Why Did The U.S. Department Of Defense Build Its Headquarters In The Shape Of A Pentagon?

The Pentagon, headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, taken from an airplane in January 2008. Wikipedia

Live Science: How Did The Pentagon Building Get Its Shape?

How did the Pentagon get its name? Well, that's a no-brainer. But how did the Department of Defense's (DoD) giant headquarters get its shape? That's a longer story.

The building was originally designed to fit onto a tract of land with borders on five sides. In the end, it was built elsewhere, at a site where a pentagonal shape was no longer essential. But by the time of this location change, it was too late to come up with a new design. So it remained a pentagon.

"It was basically an accident that was born out . . . [of] war-time emergency," Steve Vogel, a Washington Post reporter and author of "The Pentagon – A History"(Random House, 2007), told Live Science.

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WNU Editor: And what is even more remarkable about this building is that it was built in less than a year.