It’s still on the drawing board, but it has already received critical acclaim: CCAL’s planned headquarters found favor with the judges in the 2017 Design Awards competition of the Northern Virginia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

International architecture and design firm Perkins+Will was honored with the Award of Merit in the Unbuilt Projects category at the competition for their design for the CCALS headquarters. The award was made on June 15.

The project was completed as part of a larger strategy of bringing research and manufacturing jobs to Virginia, according to the AIA project description. The design and aesthetic of the CCALS project takes its visual cues from the material palette and detail of CCAM to create a visible relationship, though the planning and design are distinctly different.

The heart of the design are the high-bay and low-bay program areas. The high-bay offers space for projects involving large-scale equipment, or full-size mock-ups (see image above), while the low-bay project areas are flexible, rooms that can support a range of research from computational to light engineering. Both are adjacent to flexible research office workspaces with distributed team and meeting rooms.

Read more here: aiadc.com/blog/2017-unbuilt-awards-announced.