After Urban Flight, Corporate Campuses Add a Taste of the City

Others took the same path out of the city. In 1958, General Mills opened its suburban headquarters, a statement of glass-enclosed modernism, eight miles outside Minneapolis. IBM moved from Manhattan and opened its gated headquarters in 1964 in Armonk, N.Y., on land that was once an apple orchard. Allstate opened its headquarters in 1967 on 122 acres in Northbrook, Ill., outside Chicago.

Capital One’s plan for a new headquarters fit the 20th-century model in 1999 when it bought 26 acres in Tysons Corner, a four-square-mile commercial center near the intersection of the Capital Beltway and the Dulles Toll Road, two of the busiest highways in suburban Washington. At the time, Tysons Corner was the embodiment of what the author Joel Garreau called an edge city — a concentration, outside a big city, of daytime shopping, entertainment and business that emptied at night.

Capital One initially planned four matching 14-story office buildings. Each would have connecting parking decks with space for 1,600 cars. A barbed-wire security fence ringed the perimeter, and guardhouses were stationed at the entrances.

“What was the thinking behind that?” said Mr. Griffith, the bank’s managing director. “‘We didn’t want people here on our secured campus. You know, stay away.’”

In 2003, the company completed the first of the four office towers, but promptly abandoned its design plan because the spread-out, guarded corporate campus it envisioned no longer reflected the neighborhood. By then, the Federal Transit Administration, which oversees public transportation systems, and the State of Virginia had approved the extension of the Washington Metro, with four station stops in Tysons Corner, including one on Capital One’s doorstep.

Not long after, Fairfax County initiated a plan to transform Tysons Corner into a community with more residences, safer pedestrian connections, public spaces and parks. In 2010, the county unveiled a comprehensive plan to encourage housing for 100,000 residents by 2050, roughly 75,000 more than today. The county helped lead a marketing campaign for the evolution of the planned community with a name change to simply Tysons.