to the campus. The Metro subway is a five-minute walk and buses regularly run nearby, but the building will have 169 parking spaces each costing $140 a month. Virginia Tech has agreements with three Northern Virginia firms to house students.
Officials plan to eventually build two additional buildings there, each around 150,000 square feet.
Though classes will begin in January, the university will hold an official opening celebration on Feb. 28, 2025, open to the public and featuring a keynote address by Regina Dugan, a two-time Virginia Tech alumna and now president and chief executive officer of Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit that its website says, builds, “Programs that aim to deliver breakthroughs in human health over five to 10 years and demonstrate seemingly impossible results on seemingly impossible timelines.”
To learn more, including details on classes and research topics, visit https://www.vt.edu/innovationcampus/index.html.