President Roosevelt approves the Pentagon's construction site

On September 2, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially approved the former Hoover Airport site in Arlington, Virginia, for the new War Department headquarters. Earlier proposals had favored Arlington Farms, a location near Arlington National Cemetery whose irregular boundaries had influenced the Pentagon's original five-sided design. Roosevelt supported relocating the building because of concerns that construction near the cemetery could obstruct views toward Washington, D.C. Although the site changed, the proposed pentagonal configuration was retained because the president favored the arrangement and a substantial redesign would have increased costs and delayed construction. Once the project was freed from the original site's irregular boundaries, architects refined the structure into a regular pentagon. The decision established both the building's final location and its distinctive architectural form.