Headquarters of the US Department of Defense, the Pentagon, was built in Arlington because of lack of space in Washington DC.
In 1941, three weeks after Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, US President Franklin Roosevelt declared a state of national emergency. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany occupied much of continental Europe and Great Britain was urging the US to enter the war. The US War Department was growing rapidly, with 24,000 personnel scattered among 17 buildings in Washington, DC.
General George C. Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, turned to Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell, head of the Army’s Construction Division, for a solution. Somervell’s proposal was audacious: a headquarters big enough for 40,000 people, with 4 million square feet of office space. A building this large could not fit in Washington, so Somervell chose a site across the Potomac River in Virginia, just east of Arlington National Cemetery. Known as Arlington Farm, the plot of land was once part of the Arlington House estate.
When Somervell’s lead architect, G. Edwin Bergstrom, drew up the design for the building, he was forced by the position of existing roads at the site to use a five-sided shape. Somervell had determined that the building could be no more than four stories high, both to accommodate a wartime scarcity of steel and to prevent the blocking of views of Washington.
The House of Representatives passed the necessary legislation for the project on July 28, 1941; the Senate passed it on August 14. But controversy arose over the scale of the building and because it was so close to the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery. Roosevelt declared that the building location be moved to a site three-quarters of a mile south of Arlington Farm, adjacent to Washington-Hoover Airport.
Although the new site no longer required the pentagon shape, time was tight and things went ahead as planned. The shape also recalled traditional fortress constructions and some of the Civil War-era forts.
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