Reinforcing a Powerful Symbol
Pentagon's Operation Phoenix Rises Out of the AshesBy Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 3, 2002; Page C01
CityscapeThe Pentagon. A building that looms so large in the imagination you almost overlook its immense size, its physical thereness. A building whose symbolism is so potent, you almost forget it is a building.
But that changed all at once on Sept. 11. When the airliner with its cargo of humans and deadly fuel collided with the building, tearing through limestone walls, brick and tons of concrete as if they were no more than cardboard imitations, reality and symbol instantly became one and the same.
With terrible clarity, the suicidal hijackers who aimed the plane showed they were aware of both. They wanted to kill people, and they wanted to destroy the mightiest emblem of American military power.
Build, destroy, build again -- the cycle of history and war. In hastening to rebuild the ravaged sections of the Pentagon, our architects, engineers, contractors, suppliers and construction workers focused on the nuts and bolts, on thousands and thousands of practical details. And the controlled fury of their focus was in itself a powerful sign.
Operation Phoenix, the rebuilding effort came to be called. It has been blessed by great success. The goal was to get Wedge 1, where the plane hit, back in working order by the anniversary of the attack. Actually, folks started moving back in mid-August. Phoenix has risen.
The feat is comparable to the original construction, back in 1941. That is to say, the work was exceedingly fast and efficient.
The Pentagon was authorized by Congress and approved by the president in the summer of 1941, as war raged in Europe and Asia without, as yet, involving the United States. In what would become a chilling coincidence, construction commenced on Sept. 11, 1941. Work then proceeded at a rather leisurely pace until another famous date -- Dec. 7, 1941.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, however, the pace picked up astonishingly. Teams worked around the clock, often exceeding the capacity of more than 200 architects and engineers to produce construction documents. The first employees moved in as concrete was still being poured in the spring of 1942. The entire building, all 6.5 million square feet of it, was finished in 16 months.
Alfred Goldberg, who has spent large chunks of his nearly six decades as a historian inside the mammoth building -- he's the official historian of the Office of the Secretary of Defense -- likes the building and respects it, he says, "because it is a building that works." That is a very good reason.
Practicality was the driving force behind the original design. The architectural team faced with the task of designing the huge building in that pressurized summer long ago did not set out to create an architectural symbol. That came later, as power accrued over years and years, and the building itself gradually came to represent that power in a single, forceful, five-sided image.
Even the shape, Goldberg says, was a pragmatic choice. At first, the architects created an irregular pentagonal form in response to a different site on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, one that was hemmed by five roads. By the time the site was moved downriver (at the insistence of President Franklin Roosevelt), Goldberg explains, the architects had become familiar with the intrinsic efficiencies of the Pentagon.
For the new site, however, the designers regularized the form. As Goldberg and thousands of others have discovered over the years, an arrangement of five concentric pentagons, separated by light wells and connected to each other and a central court via 10 radial corridors, is ideal for a horizontal office building of such unprecedented size.
Those light wells, for instance, put most workers no more than 20 feet from a source of natural light -- exceeding even the most rigorous of today's workplace standards. And though there are 17 1/2 miles of corridors in the building, its shape was made for shortcuts. By walking across the central court -- a delightful park, by the way -- employees can get from place to place with remarkable speed. (That is, if they don't get lost in the labyrinth.)
A massive renovation of the entire Pentagon and its grounds was begun nearly a decade ago. By some odd quirk of fate the terrorists guided their airplane-weapon into Wedge 1, the only segment of the building where the renovation work had been almost completed. This, too, puts the rebuilding effort in perspective: Workers did over again, in less than a year, what had just taken them three years to do.
On Sept. 11, in effect, the immense renovation project was put to a test of fire. And, though it may seem counter to the searing images of destruction we all now carry in our heads, the renovation passed the test rather well. There was tragic loss of life -- 125 Pentagon workers were killed. But lives were saved, too -- nearly 2,500 souls working nearby survived. The death toll surely would have been much higher but for the new security systems designed into the renovated Wedge 1.
Chief among the improvements was the "hardening" of concrete and brick walls with additional structural steel. (During the original construction there had been tremendous pressure to save steel for armaments.) Blast-resistant windows, weighing 1,600 pounds each, were fabricated to replace the old single-pane, double-hung sash fixtures. A super-strength polymer mesh was used to reinforce walls and prevent pieces from flying off like deadly shrapnel. A sprinkler system was installed.
All of these components performed up to expectations. But important failures did occur. The public-address system proved faulty. Water pressure was severely affected. The system of automatic "smoke walls" deployed as planned, helping to curtail the flow of smoke in hallways -- but people were confused by them, and couldn't find the waist-high handles to retract the barriers. Exit signs were illegible in the dark smoke.
The failures are being closely studied and will affect the continuing renovation. "We learned a lot," says private-sector architect Stacie Condrell, a vice president of the architecture firm DMJM/H+N. She has been helping to oversee the renovation effort since 1995.
"Today, I look at a conventional exit sign and almost laugh," Condrell says. "It's just not acceptable. A jet fuel fire burns hot and very black -- there is maybe eight inches down by the floor where you can crawl and see." In the rebuilt Wedge 1, photo-luminescent exit and no-exit signs have been installed on baseboards in the halls.
Security has always been a concern at this immense military installation, of course, but up until a few years ago the building remained remarkably accessible. You used to be able to get on an escalator in the Pentagon Metro station and land in the Concourse, the second-floor shopping center for the some 25,000 employees who use the building daily. A visitor could sign up there for a tour and, afterward, pick up a souvenir in one of the stores.
Today, only groups with prior clearance are taken on tours. And that escalator has been closed off. Redesigning the Metro interchange was, in fact, a high-priority item on the renovation list, and the job, started several years ago, is almost done -- today buses get no closer than 300 feet to the building. Likewise, a remote delivery facility, constructed underneath the north-facing terrace, greatly enhances security by keeping trucks at a distance.
Still, a large part of the Pentagon renovation has to do with more ordinary concerns -- if you can think of the operation of the world's mightiest military force as ordinary. Actually, if you think about it in that context, the condition of the unrenovated sections of the Pentagon is downright scary.
After 60 years of hard use, the unrenovated sections of the building are in terrible condition. Before the renovation started, none of the infrastructure systems -- electrical, mechanical, plumbing, fire safety, you name it -- met even minimal building code standards. All systems were frightfully out of date -- a typical winter day, for instance, would bring up to 40 localized power outages. The Pentagon was well on its way to becoming an unpleasant, unsafe, unreliable place to work.
In eight to 10 years, when the renovation finally is done, all these negatives will be turned into positives, managers say. The scale of the task is, of course, Brobdingnagian. Wedge by wedge, the building is being pared to its concrete floor slabs and 41,492 concrete columns. In the Wedge 1 renovation, 83 million pounds of stuff was taken out, 28 million pounds of which were contaminated by asbestos.
Condrell, for one, believes the Pentagon project can lead the way for the rest of society in areas such as energy efficiency, information management, office adaptability, code compliance, and pleasantness for the everyday workforce. "The buying power of 6.5 million square feet means you can get things made," she says. "We want to be leaders in tomorrow's technological workplace environment."
Some facets of the renovation are pretty impressive -- and not just the security and safety features. The so-called "smart walls" being tested for the next phase of the renovation come packed with remarkably flexible electronic capacity. They can quickly be fitted to serve the simplest or the most extraordinary demands, and thus will greatly reduce the time and costs of what insiders refer to as "churn" -- the rapid changeover of offices from one function to another. This does, indeed, seem a smart way to go.
New escalator lobbies will make getting up and down the building's five stories a lot simpler and quicker. So, too, will the new elevators -- until now, the giant building has had only one, and it is for the Secretary of Defense. People in wheelchairs have had to share space with garbage in antiquated freight elevators.
And so on. These are, after all, the types of improvements you would expect, or at least hope for, in a job that's costing a fortune -- the reconstruction of damaged areas alone priced out at more than $700 million -- and taking more than 15 years to complete.
What's really surprising, and pleasing, is the architectural quality of the improvements. Nothing flashy, mind you, just good design that in places attains a very, very high level. One of those places consists of the above-ground portions of the busy Metro interchange. The new steel-supported Teflon canopies for bus passengers, designed by HDR Architects of Alexandria, are ingenious in concept, crisp in line, fluid in elevation -- they're at once utilitarian and delightful.
Arguably, the Pentagon is the most important Washington building constructed during the 20th century. It is not architecture that makes this so, although the low building does wear its immensity well -- not an inconsiderable design feat. But the heart of the matter is power, both symbolic and real.
Such power affects us in countless ways. It can be used for great ends or irresponsible ones, yet there is no question that it has transformed the city, the region, the nation, and, on occasion, the world.
Anyone who cares for the democracy cannot help but be gratified -- and proud -- that today the Pentagon is back in one piece.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company