The Pentagon: A History (6 page)

Incidentally, the largest office building in the world

The first problem was where to put it. Major Pat Casey’s mind was still reeling from the secret instructions Somervell had given him the previous night, July 17, for constructing a massive new War Department headquarters—“incidentally, the largest office building in the world,” Casey later noted dryly. Energetic and experienced, Casey was one of the Army’s most brilliant engineers, an up-and-coming officer Somervell had quickly snagged upon taking control of the Construction Division.

Somervell wanted the plans on his desk Monday morning, July 21, and it was already Friday. Casey quickly saw big problems with the location Somervell had designated for constructing the building, the Washington-Hoover Airport along the Potomac River in Arlington. A week earlier, the Army had taken an option on the 147-acre airport, a hopelessly inadequate airfield at the foot of the 14th Street Bridge. Washington-Hoover had been the principal airport for Washington for fifteen years, but a modern airfield, National Airport, had opened in June about a mile downriver. After the congressional hearing July 17, Woodrum had suggested to Brigadier General Reybold, the supply chief, that the Army use the old airport in his home state for office buildings. Somervell—eager to win the Virginian’s blessing for the project—had seized upon the airport as the right site for his enormous new headquarters building.

But the foundation conditions at the airport worried Casey. The low-lying riverbed land was barely better than a swamp and subject to flooding. Reybold, who had similar concerns, went out to look at the site and concluded that the problem was even worse than realized. “It would be hazardous for us to build a building of a permanent nature there,” Reybold warned.

When Casey asked Somervell whether other sites near the airport might be used, the general did not rule it out. “So we looked over the map of Washington, and I tried to figure out other suitable areas,” Casey later said.

Obviously, it would have to be a big site. Somervell had ordered the building to be no higher than four stories, so as to not spark protests against a tall building along the river, as well as to avoid using the amount of steel a high-rise would need. “And not going vertically and requiring that amount of office space meant getting a vastly spread out area,” Casey said.

Casey’s practiced eye quickly zeroed in on a sixty-seven-acre tract about a half-mile upriver from Washington-Hoover, on a plateau sixty feet above the Potomac, just east of Arlington National Cemetery. It was Arlington Farm, the spot Marshall had endorsed a month earlier for temporary buildings. The site seemed ideal from the standpoint of foundation, utilities, water supply, elevation, and existing roads. A small party—operating discreetly to avoid any word leaking out—surveyed the terrain and reported back favorably. Reybold also recommended the site, and Somervell quickly approved the switch.

Like the adjacent cemetery, Arlington Farm had once been part of the grand estate of Robert E. Lee that had been confiscated by Union troops in the spring of 1861 for the defense of Washington. In 1900, Congress transferred four hundred acres of the Arlington estate to the Department of Agriculture to use as an experimental farm to improve agriculture. Arlington Farm served as an Ellis Island for plants sent to the United States by Americans traveling on government or private missions abroad. Scientists studied everything from new methods of breeding corn to ways of combating tomato wilt to new uses for hemp, and over the years thousands of foreign plants were naturalized there for domestic use.

The threat of war brought an end to this agricultural idyll. Marshall wanted to use the land for the garrison of infantry and cavalry troops at neighboring Fort Myer, which was responsible for the defense of Washington. In September 1940, Roosevelt personally approved the return of Arlington Farm to the War Department.

Perched on a hill above the Potomac, just below the Lee mansion and overlooking Memorial Bridge, Arlington Farm was one of the most prominent sites in the Washington area. In approving the site, Somervell and his planners agreed that the height of the proposed building should be reduced from four stories to three to keep it in harmony with the surroundings. The lower height, Somervell figured, would take care of any aesthetic concerns that might be raised.

Bergstrom gets to work

Late on Friday afternoon, July 18, Somervell directed George Edwin Bergstrom to get to work. A formal man with a brusque manner, his dark hair whitening at the temples, the War Department’s chief architect was an intimidating figure to the young officers assigned to work with him. He looked “the way architects should appear, like a Frank Lloyd Wright,” according to one. Bergstrom’s influence on the project would be profound, but his involvement would end in disgrace and personal tragedy.

Bergstrom—known by his middle name all his life—was born and raised in Neenah, Wisconsin, the son of a Norwegian blacksmith who had immigrated to America and built a successful foundry manufacturing plows and stoves. Edwin was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then earned a degree in architecture from Yale University in 1897, with further study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Young Bergstrom headed west and founded an architectural firm that soon became a leading force in the building explosion around Los Angeles in the early years of the twentieth century. The firm, Parkinson and Bergstrom, specialized in “Class A” commercial buildings—structures built with steel frames and reinforced concrete—and designed more of them than any architectural firm in the West. In 1921, Bergstrom helped found the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, a cooperative society of thirty-three architects who collaborated on public works projects; the society designed the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and the curved wooden frame that served as the first shell sheltering musicians at the famed Hollywood Bowl.

By 1941, Bergstrom was sixty-five years old, an accomplished and experienced architect, but that was not the real reason Somervell had hired him in February to be chief of the Construction Division’s architectural unit. Bergstrom was president of the American Institute of Architects, the country’s preeminent professional organization of architecture; as such, he carried a cachet that Somervell coveted. In the same vein, Somervell hired the presidents or past presidents of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Society of Landscape Architects. Two dozen prominent engineers, architects, professors, and attorneys—a veritable who’s who in their fields—were brought in as consultants. They represented “the best in the country,” Somervell boasted.

It was essentially a public relations ploy, and an expensive one at that. Somervell’s hires were not the dollar-a-year men of lore; the consultants were drawing as much as $100 a day plus expenses. Luther Leisenring, a longtime civilian employee with the Construction Division who had served as supervising architect since 1930 until Somervell demoted him and put Bergstrom in his place, groused that the various society heads “just sat around in fancy offices and signed a few papers” and did no appreciable work.

Bergstrom, at least, was no figurehead. His patriotism fired by Nazi atrocities, including in his father’s native Norway, Bergstrom took his assignment seriously and became Somervell’s key adviser on architectural matters. He worked “every day and long into the nights,” assisting in the design of the camps, munitions plants, and buildings the Construction Division was putting up around the country, and bringing in private architects to help.

Now Bergstrom was in charge of the biggest project of his long career. Captain Robert W. Colglazier, a Construction Division officer, was under orders from Somervell to get everything Bergstrom needed—people, equipment, office space—and to get it without question. Bergstrom wanted a lot. “He literally, and I mean literally, wanted hundreds of people,” Colglazier recalled. He scrambled to meet the chief architect’s demands.

Meanwhile, Bergstrom and his assistants gathered with Casey’s team Friday night at the division headquarters in the Railroad Retirement Building in Washington to plan the new project.

It fit

The Arlington Farm tract had a peculiar shape, bound on five sides by roads or other divisions. It was roughly a square, with a triangle sliced off one corner, leaving an asymmetrical pentagon. The site was bound on the north for 1,360 feet by Arlington Memorial Drive, the stately road that connected Memorial Bridge to Arlington National Cemetery. On the west the border ran for 1,340 feet along Arlington Ridge Road, an old and important thoroughfare connecting Georgetown to Alexandria. To the south, a double row of oak trees bounded the site, dividing it from a field used for training troops at Fort Myer. Another planned highway would run on a north-south route, forming the southeast border of the site. On the east-northeast side, the borderline followed a branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a proposed truck highway for 1,150 feet.

Though he had reduced the number of floors from four to three, Somervell still wanted four million square feet of office space. The design team gazed at maps, trying to figure out how to fit such a large building in.

Bergstrom led the deliberations, working closely with Casey and Frederick H. Fowler, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, another Somervell hire. Roy C. Mitchell, Bergstrom’s longtime chief engineer in Los Angeles who had followed his boss to Washington, brought expertise in structural design and mechanical work. Also detailed to the team was Socrates Thomas Stathes, a young War Department draftsman who had studied architecture at Washington’s Catholic University.

Stathes was known to friends as Red, in honor of his auburn hair and freckled face. His father and mother had emigrated in 1900 from the Greek village of Isari and settled in Washington, where they opened a restaurant. Red, the second oldest of their five children, was the pride of the Stathes family. He earned an architecture degree at Catholic University and after winning the Paris Prize in 1938 went to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Caught in France with no good way home when the war broke out the following year, Stathes used the Greek he had spoken since childhood to befriend several Greek crewmembers aboard a freighter. They let him stow away back to America. Stathes went straight to work for the War Department, and the gifted draftsman now found himself assigned to sketch the first drawings of the new building.

Despite the layout of the tract, a pentagonal shape was not immediately obvious to the designers; rather, it gradually dawned on them that it might make sense. The team tried “different setups and layouts, such as square, octagonal and rectangular and so on,” Casey later said, “and finally we came up with sort of a joint expression of views and thoughts and ideas and ended up with this five-sided pentagon structure.” Stathes’s sketch showed an irregular pentagon, like a square with a corner cut off, more or less matching the shape of the tract. It was really two buildings, a five-sided ring surrounding a smaller one of the same shape.

All through the weekend they refined the design. The interior of the outer ring was lined with forty-nine barracks-like wings, sticking in like the teeth of a comb. The smaller ring had thirty-four exterior wings, all pointing toward the outer ring. The wings were 50 feet wide and 160 feet long, separated from each other by thirty-foot-wide open-air “light courts.” Corridors connected the two rings on the ground and third floors. The whole structure had a gross area of 5.1 million square feet, including 4 million square feet of office space and the remainder for services facilities. Only the most senior officials would have private offices; everyone else would work in enormous open areas. Allowing a hundred square feet per worker, the building could hold forty thousand employees.

By Sunday night, the plans were completed. Bergstrom had come up with an estimate of $17.5 million for the project; to be on the safe side, Somervell would double that to $35 million. The figure was startlingly high for a single building, yet would prove woefully inadequate. Stathes’s drawings were prepared for presentation to Representative Woodrum’s House subcommittee on Tuesday.

Two years before his death in 1981, Casey could not conceal his pride over meeting Somervell’s challenge: “I might say that on Monday morning he did have our layout plans, the architectural perspectives, and the general description of this structure conforming generally to his instructions. As I say it was a busy weekend.”

While all the designers contributed, it was Bergstrom, more than anyone else, who conceived the pentagonal shape. “I would say Bergstrom probably has the greatest credit for it,” Casey said in 1979. Contemporary records reach the same conclusion. “The original conception, the general layout and the overall direction of the design…were the responsibility and the contribution of Mr. Bergstrom,” according to a 1943 Corps of Engineers memorandum.

There were many problems with the irregular design. The pattern was awkward and the routes between wings of the two buildings were circuitous. Lacking symmetry, with rows of wings sticking out, the building was frankly quite ugly.

Yet given the five-sided site, the pentagonal design had one virtue that overrode all other considerations, Red Stathes remembered more than sixty years later: “It fit.”

It should not ever come to pieces

The whole idea seemed nonsensical to Henry Stimson, still disgusted with the debacle over the last New War Department Building. How could the War Department propose to build a new headquarters when it had just opened one last month?