Comsat / Clarksburg Gateway

Image: River Falls Investments.

The parcel

Two hundred and four acres at the head of Comsat Drive, west of I-270, in Clarksburg, Maryland. The Communications Satellite Corporation built its research headquarters there in 1969 — a roughly 500,000 GSF complex of curved glass and metal, designed by Cesar Pelli when he was at DMJM, two decades before Pelli became the architect-of-record on the World Financial Center and Petronas Twin Towers. Real-time international phone links and live international television were invented inside it.

The building had been vacant for about twenty years when Bob's firm acquired the tract in 2015. Ten years of zoning and entitlement followed. The Clarksburg Gateway Sector Plan, the policy framework for the parcel's next life, was approved in 2025. The Planning Board did not recommend the existing structure for historic designation. Demolition began on April 13, 2026 — the first physical work to happen on the site in a generation.

Why this is a palimpsest, not a portfolio

A site, in the developer's strict sense of the word, is a piece of ground on which something will be built. It is also a piece of ground that, by definition, cannot be drawn from memory. You go to it, you measure it, and you re-ink the page every time something material changes — the older versions don't disappear, they leave traces. This parcel is the part of Bob's career where the ink is still wet.

What the next decade puts here — housing, employment, retail, public space, in some proportion — is the question the rest of this site is written around. The plan is large-scale and mixed-use; the unit and square-foot counts are not yet final and won't be invented here.

Quotes from the announcement

"With the Sector Plan now approved, we are moving forward to position this site for its next chapter."

"This is only the beginning."

— Bob Elliott, on the start of demolition.

Image: River Falls Investments.

What you can read while you wait

The references list every public source we used to write this page. The Bisnow interview from earlier in the project's life is the most useful single piece if you want the developer's-side reasoning on Clarksburg as a long land play. The Montgomery Planning file is the most useful for the architectural history of the building that came down.