The Dark Architecture of National Security

All that is known about this photo for sure is that it was taken after 1986. The Headquarters Building for the National Security Agency is the one in the back, a modest nine-story structure that resembles an anonymous apartment complex. It was completed in 1963; the lower, mall-shaped building, Operations Building 1, predates it by a decade. The more prominent towers—a pair of blue-black boxes, Operations 2A and 2B, clad in copper to block electromagnetic signals, like a Faraday cage—were finished in 1986.

That much is knowable thanks to a 2012 document published by the NSA for its 60th anniversary. The agency itself would not confirm when the buildings had been finished (or if they even were), according to Jack Self, a writer for the U.K. magazine Dezeen who dug into the history of the NSA campus a couple years back, revealing the unlikely architects behind the structures.