Space for a new age

The new NATO headquarters provides the necessary space for NATO's main task, namely communication between the member states and the rest of the world.

After numerous analyses and feasibility studies, the structural, technical and security-specific requirements of the new building were defined, and an architectural competition was held in 2003. The winning design, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and ASSAR, was put through another in-depth analysis, and implementation planning was completed at the end of 2008.

The design for the new headquarters includes around 190,000 square metres of office space, conference rooms and private areas – and offers the delegates of the 26 (soon to be 28) member states their own areas which are fitted out to embassy standard plus joint areas for communication.

Project management at the highest level

Such a highly-complex project requires stringent and robust management structures. A number of internal committees and project teams, both international and from the host country Belgium, are coordinating the new building. They are supported by numerous external specialists, in particular an international planning team consisting of a consortium made up of SOM and the Belgian companies ASSAR and VK Engineering. A separate planning building was set up for the architects and engineers on land belonging to the Belgian Ministry of Defence.

NATO chooses think project!

After a tender process, think project! was selected as the platform to support coordinators and project partners in their tasks. Those responsible for the project decided to set up an internal solution requiring local hosting, so the IT infrastructure needed to run the software and store data is operated in a Belgian Ministry of Defence computer centre and is subject to the strictest security standards.