At a Glance

Sector:  Higher Ed / Innovation

Location:  Arlington, VA

Delivery:  Public-Private Partnership

Scale:  345,000 SF Academic Facility

Certification: LEED Platinum | Net-Zero Energy Ready

Result: A First-of-Its-Kind Innovation Ecosystem Blending Public Institution, Research, Students, and Private Enterprise | 75% Commercial Space Committed at Launch | Delivered On-Schedule and On-Budget Through COVID

The Situation

When Amazon announced its HQ2 move to Northern Virginia, it came with a commitment from the state: 25,000 new tech graduates by 2039. George Mason University, the state's largest public university and one of its fastest-growing research institutions, was expected to deliver a significant share of those graduates. To do that, they needed more faculty. To attract more faculty, they needed more research space. And to fund more research, they needed industry partners who wanted to be close to the work.

The university didn't just need a building. They needed an ecosystem, a place where education, research, and private enterprise could operate side by side and feed off each other in ways that a traditional academic facility or a traditional office building could never support on its own. Nothing like that existed in the Northern Virginia market. There was no precedent to follow and no template to apply.

George Mason needed a partner who could understand the full scope of what the university was trying to accomplish, design something genuinely new around it, and manage the entire process from concept through delivery. And they needed to do it in the middle of one of the most challenging market environments the industry has faced in modern history. Fuse was the answer to all of it, and there wasn't a Plan B.

Site Complexity

The site itself was one of the most complex pieces of real estate Edgemoor has encountered. Both documented and undocumented existing features crisscrossed the site, including easements, existing foundations, and critical infrastructure. And all of this was unfolding during COVID, in a market where commercial office financing had essentially frozen.

How We Got Involved

Edgemoor had spent years studying how knowledge-based communities function, what drives research-industry collaboration, and how physical environments can either enable or limit that interaction. When George Mason began exploring what was possible for this project, that depth of understanding in the innovation development space set us apart.

Working collaboratively with the university, we developed a vision and a financial structure that the market was not offering, one that allowed the university to meet its obligations without taking on traditional development risk, while creating a building that put innovation outcomes ahead of conventional leasing logic.

Designed for Connection

Most innovation buildings separate their tenants. The university occupies one section, industry occupies another, and the two interact primarily through programmed events. We took a fundamentally different approach.

At Fuse, everyone is mixed together. Researchers, students, entrepreneurs, and established companies share floors, corridors, and common spaces. The building's core is organized around shared labs for robotics, cybersecurity, and data visualization, positioned so that a company on the same floor can walk down the hall, collaborate with a researcher, use the lab, bring a customer through, and be back at their desk in an hour. That kind of interaction doesn't happen by accident. It happens because the building was designed from the ground up to make it inevitable.

The most important breakthroughs rarely happen in a conference room. They happen in the in-between moments, when two people who never would have met end up in the same space and realize they can change each other's trajectory. Fuse was designed to create as many of those moments as possible.

Roughly 100,000 square feet of the building, about a third of the total space, is dedicated to lounges, cafes, collaboration areas, and event spaces that belong to no single tenant but are available to everyone. These are what the industry refers to as "third spaces," the spaces between home and work where organic interaction and unexpected connections happen naturally. Dedicating that much space to shared environments meant reducing the building's overall rentable square footage, which on paper looks like a riskier decision. But we knew that in order to create the kind of environment where this building could truly flourish, activating it with the right uses mattered more than maximizing leasable area.

We built the tenant-mix strategy around what we call the three E's: entrepreneurs, emerging companies, and established companies. The ecosystem needs all three to function. Startups bring energy and ideas. Mid-stage companies bring growth and momentum. And established companies bring the research funding, the acquisition interest, and the scale that makes the whole system work. Getting that mix right, and designing a building that supports it, was central to everything we did.

Getting It Done Through COVID

This project was bid, financed, and delivered during one of the most difficult periods the commercial real estate industry has ever faced (during COVID). At a time when office projects across the country were being shelved, delayed, or abandoned entirely, we closed commercial financing and broke ground on a first-of-its-kind innovation building.

Getting to financial close in that environment required conviction from every party involved. The university chose to prioritize the long-term trajectory of their research mission over short-term market uncertainty. Our investors and financing partners backed the concept at a time when the conventional wisdom said to wait. And our team held the project together through conditions that stalled or killed projects with far less complexity across the country.

The building was delivered on schedule and on budget, an outcome that very few projects of any kind achieved during that period, let alone one this complex and new to the market.

A Living Building

Delivering the building was just the beginning. Fuse is a living environment that is actively cultivated every day. Our team on the ground knows every tenant by name, what they're working on, and what they need to succeed. They make introductions, host events, and work every day to connect the people inside the building in ways that would not happen on their own. The job is not to simply run a building as a typical property manager would; it is to cultivate the community inside it.

The ecosystem has come together faster than anyone expected. Cybastion, the building's first commercial tenant, is now leading cybersecurity and 5G/6G research alongside George Mason faculty and students, with collaborations extending as far as supporting national digital infrastructure efforts in Côte d'Ivoire. JSI, Corvex, and Oasis Hill have followed, bringing defense, AI computer infrastructure, and a healthcare and AI startup accelerator into the same set of corridors. Inside, the Institute for Digital Innovation, the Cyber Living Innovation Lab, and the NuScale Energy Exploration Center give students hands-on access to the kind of research environments most universities can only describe in a course catalog. One early tenant, taken on before they had six months of financials, has since become a publicly traded company valued at over $200 million in less than two years. Tenants have called the building "Disneyland for technology companies."

The common thread is a kind of collaboration that does not happen in most buildings. A startup founder runs into a federal research director in the cafe. A graduate student walks into a corporate lab and ends up on a project that becomes a job offer. A pitch competition fills a third-floor lounge with founders, faculty, and investors who would otherwise never have been in the same room. These are the moments Fuse was designed to make inevitable, and they are now happening every week.

Fuse is still in its early days, and the full story of what this building will produce is still being written. But the foundation is there, and Edgemoor is committed to cultivating it for years to come.

Recognition

Fuse at Mason Square has received the following awards and certifications:

• P3 Bulletin — Environmental Impact Award (2025).

• Fitwel — 2 Star Rating, a first for George Mason University.

• LEED Platinum certification (expected/pursuing).

• Net-Zero Ready designation.

• RELi Resilience certification (pursuing).

The Bigger Picture

The best projects we have been part of are the ones that change how people think about what is possible. Fuse is one of those projects. Not because of its size or complexity, but because of what it represents: a bet that if you put the right people in the right environment and invest in connecting them every day, something extraordinary will happen. That bet is being validated every week, by the people inside the building doing work that matters not just for the university or its industry partners, but for the region and the country. Fuse is still getting started, and we are excited to see how it continues to evolve.