This is a kid's toy. There's a square.
Oval. And a pentagon.
"Everyone knows the pentagon. It has been an internationally
recognized symbol for the u.s military. The site down here wasn't five-sided
but uh there really wasn't time to go. But that's almost an accident."
Why is this, the headquarters of the Department of Defense, a preschool
level shape? Why is the pentagon a pentagon? "It was built in a rush to meet a looming crisis.
Its shape was determined by circumstance." I think the story of why the pentagon
is a pentagon actually says something surprising about history and maybe about institutions, too.
All right, 2022, I'm gonna brighten up my studio setup this year so i
don't look like i'm trapped in a cave. I look like i'm in a high school yearbook photo.
I look like i'm being hunted down at the end of Silence of the Lambs.
I look like I'm in hiding from a Seal team. "Fire in the hole!"
And so the ramshackle, half-baked, improvisatory process that you're about to see here
it actually pairs pretty well with the history of the Pentagon.
Now let me explain. This is the National Mall today.
But in 1943, it looked like this. Do you see the difference?
For half a century, 1917 to 1971, temporary military buildings crowded the National Mall.
They started with the big expansion of the government after World War One and
never really stopped. The War Department,
predecessor to the Department of Defense, didn't have one consolidated place to put everything. And
by the 1930s, that was an increasingly bad thing because of...you know...rhymes with Schmitler.
"Duck Nazi salutes that I'm too scared to type in because YouTube might penalize me!"
Thank you, Donald Duck.
So the army's logistics wizard, Brehon Somerville, realizes that this is a problem.
He wants to build a new HQ for 40 000 people - consolidate all those temporary buildings
into one big one. Do you see why
i'm making my studio on the fly here? This was a scramble as late as June, 1941.
They were trying to build the plane while they were flying it.
Somerville basically convinced congress to get on board and he got his marching orders to build the
pentagon. They designed it that shape so it fit in elegantly between the existing roads.
And in case you didn't notice, that's not where the pentagon is today.
This is the paradox of the pentagon: they want to build the largest office building in the world,
yet they are constantly changing plans about how they're going to do it.
The original site was a pentagon meant to fit elegantly in the existing landscape of
the site — that picture is kind of confusing, it should actually sort of be turned around.
But a bunch of preservationists got mad that the new pentagon would be blocking the view of
Arlington National Cemetery, among other reasons. So they just moved the site down
and razed whatever existing buildings they had to. So the pentagon was a pentagon to fit into
one landscape but then when they had to move it they kept it around because president Franklin
Delano Roosevelt just really liked it. Seriously. He said "You know gentlemen,
iI like that pentagon shaped building...you know why i like it? Because nothing like it
has ever been done before." I am, uh, I am inspired.
That's right, I put that old wallpaper up because i like it. Now i'm basically FDR.
Of course, there are other reasons too. The pentagonal arrangement makes it quick to travel
across a huge campus, and there was probably a sentimental attachment to the fort-like shape.
But let's be real, a lot of this was kind of a mess. I mean, they changed their design plan
on the fly, and then they had to keep moving really fast. This is the old airplane hangar
that 110 architects, 54 structural engineers, and 43 mechanical engineers
all gathered in to cram on making a pentagon. This, by the way, is the most Wes Andersony
picture I've ever seen for a war department. (Mothersbaugh-esque music plays)
They ended up with 3,100 architectural drawings, and they did it despite this
being such a scramble. There were clever hacks,
like the rings running throughout, with intersection points that included little foyers
and meeting places; the big courtyard in the middle was another place to convene;
all of that let in some light in between the bulk. From September 11, 1941 to January 15, 1943,
they worked hard and they built the largest office building in the world.
What they came up with was gargantuan and a little weird.
No elevators — that would have taken too long. There were bicycle carts
for messengers to go between sections, and, friends, there were 3,004 fantastic
Watrous flush valves for the country's most important toilets. And as Popular
Mechanics pointed out, the pentagon was so big that five U.S. capitals could fit inside.
This is Apple park, the majestic circular headquarters of Apple
in Cupertino, completed in 2017. It's got almost the same footprint
as the pentagon, yet obviously its meaning is entirely different.
Let me dwell on something here as I sit in my extremely janky unfinished studio: the pentagon
was moving too fast to build elevators. The pentagon: it might mean Vietnam war protests and
bombings to you, it might mean the 9/11 attacks, it might mean the military-industrial complex.
Whatever it means to you, this building has deep resonance now beyond its preschool
shape and its haphazard creation. Buildings do matter: the pentagon
undoubtedly shaped the culture of the military. But the lasting impression of the pentagon
comes from what was inside its walls not the way that those walls were arranged.
It's a set.
All right, that is it for this one. Thank you for bearing with me as i try to fix things up here.
This will probably look totally different in the next video, at least God willing.
Um, subscribe if you want to see that, I guess. If you haven't been here before,
this is a personal channel where i post history and personal type videos, stuff like that.
Um, I'd also be interested if you let me know in the comments any pentagon trivia that I left out,
because I know there's a lot of it. I put links to the two books that i used as a source for
this video in the description as well. And yeah, I think that's pretty much it. I will see you in the
next one and, uh, in the meantime, I'm gonna put this pentagon back in here if I can figure it out.
Okay, I did it. (Cheering)