War Office - Old War Office Building

Old War Office Building

Between 1906 and its abolition in 1964, the War Office was based in a massive neo-Baroque building, completed in 1906, located on Horse Guards Avenue in Whitehall, London. It contains about a thousand rooms across seven floors, linked by 2½ miles of corridors. The construction of the War Office building took five years to complete at what was then a huge cost of over £1.2 million.

The building is somewhat oddly shaped, forming a trapezium shape in order to maximise the usage of the irregularly shaped plot of land on which it was built. Its four distinctive domes were designed as a decorative means of disguising the building's shape.

The building is still used by the Ministry of Defence and is not open to the public.

Read more about this topic:  War Office

Famous quotes containing the words office building, war, office and/or building:

    While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.
    Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)

    The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
    Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

    There’s something about the dead silence of an office building at night. Not quite real. The traffic down below is something that didn’t have anything to do with me.
    John Paxton (1911–1985)

    Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)