boeing 40 88 building inside office space

The three-story building would be completed, he claimed, within a year, with 500,000 square feet ready for use within six months. 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 blocking the views of Washington, D.C. Edwin Bergstrom, drew up the design for the building, he was forced by the position of existing roads at the site to use an asymmetrical five-sided shape. Known as Arlington Farm, the plot of land was once part of the grand estate of the Confederate general Robert E.

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. Somervell’s proposal was audacious: a headquarters big enough for 40,000 people, with 4 million square feet of office space. Somervell, head of the Army’s Construction Division, for a solution. Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, turned to Brigadier General Brehon B.

(In 1947, it would become the headquarters of the U.S. By that time, however, the building was deemed far too small. Built for $18 million, it was set to open in June 1941. Roosevelt himself had personally approved construction of a new War Department facility at 21st Street in the city’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood. By the beginning of the next year, that number was expected to reach 30,000.ĭid you know? Construction on the Pentagon began on September 11, 1941, 60 years to the day before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. War Department was growing rapidly, with 24,000 personnel scattered among 17 buildings in Washington, D.C.

Boeing 40 88 building inside office space