St. Elizabeths West Campus
General Services Administration, Washington, DC
Homeland security campus brings new life to a long-languishing national landmark site
Featuring a mixture of adaptive reuse and new construction, the new headquarters campus for the Department of Homeland Security will ultimately connect Homeland Security with an Operations Center and a new United States Coast Guard headquarters while resurrecting and repurposing a number of historically significant buildings. Goody Clancy is the overall project manager, as part of a Goody Clancy | HDR Joint Venture, for the 176-acre project which is the former St. Elizabeths Hospital site, across the Anacostia River from the Capitol District.
The National Historic Landmark site, originally established in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane, is based on the principals of the Kirkbride Plan, which sought to create a human treatment environment through the design and organization of the buildings and grounds. In 2002, the hospital closed and the buildings fell into disrepair.
Uniquely challenging, and representing the largest public building project since construction of the Pentagon during World War II, the project provides the opportunity for Goody Clancy to utilize all of its professional disciplines—Architecture, Preservation and Planning—on a single complex project.
- The diverse collection of remaining Gothic, Italianate, and Renaissance Revival structures, constructed over a number of decades, has a range rehabilitation and restoration demands that must be addressed building by building.
- We assessed and cataloged existing conditions and documented each building’s repair history, creating a database that links to the electronic building model and the construction documents. The range of construction dates creates unique rehabilitation and restoration demands that must be addressed specifically.
