Virginia Tech is celebrating the grand opening this week of the first academic building on its Innovation Campus outside Washington, D.C., a property initially conceived as a bid to attract tech giant Amazon's second headquarters to the Commonwealth.
The 11-story, 300,000-square-foot building at 3625 Potomac Ave. in Alexandria, Virginia, completed construction in January and has started welcoming students. An official ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled for Friday.
The university, with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, plans to use the new space in the National Landing area across from the nation’s capital to shape the next generation of tech talent through its graduate education in computer science and computer engineering as well as coursework for its business students.
In 2018, Amazon selected National Landing for the location of its East Coast corporate office, also known as HQ2. New York City also was selected, but Amazon canceled those plans. The first phase of Virginia's HQ2 opened in May 2023. National Landing encompasses parts of the Crystal City and Pentagon City neighborhoods in Arlington County and Potomac Yard in Alexandria.
"We can already see that our proximity here is making a difference,” Vice President and Executive Director of the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus Lance Collins said Tuesday at a media preview event. He told CoStar News that Virginia Tech students are already working with Amazon on projects at the new building, called Academic Building One.
The roughly $1 billion Virginia Tech Innovation Campus was scheduled to open earlier but was postponed due to supply chain issues. The project cost about $302 million, Sven Shockey, vice president and design director with SmithGroup, the architect for the property, told CoStar News.
Interesting features
On the outside, the building's design allows it to take advantage of the sun’s orientation and movement to capture solar power and improve the property’s energy performance. That’s through solar installations on the roof and technology on the sides of the building that help generate electricity.
In addition, the building features an auditorium that seats up to 300, dedicated space for K-12 programming, multiple classrooms, and a center for artificial intelligence and data analytics.
There’s also a 465-square-foot, two-story drone testing cage located on the third and fourth floors.
More than 500 graduate students currently take courses in Academic Building One, Virginia Tech's Collins said.
“I was just really excited to be closer to a lot more job opportunities and things going on here in the Northern Virginia area,” Sydney Johns, a Virginia Tech doctorate student in computer science, said during the media tour Tuesday.
The first Innovation Campus class, about 75 students, started in the fall of 2020, Virginia Tech said. Course instruction was previously based out of a Virginia Tech location in Falls Church, Virginia, while the new campus was being built.
Once fully built out, the Innovation Campus, located just a few minutes walk from the Potomac Yard Metro station that opened in 2023, is expected to host about 750 master’s and 200 doctoral students, according to materials shared by SmithGroup.
There are entitlements for two other properties on the campus that currently serve as surface parking, according to Liza Morris, Virginia Tech’s assistant vice president for planning and university architect. Collins said the timeline for future construction was not available at this time, but the future buildings are imagined to measure about 150,000 square feet each.
For the record
SmithGroup served as the architect. Others involved with the project included A&F Engineers, Form Architects, Core Studio Design, Sorba Engineering, CM Kling and Associates, Patrica Hord Graphik Design, Brightree Studios, Polysonics, LJB, Rich and Associates, and Forella Group.