Omega Point

A blog by Catherine Winters

05 Mar

Why is the Pentagon pentagonal?


One of ben­e­fits of being me is that I have the sort of ran­dom thoughts that other peo­ple can gen­er­ally only expe­ri­ence dur­ing some kind of med­ical exper­i­ment involv­ing the injec­tion of highly con­cen­trated THC directly into the brain. For exam­ple, when drift­ing off to sleep the other night, it occurred to me to ask: why is the Pen­ta­gon pentagonal?

Huh. Why is it? That can’t be the cheap­est design for a build­ing in wartime.
A short getting-out-of-bed-instead-of-sleeping later, I was much more knowl­edge­able about mid-20th-Century civil plan­ning projects than I had been before.

From Wikipedia:

Its unusual shape results from the fact that its orig­i­nally intended site, Arling­ton Farms, fronted on Arling­ton Ridge Road and the Arling­ton Memo­r­ial Bridge approach, which inter­sected at an angle of approx­i­mately 108 degrees (the angle of a reg­u­lar pen­ta­gon). Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt had it con­structed at its cur­rent loca­tion because he didn’t want the new build­ing to obstruct the view of Wash­ing­ton, D.C. from Arling­ton Cemetery.

In fact, Arling­ton Ridge Road no longer exists, its route now mostly replaced by Eisen­hower Drive, which winds through an expanded Arling­ton National Ceme­tery and ter­mi­nates near the orig­i­nal site. The Pen­ta­gon was con­structed as planned, just some­what south of its intended location.


Filed under: Learning is fun!


4 Responses to “Why is the Pentagon pentagonal?”

  1. By irakli on Mar 6, 2007 | Reply

    Also — accord­ing to peo­ple who believe in the con­spir­acy the­o­ries, the shape was cho­sen because pen­ta­gram has sacral mean­ing for Freema­sons. Some believe US is run by Freemasons :)

    Not sure how I feel about the con­spir­acy the­ory but I could buy the argu­ment that the archi­tect of Pen­ta­gon put cer­tain sym­bolic mean­ing in using pen­ta­gram shape.

    You have to agree that Wikipedia ver­sion — the shape was moti­vated purely by Geo­graph­i­cal con­straints, does not make sense, either.

  2. By Catherine Omega on Mar 6, 2007 | Reply

    Well, okay… let’s say the OFFICIAL rea­son the Pen­ta­gon is pen­tag­o­nal then.

    I don’t know, I buy it, but it doesn’t seem like the archi­tects were con­strained geo­graph­i­cally so much as they found a way a way to do some­thing inter­est­ing with the design of a hor­ri­ble mono­lithic gov­ern­ment build­ing in the mid­dle of the biggest war in the his­tory of the world. It’s not like they had the free­dom to go all Frank Gehry on it. :)

    (Plus, it leads to the much catch­ier name “The Pen­ta­gon” instead of “The War Depart­ment Admin­is­tra­tion Building”!)

  3. By readyjack on Mar 27, 2007 | Reply

    Every­one knows that the pen­ta­gon was designed to mag­ickly con­tain the demon Yog-Sothoth after it was cap­tured from the Nazis in the early stages of WWII. Unfor­tu­nately said demon escaped when the walls were breached by a cruise mis­sile on Sep. 11th 2001 and much of the cur­rent unrest in the world stems from that occasion.

  4. By Moe Sizlak on Dec 11, 2007 | Reply

    The above is a link to my web­site that deals with sym­bols in the DC map. You may enjoy read­ing that.

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