by Steve Vogel
At a meeting the night of October 13 with David Witmer, Bergstrom’s deputy, McShain angrily warned he might shut down work on the job if the designers could not provide more plans for the floor slabs. “We’re pushing that job frantically to help you and save you any embarrassment rather than close down, which we really should,” he told the architect. It was a bluff—McShain would sooner die in anonymity than stop work even temporarily on this project—but the problem was real.
The following morning, a clear and warm fall day more than a month after ground was broken, McShain called Groves to complain. “We haven’t got what we really need and what we should have to drive that job the way it’s necessary to finish,” McShain said. “Now we’re losing perfect weather. Look at a day like today—and, well, we’ve got about one-tenth of the men we should have out on that job.”
By October 28, McShain had only part of the plans for the second floor on Section A, and the situation got worse in each section around the building. He was still waiting for some of the plans for the first floor of Section B, and there were no plans for the piles and foundation in Section C. Bulldozers were ready to start grading Section D but sat idle, waiting for plans. No structural information for the power plant was available save for the basement.
Every day Hauck clamored for more plans from the designers: “What do you have for us to do today, because we finished everything you gave us yesterday.”
Further complicating the problem, the project had lost the services of Lieutenant Colonel Pat Casey, the energetic Construction Division design chief who had played a critical role in the early planning for the building. In September Casey received a cable from General Douglas MacArthur, with whom he had previously served in the Philippines, asking Casey to return to Manila as chief engineer with the U.S. Army Forces Far East Command. Casey went to see General Somervell. “Well, you’re not going to accept that, are you?” Somervell asked incredulously.
“I definitely am,” Casey replied.
Somervell was shocked that Casey would jilt him for a has-been like MacArthur. “Now look, Pat…if you do that, you’re going to somebody who’s reached the top and won’t go any further, whereas you should stick with me…I’m on the way to the top.”
But Casey was not to be dissuaded, even by Somervell, and he departed for Manila in October.
Worried about the growing design crisis, Groves assigned one of his top men, Colonel Thomas F. Farrell, to investigate. Farrell was a widely experienced engineer who had worked on the Panama Canal and served as New York State Commissioner of Canals and Waterways. Farrell knew a mess when he saw one. After he attended a weekly progress meeting on the evening of October 27 with McShain, Bergstrom, and Renshaw, Farrell’s assessment was gloomy. “It is apparent that there is no immediate prospect of the Architect-Engineer getting sufficiently ahead of the Contractor as to permit full steam ahead,” Farrell reported to Groves the next day. “It would be entirely practicable for the Contractor to employ two or three times his present forces if design information was available.”
The design team must be reinforced as rapidly as possible, Farrell concluded. The most pressing need was for first-class concrete structural engineers familiar with modern techniques of calculating how to safely design large reinforced-concrete buildings. It was a specialized and critical skill, especially in a building with miles of concrete walls planned; miscalculations could cause the structure to fail.
Groves telephoned private engineering firms and Army quartermaster depots around the country, desperately trying to find concrete specialists. Price was no object, Groves made plain—he was offering salaries of $125 a week to designers who would normally earn $75. “We’re going to pay them twice what they’re worth,” Groves promised. The colonel was livid when a highly regarded concrete structural engineer who reported from Philadelphia turned around and left when he was mistakenly told his salary would only be $90. “He just laughed at it and came home,” Groves was told. A chagrined Renshaw rushed to square things away, but concrete structural engineers remained scarce.
The design bottleneck was not Bergstrom’s fault. Yet something had to be done. “It must be recognized that in a construction operation of this character, the Architect would normally have a start of many months on the Contractor,” Farrell pointed out to Groves. “Since this start was not available, there will be continuous pressure on the Architect by the Contractor for many months to come. The Architect’s present forces are apparently working ‘all out’ trying to keep ahead.”
In the hangar
“All out” was not fast enough. It would be up to Ides van Waterschoot van der Gracht to figure out a way to produce more drawings. Van der Gracht had joined the project soon after ground was broken in September. Somervell had asked William Delano—Frederic’s distant cousin—to suggest an architect who could organize the enormous job of producing drawings for the building and oversee the huge force of draftsmen: “Somebody to help operate this mob.” Delano, a well-known New York architect, recommended van der Gracht, one of his protégés. As architect for LaGuardia Airport, Delano had formed a lifelong friendship with Somervell during the WPA days, and his recommendation carried great weight with the general. Somervell immediately telephoned van der Gracht in New York; the following day, the thirty-nine-year-old architect, a Dutch man with tousled brown hair, found himself in the general’s office in Washington.
“Mr. Delano said you were reasonably competent in those things, and what do you think?” Somervell asked. “Do you think that you can handle it?”
“General, I never even thought of anything as big as this,” van der Gracht said.
Somervell was dismissive. “Oh, don’t let that worry you, neither have we,” he replied.
Ides van der Gracht was thus recruited to be chief of production for the project. He stood a shade under six feet tall and was thin as a rail, with blue eyes that shone like headlamps above his prominent nose and perpetual smile. Van der Gracht had an engaging personality and a cordial, forthright manner that won him friends easily. He was born in Graz, Austria, in 1902 and grew up in Katwijk, Holland, a fishing village on the North Sea; his father was a Dutch businessman and his mother came from a wealthy Austrian family. During World War I, at the age of thirteen, Ides came with his parents to the United States and studied at Jesuit schools. His parents returned to Holland after the war but Ides stayed in America, attending Princeton University. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1923 and stayed on to earn a master’s degree at Princeton’s School of Architecture, where his professors considered him unusually gifted.
A Princeton friend helped land him a job at the prestigious firm of Delano & Aldrich. William Delano was quite taken with the young Dutchman, treating him as a surrogate son. At a young age van der Gracht was entrusted with the U.S. Post Office project in Washington, part of a group of prominent government buildings constructed in the 1920s and 1930s known as the Federal Triangle. “He has shown exceptional skill and ability in the way he has handled this building, from the beginning to the end,” Delano wrote. Van der Gracht became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1934 and was thoroughly Americanized by his education and work experience. But he retained a European outlook on the world and a European stake in the war. He toured the old country for more than a year on a beautiful British BSA motorcycle beginning in 1937, visiting his mother’s family estate in Austria and returning to America just before her homeland was absorbed into the Nazi Reich in March 1938. When Somervell called in September 1941, van der Gracht’s parents and sister, living in Roermond in southeastern Holland, were no longer free citizens but living in a Nazi-occupied land. Van der Gracht was eager to sign on.
“Okay, go to work,” Somervell said.
The first priority was to bolster the size of the drafting force, already numbering well over a hundred. Van der Gracht was assigned several assistants who “went all over the United States siphoning off the best talent they could lay their hands on to form this team, which grew l
ike topsy,” van der Gracht recalled many years later.
More architects and draftsmen of all types were brought in from the Quartermaster Corps headquarters in Washington. Larry Lemmon, a dark-haired and thoughtful thirty-six-year-old bored with his work as a $2,600-a-year assistant landscape architect with the Construction Division, was at work one morning in the drafting office at division headquarters in the Railroad Retirement Building on Capitol Hill when the office chief called for everyone’s attention. The supervisor walked down a wide aisle running the length of the room between two parallel rows of drafting tables, tagging every second man on the shoulder, Lemmon among them. Everyone selected was to report the following morning for duty designing the new War Department building. Lemmon’s life was about to get much more interesting.
The drafting team was working from the basement of a Fort Myer warehouse previously used to stable horses that drew the caissons at Arlington National Cemetery. To van der Gracht, the warehouse was more like a sweatshop than an architect’s drafting room. With the heat wave broiling Washington that fall, the place was miserable. Draftsmen were sweating so much they had to cover their drawings with blotting paper to avoid ruining them. “It was hot as the devil,” van der Gracht recalled. “So we sat there, stripped to the waist, some just in their shorts, and with big blotting paper all over the plans with just small holes…where you were actually drawing while the perspiration was dripping off your nose onto the drawings.”
More problematic, the warehouse was far too small for the burgeoning force of architects. The answer was standing before their eyes on the construction site itself, on the grounds of the old Washington-Hoover Airport: the Eastern Airlines hangar. The large metal-frame building was designed to hold airplanes, not people, but it was hurriedly wired with telephones and outfitted with hundreds of drafting tables and a blueprinting plant. The designers moved in on November 3. A big Eastern Airlines logo remained on the hangar’s front, listing the attractive destinations—Miami, Tampa, and New Orleans among them—that the overworked members of the drafting force hadn’t a prayer of visiting. The hangar was hardly plush, but compared to the Fort Myer warehouse it seemed luxurious. The architects had sixteen thousand square feet of unobstructed drafting space. Larry Lemmon was astonished at the size—the hangar had “become a huge design factory,” he said. “[Yet] large as it was, it was still not large enough.”
The design force was approaching its full strength of about 350, including 110 architects, 54 structural engineers, 43 mechanical engineers, 18 electrical engineers, 13 plumbing engineers, various specialists in roads, landscaping, and acoustics, as well as dozens of clerks and messengers. To make room for them all, a large extension was added to the hangar and covered with a shed roof. The expanded hangar had twenty-three thousand square feet, with room for four hundred drafting tables. The draftsmen worked at row after row of the tables, illuminated by lamps hanging from cables strung between the exposed beams of the cavernous hangar.
The drafting force was broken down by specialty—one draftsman might do nothing but detail elements of the façade, another the foundations, another windows, another toilets. They were divided into teams—architectural, structural, highways, mechanical engineering, heating and cooling, and plumbing, among others—each headed by a team chief. Every team in turn was divided into squads, each reporting to a squad leader. Lemmon was assigned to the highway-engineering team and given the job of drawing plans and cross-sections for roads and bridges.
Van der Gracht was a natural organizer—he had a “nit-picking mind,” by his own description—and he brought order and reason to the chaotic process. Van der Gracht would get orders from Bergstrom as to what was needed, and it was up to him to see that the hundreds of architects and engineers produced it. “My job essentially was to keep everyone drawing in the same direction,” he said.
Van der Gracht issued a daily bulletin that kept the entire drafting force up to date on revisions and procedures. He met first thing each morning with the team chiefs, issuing instructions in extremely precise and slightly accented English, liberally sprinkled with corny Americanisms. They tackled the requests that had poured in from the field during the night: The contractor was screaming for foundation plans because a pile driver would be finished by 10:30—where should they move it? Van der Gracht would turn to the section head responsible for the plans—in this case, the structural engineer chief. “It’s your baby,” he was fond of saying. “So please, get it out, get it duplicated, and get it to the field.”
Behind van der Gracht’s desk was a long wall that ran along half the length of the hangar, covered with schedules, diagrams, and color-coded progress reports. Assistants constantly updated them with the latest information from the field. Van der Gracht paced up and down the length of the wall, stopping in his tracks when he spotted any sign that a design team was falling behind schedule. “Jeepers creepers!” he would exclaim. “They’d better get off the seat.” He would immediately shift priorities and feed reinforcements to the faltering team.
Van der Gracht could tell almost instinctively what was fitting and what was not. “That whole building, in a way, took shape in my mind,” he recalled. The thin Dutchman would regularly walk through the aisles between the endless rows of drafting boards, scanning desktops like a proctor monitoring a study hall. His eyes would zero in on anything that looked out of place and he would start asking questions. “Now wait a minute here, this isn’t quite right,” the offending draftsman would be told.
The draftsmen were using tools that would become antiquated in subsequent years: T-squares, pencils, and carbon copies on typewriters. The Pentagon, van der Gracht later said, “was probably the culmination of the T-square and typewriter way of producing architecture.” All drawings were made in pencil on tracing paper; there was no time to ink them.
Drawings were issued nightly in order to record design decisions made during the day and get the information to contractors as fast as possible. At times they were reissued as often as every hour to record near-constant revisions. Two Ozalid machines for copying blueprints ran twenty-four hours a day, operated in three shifts of four men each. The machines, reeking of the ammonia used to produce the blueprints, spit out an average of fifteen thousand yards of print paper per week—at least twelve thousand per week and at times more than thirty thousand. On nights when there was an especially large output, three outside blueprinters would be hired to make copies.
Anywhere from two dozen to five dozen copies of each blueprint were produced, measuring on average three feet by five feet. Some tracings were printed so often that they wore out and had be redrawn two or three times during the night. Every morning a station wagon was loaded with hundreds of prints to be delivered all around the job to Army engineers, contractors, subcontractors, foremen, inspectors, field coordinators, draftsmen, and many others. “The stuff was pushed out by the score,” van der Gracht said.
The builders and Army engineers did not always await delivery. “They went in at night and took their plans while they were finishing them and got going,” Furman said. “It was that fast.” McShain himself would go down to the hangar with Hauck early some mornings to grab the latest plans.
“We were designing just one step ahead of the pile drivers, as it were,” van der Gracht recalled. “Construction was always on the heels of design,” was the way Renshaw put it. Indeed, construction sometimes got ahead of design, often enough that Luther Leisenring, the architect in charge of the specifications group, took to referring to building specs as “historical records” by the time they were written, there was often something else already in the building.
“How big should I make that beam across the third floor?” architect Allen Dickey was asked by a colleague.
“I don’t know,” Dickey replied. “They installed it yesterday.”
To curb the design chaos, a separate field force of 117 architects, engineers, and inspectors worked at the construction site; they were divided int
o six teams, one for each section of the building and another for the grounds. The field architects were granted unusual authority to make decisions on the spot. They served as advisers and interpreters at the construction site, peering at blueprints, gauging the intent of the designers, and trying to reconcile differences between the plans on paper and the realities on the ground. Construction foremen waited impatiently at their elbows for the verdict, ready to relay it to construction gangs, bulldozer operators, or pile drivers. Revisions made in the field were sometimes memorialized in the plans after the fact, and sometimes not.
The architects soon developed an esprit de corps—“it was a tremendously good working gang,” van der Gracht said. It helped that they had a common enemy. An unnamed draftsman composed and distributed a bit of doggerel aimed at their primary tormenter, Somervell:
Oh the General from the Arkansaw
Has a Jinx for raising H–
And he thinks his Thoughts are the Blooming Law
And Holy Gospel just as well
He swears that Things which can’t be Done
Are the Things you got to do
And cussed be the Sons of Gun
Who hint that they can’t put it through
For the General totes a six inch Jaw
And the air around him Reeks
“Get them Jitters out of your Craw
Gimme them Plans in three more weeks”
If I had my way, if I had my say,
I’d…send that General right way
Straight back to the Arkansaw
Such verse-mongering was one of the few outlets the draftsmen had—with work days that sometimes stretched to eighteen hours, there was almost no time for a social life. Van der Gracht would make it home around eleven at night to a little white wooden shack in the woods on the crest of a hill on North Nash Street in Arlington Heights, overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. The owner, Bessie Christian, rented it to him for almost nothing—the shack was practically bare and there was no heat and little electricity. Before falling asleep, van der Gracht would relax by working on the design of a little house she hoped to build on the site.