Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Situated on 80 wooded acres of the Suitland Federal Center near downtown Washington, D.C., the 1.5-million-square-foot headquarters for the U.S. Census Bureau houses all of the Bureau’s 6,000 employees. To minimize this necessarily large building’s presence in its natural setting, the design team limited the office program to eight stories and used a variety of other architectural and sustainable design strategies to reduce the real and perceived impact on the site. Two separate buildings grow from one single mass, cleaved apart to create a central garden that integrates the building with its landscape, while maintaining one cohesive vision.