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The Pentagon

The Pentagon, headquarters of the national defense establishment and the nerve center for command and control, is virtually a city within itself. The Pentagon presently houses approximately 26,000 military and civilian employees and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel dedicated to protecting our national interests.

The War Department had charge of the Army. It counted 24,000 employees that were spread throughout 17 buildings. With the department scheduled to grow in size by 25 percent during the second half of 1941, it was clear that its makeshift arrangements could only spawn confusion.

The Pentagon — a building, institution, and symbol — was conceived at the request of Brigadier General Brehon B. Sommervell. Gen. Brehon Somervell, the Army’s chief of construction, took the view that the Army needed an entirely new headquarters that would consolidate its Washington staff within a single building. In July 1941, with the issue of the draft still in the balance, he set a group of architects to prepare a design. He was in a hurry; he gave them a weekend. The site he had in mind was on the Virginia side of Memorial Bridge, close to Arlington Cemetery and not too far from Lee mansion. A road cut off one corner of the property, and this led the designers to propose a pentagonal structure.

Somervell won the support of President Roosevelt, who sent a request to Congress for the necessary funds. Quickly a storm of criticism arose. Some people dubbed the project “Somervell’s Folly,” demanding to know why the Army needed such a large and permanent structure. They were mollified when officials responded that it could also serve as a veterans’ hospital or as a repository for archives. Other critics denounced the proposed location, and they were not so easily put off. The land had been reserved for expansion of Arlington Cemetery, and to build on that site would require the approval of the Commission of Fine Arts. Its chairman, Gilmore Clarke, invoked the city plan created by Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 and testified that the Army proposal “would be one of the most serious and worst attacks on the plan of Washington that has ever been made.”

The Army responded by moving the site three-fourths of a mile to the south to an area of dumps, shacks, pawnshops and a rendering works. It was known as Hell’s Bottom. But it was within view of the Capitol and convenient to downtown, and the government already owned half of the necessary 583 acres. Groundbreaking took place on August 11, and construction proceeded afterward at the pace of a forced march.

The shape of the building remained pentagonal. To change the plans would have cost time, but this shape was no hasty compromise; it yielded efficiency. The most effective shape would have been a circle, offering the shortest distances between widely separated offices. But that would have ruled out use of long, straight sections, which were easiest to build. A square structure, by contrast, would have added distance wastefully. A pentagon mediated neatly between these possibilities.

Efficiency also dictated the broad, low shape. A high-rise would have demanded elevators, but the building’s five-story plan dispensed with them, allowing people to reach different floors rapidly by using broad ramps. A similar concern for traffic flow was evident in the design of roads. Adjacent highways sprouted cloverleaf interchanges and overpasses, eliminating traffic lights. A thousand-foot busway ran below one of the five segments of the structure, accommodating surges of up to 30,000 people per hour. Architectural Forum noted approvingly that such arrangements “give a real foretaste of the future,” adding that “as building approaches the scale technically feasible, the distinction between architecture and city planning vanishes.”

It took only 16 months to advance from the first spade turning to completion of construction. The Potomac itself supplied much of the building material, with 680,000 tons of sand and gravel being dredged from the river bottom to make concrete. Construction proceeded in a clockwise manner, with the last section being reserved for elements requiring the most time to design and build. Even so, the first tenants—employees of Army Ordnance—were moving in as early as April of 1942. It was not possible just then to install permanent directional markers, and people soon were getting lost. That led to such legends as the man who entered the building on a Tuesday, wandered through the labyrinth until Saturday, and finally emerged—in Philadelphia.

Another tale told of a woman who rushed up to a guard and exclaimed, “Quick! You have got to get me out of here. I’m about to have a baby.” The guard remonstrated, “You never should have come in here in that condition.” “I wasn’t when I came in,” she snapped back.

Yet the basic layout was simple: five concentric rings linked by ten major numbered corridors resembling the spokes of a wheel. Each office number carried its own directions for getting there. Room 3C273, for instance, lay on the third floor, C Ring (the third one from the center), off Corridor 2. The architectural style of the Pentagon is Stripped Neo-Classical. The building was constructed out of reinforced concrete made from 380,000 tons of sand dredged from the Potomac River and supported by 41,492 concrete piles. The designers’ ingenuity not only created a building that reflected the architectural style of the nation’s Capitol but also saved enough steel to build one battleship. At the height of construction, over 1,000 architects worked in an adjacent hanger producing enough prints to supply the 14,000 construction workers and tradesmen. Three shifts worked 24 hours a day, every day, constructing the Pentagon wedge by wedge. These wedges were occupied as they came on-line.

The structure was finished in mid-January of 1943; a month later it received its official name, the Pentagon. From the start much commentary focused on its size. Five complete Capitol buildings could fit within its 34 acres, while its 4,600-foot perimeter would accommodate the Great Pyramid of Cheops with a couple of hundred feet to spare. It had room for 40,000 employees within its 3.8 million square feet of usable space; the corridors ran to 17 miles; the telephone system could serve a city of 125,000; the cafeterias could feed 7,000 people at once. There was a hospital equipped for surgery, a bank, a drugstore, a barbershop, and a bi-level bus station featuring a concourse two blocks long.

Yet in comparison with its task, the Pentagon was all but lost amid a far vaster immensity. Military expenditures would rise to 38 percent of the gross national product. The armed forces would reach a peak strength of 12.3 million. America also had a civilian army of as many as 15 million, more than a tenth of the nation’s total population, consisting of people who left home to find work in the booming war centers. Well before the Army and Navy sent our forces ashore at Normandy, Joseph Stalin could offer a toast: “To American production, without which this war would have been lost.”

Yet war’s end would bring no return to normalcy. After 1945 the Pentagon’s prime responsibility was to develop weapons and doctrines appropriate to the new nuclear era, while deterring the annihilation it threatened. The first major steps came in the wake of the National Security Act of 1947, which established the Defense Department with its Joint Chiefs of Staff and made the Air Force into an independent service. Very soon the Air Force found itself engaged in a new struggle, not with the Soviets but with the U.S. Navy.

The Pentagon has never undergone a major renovation and, after more than 55 years, renovation is essential in order to meet current health, fire, and life safety codes and provide reliable electrical, air conditioning, and ventilating services. Absent a major renovation, the building infrastructure will become increasingly unreliable and soon unable to effectively support the headquarters and nerve center of the national military establishment. Major building systems have deteriorated to such an extent that repairs are no longer effective and entire systems need replacement. The presence of asbestos in the ceiling plaster, ventilating ducts, pipes, and floor coverings is a hazard that makes repairs or alterations extremely disruptive and expensive.

From 1982 through 1990, the Department of Defense discussed with the General Services Administration (then owner of the building) renovation of the Pentagon and, in the mid 1980’s, GSA supported the concept of transferring the building to the DoD.

Based on consultation within the Administration and with Congressional Committees, legislation was prepared to transfer the Pentagon from the Administrator of General Services to the Secretary of Defense so that the renovation of the Pentagon could be undertaken.

The Defense Authorization Act of FY 1991 transferred control of the Pentagon Reservation from the Adminsistrator of General Services to the Secretary of Defense. Under the same Act, Congress established the Pentagon Reservation Maintenance Revolving Fund for the expressed intent of renovating the Pentagon. This Act allows the Secretary of Defense to establish rent rates for the tenants to support the renovation.

T. A. Heppenheimer. The Pentagon’s 50th … And The Future For America’s Defense. . September 1992; Volume 43, Issue 5.

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