by Steve Vogel
Just arriving at the Pentagon in the first days of 1943 was like stepping forward in time. There was a sense of excitement about the whole building that even the lowliest clerks shared. The nearly completed road network leading to the building, with its cloverleaf interchanges, ramps, and overpasses, was quite unlike anything most Americans had seen. Architectural Forum, a respected magazine in the field, enthusiastically described the overall vision of the project. “For miles around the results of building the Pentagon are visible: the reclaimed slums, the broad roads, and the new, integrated approaches to the capital,” the magazine wrote in January 1943. “Perhaps the greatest lesson of the Pentagon is here: as building approaches the scale technically feasible, the distinction between architecture and city planning vanishes. Despite its shortcomings, the Pentagon gives a real foretaste of the future.”
Most people came into the building via the massive bus terminal, which had opened in November. Leading up to it was a looping access road, its turns utterly confounding to riders. “The highway began to contort itself into weird geometrical figures so that now the building was on our starboard, now on our port, now immediately in front of us and now directly behind,” a taxi passenger wrote. “There can be no doubt that the chief of army engineers collaborated with the landscape architect so that army headquarters could not be taken in a frontal assault.” After a final loop, the buses and taxis swooped into the Pentagon through a thousand-foot tunnel running the entire length of the first floor on the building’s southeast face. Parallel rows of neon lights lined the whole route, forming a continuous streak to passengers aboard the rushing vehicles.
“Here is the picture of a future architecture in which buildings will be linked to their users by smooth-flowing traffic networks,” Architectural Forum reported. “To the visitor who has just been exposed to the vast and boring expanse of windows, cornices and columns, nothing comes as a greater surprise than this sleek tunnel, for its entrances have been almost hidden in the corners of the building. The buses glide in between low walls of smooth gray brick, their engines muffled by a ceiling of acoustic tile.”
The terminal, the largest that had ever been incorporated into a building, could handle 25,000 persons an hour. At peak hours, buses rushed through at the rate of one every eight seconds, pulling up in two lanes to one of fourteen loading platforms. A third lane served taxis. Passengers pouring off the buses and taxis complained of near-asphyxiation from gas and dust, but engineers promised conditions would improve as more roads around the building were paved and eight huge exhaust fans were properly adjusted. The passengers moved from the platforms through doors leading toward twenty-one stairways, feeling a rush of cool air coming down the steps from the building.
At the top of the stairways, they dropped a nickel for the bus ride into fare boxes manned by conductors and strode into the Pentagon Concourse on the second floor. This was a vast and bustling expanse 690 feet long and 135 feet wide, almost the width of a football field and more than twice as long. A long row of round columns, painted a glistening red, ran down the middle almost as far as the eye could see. The concourse—larger than that of New York’s Pennsylvania Station—“seemed to me to be big enough for tank maneuvers,” one visitor wrote. “If you waited around there long enough you’d see every American general you’d ever heard of and more second lieutenants than you dreamed existed.” It was a futuristic scene—a precursor to an indoor shopping mall. There were no windows, just diffused light. The walls were lined with neon signs identifying various facilities. Already there was a bank, a sixteen-chair barbershop, a checkroom, newsstands and shoeshine stands, and there were plans for shops, a post office, and more. It was a self-contained community, designed that way because the Pentagon was considered in the hinterlands, with few services nearby.
A reception desk was centered at each end of the concourse—one for government employees, the second for other visitors. Eight women—all of them “comely young ladies,” according to the Star—presided behind the counters. “The girls are selected for their good looks, brains, tact, and just ordinary horse sense, and many a male lingers at the counter,” the newspaper reported.
Visitors—those not asking for dates—stated their business. Receptionists checked identifications and verified appointments. Military and government visitors receiving clearance were given badges. All others had to wait—often for lengthy periods—for an escort, usually an officer or employee from the office to be visited.
Once past security, the visitor moved into the abyss. A writer for Popular Science likened it to “something of the sensation of a tourist viewing Niagara Falls for the first time…. Torrents of humanity swirl through its corridors—Army officers and men, civilian specialists, stenographers, cafeteria waitresses, switchboard operators, messengers.”
Broad ramps of polished black terrazzo led out from the concourse; one carried pedestrians farther into the second floor, another led up a 10 percent slope to the third floor, a third with two switchbacks rose to the fourth floor. The corridors had the feel of a circus, as messengers rolled by on bicycles, roller skates, and oversize tricycle carts tinkling their bells to avoid running over pedestrians. Message centers on each floor served as hubs, linked by fifteen miles of pneumatic tubes that whisked files and correspondence throughout the building inside plastic containers.
The quickest way to any far-off point in the building—even if it was on the same ring where one started—generally was to go toward the center of the building to the inner A Ring and follow signs leading to the proper radial corridor. Hugging the inside track of the A Ring, an employee could circle the building in 1,800 feet, while sticking to the E Ring was a journey of 4,605 feet, not much short of a mile.
Travelers gauged their location by color-coded corridor walls—the firstfloorwastan,thesecondgreen,thethirdred,thefourthgray,andthefifth blue. The upstairs floors, in theory, had a bit more natural light. The rings on the top three floors were divided by light courts—open space allowing sunlight and fresh air to reach the thousands of steel casement windows lining both sides of each ring. Seen from the air, the light courts gave the building its distinctive look of five parallel rings circling the center court, rather than one solid block of concrete.
The fifth floor was packed with oddities, most born of the hasty decision in July to add another story atop the three middle rings. There was less headroom in the hallways and fewer toilets, stairways, and fire escapes. The exterior façade outside the fifth floor was covered with a slablike entablature that wrapped around the building. It gave the Pentagon a classical look, but it meant none of the fifth floor had windows out front.
The first floor was darker and danker still, with narrower corridors and less light—even on the E Ring, many offices lacked windows. First-floor employees also had to watch out for trucks, cars, and carts: An interior truck road, forty feet in width, ran between the B and C rings through four of the Pentagon’s five sections, giving supply trucks and firefighters a route to the inner courtyard.
Most unnatural were the basement and sub-basement, a maze of mezzanines, corridors, and gangways. Much of this netherworld was built into the low ground on the eastern side of the building, but there were pockets of space all around. The basement extended beneath the Mall and River terraces, well beyond the Pentagon’s confine creating an F and even a G Ring below some of the building. Utility pipes, ducts, and pneumatic tubing snaked through the narrow corridors.
The basement had a Byzantine quality that would only grow over the years, as various mysterious offices took up residence in the Pentagon’s lower reaches. Yet its design had more to do with engineering than secrecy. Since the Pentagon had been built on both low ground and high ground—the western two-thirds forty feet above sea level, and the eastern third ten feet above—the low ground had been raised with eight feet of fill. A retaining wall had been needed along the line where the forty-foot and eighteen-foot levels came together. Rather than build a long, twenty-two-foot-high retaining wall—a
difficult and expensive proposition—engineers constructed one eleven-foot retaining wall stepping down to a second eleven-foot retaining wall. The result was the Pentagon had a mezzanine floor and a smaller basement.
The building’s low setting in what was once Hell’s Bottom placed it well below the surrounding high ground of Arlington Ridge and the commanding ground of the Arlington mansion. Moreover, the building was so low in relation to its width—71 feet, 31/
2 inches high, with outer walls each 921 feet long—that its mass was dispersed. It was impossible from the ground to see more than two sides at a time, which disguised the building’s size. Large as the Pentagon was, it barely made a ripple on the landscape.
Likewise, from an architectural standpoint, the Pentagon blended surprisingly well into the evolving design of Pierre L’Enfant’s Washington. The Pentagon’s façades carried the story of twentieth-century architecture in federal Washington until that point. In the early 1900s, as L’Enfant’s plan was resuscitated from the dead, Beaux-Arts classicism enjoyed a revival. By the 1920s, reaction against such elaborate and monumental design helped spawn the rise of the modern style, with an emphasis on simple design and functionality over ornamentation. Stripped classicism—a synthesis of classical and modern—became the dominant style in 1930s federal Washington. The Pentagon was stripped classicism writ large. With it, the style reached a pinnacle—certainly in size, but also in effectiveness, in the view of some later critics. Stripped classicism “may never have been so gainfully employed as on those long Pentagon walls,” wrote Washington Post critic Benjamin Forgey.
The façades followed a traditional classical form. The colonnades, with tall, narrow, rectangular columns, were clearly delineated on the top by the entablature and on the bottom by a pediment molding line. On two sides facing Washington—the River and Mall, the building’s official entrances—the colonnades projected out to form central porticos with steps. The two official entrances were decorated with simple cornices and friezes. Yet all the building’s exterior features, including the columns and the entablature, were stripped and smooth, with little ornamentation.
The limestone of the façades was an excellent match for the stripped classicism, not shining like marble yet conveying a timeless look. On the rest of the exterior walls, the architectural concrete Edwin Bergstrom had insisted be used—for all the headache it caused McShain—lent a coherence that brick could not have provided. A sloping roof of unfading green Vermont slate stood atop the inner and outer rings and the radial corridors of the building. The slate—pooled from many quarries because of the great amount needed—had a variegated gray-green hue that one observer found pleasingly reminiscent of the old copper roof on part of the U.S. Capitol.
None of this was to say the Pentagon was beautiful. Public reprobation was swift and severe. “About the building’s exterior, the less said the better,” wrote Architectural Forum, which, despite its enthusiasm about the road network and bus tunnel, found the endless stripped classical walls dreadfully unimaginative: “In essence it is the official Washington front, stretched thin to cover 4,600 running feet of façade.” Newsweek condemned its “simple, penitentiary-like exterior.” The New York Times described it as a “great, concrete doughnut of a building.” “Monstrosity” was a word frequently heard.
Yet the first judgments were perhaps too harsh. David Witmer, chief architect after Edwin Bergstrom’s departure, observed that “the design is far from, yet reminiscent of, the classic tradition. Withal, while it is harmonious with the public buildings of the national capital, it offers a [sheer] quality which sets it apart.”
Major William Frierson, an Army historian assigned to write a booklet about the building soon after its completion, elaborated on Witmer’s words and eloquently captured what set the Pentagon apart: “The world’s largest office building was designed in a race against time and was planned for efficiency, not beauty,” he wrote.
Yet of all Washington’s public buildings reminiscent of the classic style, The Pentagon is least imitative; and of all the structures modern in conception, it is the least self-consciously startling. Its massive, fortress-like outline suggests at once its military function. There is a quiet dignity in the symmetrical facades with square columns recessed in projection which break the long flat expanses and give both order and variety to the pattern. This is reflected on all of the five sides, each displaying…nicely proportioned stone facing. The effect is Hellenic in its simplicity and harmony; modern in its lack of curves, its rigid formality, and its vastness.
A little chiseling
The building was completed before winter’s end, but the project was not. The 320-acre Pentagon grounds remained an enormous work zone as crews hurried to finish reshaping the land. Through February and March, more than 40 bulldozers and 125 dump trucks rumbled about, moving tons of fill, rocks, and grass seed. A thousand men were at work, some operating heavy equipment, others swinging picks and wielding shovels. The work was being planned and directed by famed Cleveland landscape architect Albert D. Taylor—a follower of the Frederick Law Olmsted school of American landscaping and another one of the big, pricey names Somervell had brought to the Construction Division.
The landscaping was not primarily a beautification project, although Taylor’s goal was to integrate the Pentagon grounds with the abutting Arlington National Cemetery and National Park Service land along the Potomac. The ground had to be covered with topsoil and planted with grass, trees, and shrubs to prevent serious erosion and possible damage to the highway network. Already there had been erosion in uncovered areas, and drains were clogging with mud. The landscaping had been vastly pared down from what was originally contemplated. Taylor and Witmer had hoped to plant some six thousand trees, but the number was cut in half. To further save money, Groves ordered that they plant only scrawny trees with diameters less than three inches.
The whirl of activity nonetheless raised the curiosity of Time magazine, which began asking why the War Department was spending so much time, money, and effort landscaping the Pentagon. Groves resorted to his old tricks, juggling figures to hide costs. “The General figures we ought to do a little chiseling on Time magazine…and define landscaping as planting of trees and bushes and shrubs,” Groves’s aide, Franklin Matthias, told Renshaw February 17.
“And leave out the topsoil?” Renshaw asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well that’s one way of handling it alright,” Renshaw said.
That accounting trick, together with the actual cuts, reduced the amount ostensibly being spent on landscaping from $2.3 million to $385,000. But it did nothing to stop Time from running a story denouncing the landscaping as a senseless beautification project. The likely explanation, the magazine theorized, was that Somervell and Roosevelt wanted it, and “now, even with the manpower pinch here, no one had the time nor strength to stop its course.”
Groves responded to the criticism by banning the word “landscaping” from any documents related to the Pentagon. He erupted in fury in April when cost estimates from Renshaw’s office violated this edict. “How long is it going to take to eliminate the word ‘landscaping’ from the writings and droolings, and I mean droolings, (good soldiers keep their mouths shut) of your personnel,” Groves wrote in a memorandum to Renshaw on April 9. He also ordered Renshaw to return the memo “so that I can destroy it,” but a copy survived.
By whatever name, the landscaping continued. Once the grading was finished, planting continued well into the spring, performed “almost entirely by squads of Negro women, who all wear straw hats, cotton blouses and blue dungaree trousers, giving the countryside something of a plantation aspect,” The New York Times reported.
I prefer not mentioning our fee
Constructing a building that was more than half again bigger than the one they had begun did not translate to a similar bigger profit for McShain and the Virginia contractors. The original contract setting their fee at $524,000 was based on a building of four
million gross square feet. McShain argued that the contractors’ fee should be raised by at least $200,000.
Groves mercilessly drove down the figure. “Successive negotiations have brought him to the point where I think he is ready to accept an amount in the neighborhood of $110,000, although he appears none too happy about it,” Groves reported on March 16. McShain was even less pleased when the War Department’s Construction Contract Board reduced the amount to $90,000, making the total fee $614,000. By the terms of the 60-40 split in the contract, McShain would get $368,400 and the Virginia contractors $245,600. McShain would claim it was one of the lowest fees the War Department ever paid to any firm in proportion to the size of the building. “Contrary to the opinion of many, the profits on the job were not too attractive considering the great responsibility,” he said.
Perhaps to soften the blow, the War Department promptly chose McShain to receive the Army-Navy “E” Award for war construction. Major General Thomas Robins, the Construction Division chief, presented the builder with a large “E” burgee at a ceremony in Arlington on April 17. “Fly it proudly, for it is the visible symbol of what your country thinks of your efforts,” Robins told McShain. “It is Uncle Sam’s version of ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’”
McShain did fly it proudly, trumpeting the award in a full-page ad in the Washington Post. But it did not quite erase the sting of his fee, which rankled McShain to the end of his days. “I prefer not mentioning our fee, as it will constantly be a source of embarrassment to the Government,” he wrote in a 1978 letter. “They considered it was such a great privilege for me to build the Pentagon that the fee should be very low.”
Yet the Pentagon project had cemented McShain’s reputation. Before long, it was being said in Washington that Pierre L’Enfant may have designed the city, but it was John McShain who built it. That was not much of an exaggeration. So many construction projects in Washington were adorned with the McShain name that a radio commentator would later joke that signs at the city line reading “Welcome to Washington, the Nation’s Capital” should be changed to “Welcome to Washington—John McShain, Builder.”