ARMED FORCES: The House of Brass

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Almost before the roof was on, it was a butt of criticism, a begetter of jokes and a breeder of legend. There was the story of the Western Union messenger who went in on a Monday morning, got caught in the red tape, and walked out on Friday a full colonel. There was the man who sat down at an empty desk to rest his feet and forthwith found himself with a phone, blotter, desk set and secretary. And then there was the acutely pregnant woman who accosted a guard and urgently demanded the way out. "Lady, you shouldn't have come in here in that condition," he said. "But I wasn't, when I came in," she wailed.

The Pentagon, now as familiar an address around the world as Whitehall, 10 Downing Street or the Quai d'Orsay, is a vast concrete and limestone materialization of the military mind. Like the military mind, it inspires awe, often admiration, sometimes exasperation. It is simple in concept and organization, infinitely complex in detail; a marvel of systematic sense when the system is mastered, a mire of confusion when it is not. It is the brain of the U.S.'s armed might. Through its radio antennae its nerve ends reach to a bloody hill in Korea, to Eisenhower's SHAPE headquarters, to a destroyer squadron in the Mediterranean. The incoming messages are caught up by the churning life which animates its rings of corridors, flow to high, bare spaces where it weighs, remembers, balances before it makes its decisions; the answers clatter out over its ceaseless machines.

The housing for this vast brain is a marvelously articulated mechanism, unique on the face of the known world. It is the world's largest office building—three times the size of the Empire State Building, 50% bigger than Chicago's Merchandise Mart. The U.S. Capitol would fit neatly into just one of its five segments. It was built low because of the nearby Washington airport, with stairways and ramps instead of elevators* to save wartime materials, and with five sides to add wall space without adding walking time (the way to save steps is to walk around the hub-like ring to a numbered corridor, then walk out the spoke to the proper ring). Each of its five outer walls is roughly the length of three football fields, and in all, its corridors stretch for 17½ miles.

Somervell's Folly. The Pentagon was built in a wartime hurry for the wartime Army. The Army's Engineer General Brehon Somervell (now retired and president of Koppers Co.) drove the work at a prodigious clip. The first offices were occupied in seven months; the job completed in 16. Some 300 architects had a hand in its design. It has five floors, each of which is painted a distinctive color—powder blue, grey, peach, green and tan. It has 7,370 windows, but it is entirely air-conditioned by a unique system, regulated by electronic "eyes" on the roof which adjust the temperature by the sun's heat. By conservative official reckoning, it cost $83 million. At first it was called "Somervell's folly"; critics predicted that after World War II it would become a vast, desolate pigeon roost. Now actually filled to overflowing, it is probably the most efficiently used building in the Government's vast catalogue of real estate.