Carling Campus

The Carling Campus is a 148.79-hectare (367.7-acre) site containing Federal government buildings in the west end of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The site, located at the intersection of Carling Avenue and Moodie Drive, consists of 11 interconnected buildings with a total of 207,000 square metres (2,230,000 sq ft) of space.

The property was acquired by Public Works and Government Services Canada from Nortel in December 2010, and will house the National Defence Headquarters.

During the peak Nortel period of the 1990s, the research and development conducted at the Carling Campus was a catalyst for numerous high-tech spin-off and support companies in Ottawa. This development began changing Ottawa's reputation as a boring government town and the campus even came to represent the city's aspirations of becoming a technology hotbed like Silicon Valley.

Northern Electric originally acquired the site for their Northern Electric Research and Development Laboratories and built two small research buildings in 1960. In 1971, Bell Canada and Northern Electric combined their R&D organizations and formed Bell-Northern Research, headquartered at the Carling site. Starting with just 42 engineers, the site was quickly expanded to house 800 people five years later.

Nortel assumed a majority share in Bell-Northern Research in 1996, and the site became part of the Nortel R&D organization. At its peak, the campus had some 10,000 employees, even hosting North America's largest recreational softball league.

After Nortel went bankrupt in 2009, its research divisions were sold to Avaya, Ciena, Ericsson, and Genband, while the real property was purchased by Public Works and Government Services Canada for CDN$208 million. The site is intended to become home to 8,500 staff members of the National Defence Headquarters that are scattered across more than 40 different locations across the National Capital Region. The renovations to accommodate the defence personnel are projected to be approximately CDN$506 million, staged over 6 years.

...
Wikipedia