NGA Breaks Ground on New facility in North St. Louis

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency recently hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for its new campus in North St. Louis, Missouri, beginning a new chapter for the agency.

The new NGA campus location puts it in the heart of a community of outstanding academic institutions and cutting-edge industry. It is scheduled to be open and fully operational by 2025.

The new facility will include approximately 712,000 square feet of office space, parking garages, a visitor’s center, an inspection facility and control access points. Plans are for the facility to include wireless technologies – which, while standard in private industry, has been a challenge for the intelligence community to adopt for a secure, classified work environment –and for the facility to be built to LEED Silver standards for environmental sustainability.

With the groundbreaking, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin managing the construction on behalf of NGA.

The new site in North St. Louis will replace NGA’s present facility, which dates back to the 1840s, in South St. Louis. The decision to build a new facility came after a series of planning studies showed it would be less costly, quicker and less disruptive to NGA’s mission to build a new facility rather than upgrade its facilities. It has not yet been decided what will happen to NGA’s current campus, which also is owned by the U.S. Air Force, when NGA vacates the South St. Louis facility.

The Design-Build team leading the project is McCarthy HITT, Black & Veatch + Gensler, and Akima, LLC.

Project timeline

• Fall 2019: Site logistics began
• Early 2020: Major construction work begins
• 2023: Estimated construction completion
• 2025: Estimated operational campus

Budget

The total project budget of roughly $1.7 billion includes the McCarthy HITT contract of $711.7 million, land procurement, post-construction outfitting of the building and small business set-aside construction projects.

Rendering courtesy of McCarthy HITT.