A 110-acre Prince George’s County property that houses the Smithsonian Institution’s off-site collections is poised to grow significantly in the coming years. The Smithsonian Institution filed plans with the National Capital Planning Commission to expand the Suitland Collections Center campus from 1.3M SF to 2.4M SF.
The NCPC is scheduled to hold a meeting on the proposal Thursday. The organization that runs many of the museums in the nation’s capital has more than 155 million objects and 2.2 million library volumes, and the Suitland property is the largest off-site facility for storing them.
But several of the buildings on the campus have outlived their life expectancy and must be replaced, and the Smithsonian projects a significant expansion of the collections capacity it needs in the decades to come. The planned redevelopment would retain 902K SF of the existing 1.3M SF of facilities, demolishing the rest, and it would add 1.5M SF of new buildings. The new development would be built in phases over the span of four decades. In the next two decades, the Smithsonian envisions growing the campus by 626K SF.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Jon Banister over at Bis Now
