The Pentagon World's Largest Office

The Pentagon is headquarters to the Department of Defence in the USA. Located in Arlington, Virginia, the world's largest office building has an astounding 603,869 square metres of total floor space -  three times that of New York's Empire State Building. It is home to around 26,000 employees, including 23,000 military and civilian staff and a 3,000-strong support team.

Designed by Wisconsin-born architect, George Edwin Bergstrom (a Yale University graduate), Philadelphia-based contractor John McShain began construction on 11th September 1941 - the building was dedicated on 15th January 1943. It has seven floors, with corridors dividing the structure into its distinctive shape - five sides form an asymmetrical pentagon.

The Pentagon ended up with its unique shape partly due to the restrictions on the use of steel during the Second World War. In July 1941, as the United States entered the conflict - after the Japanese bombing of American troops in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii - a group of top US Army officers held secret discussions to formulate plans for new headquarters for the War Department.

The plan was to provide four million square feet of office space, to house 40,000 people. However, the plans proposed by the head of the Army Construction Division, Brigadier General Brehon Burke Somervell, were unsuitable, as the building would have been too large to fit in Washington. His design would have to be located across the Potomac River instead and this wasn't considered feasible.

Subsequently, the general instructed that 500,000 square feet of the office space in the Pentagon must be ready to use within six months, and the whole building should be ready within 12 months - a massive feat of engineering. What's more, he wanted the final design on his desk in a very short time-scale.

It wasn't possible to build a very tall building, as wartime restrictions on the use of steel were in place – plus, it might have spoiled Washington's skyline. Therefore, architects went for the simplest solution: a building with an asymmetrical pentagon shape, surrounded on all five sides by roads or other divisions, so that it conformed to the shape of the piece of land, Arlington Farm, earmarked for the mighty building.

At the eleventh hour, there were objections that the proposed new building would block the view of Arlington National Cemetery, so the Pentagon's location was moved around half-a-mile south of its original site. Although it was no longer being built on the five-sided Arlington Farm land, the team of architects retained the Pentagon's unique shape, as there wasn't enough time to change the design, due to the very tight timescale of the project.

The building took 13,000 workers 16 months to complete and used 689,000 tons of sand and gravel, 5.5 million cubic yards of earth and more than 41,000 concrete pilings. Thirty miles of access roads surround the building's suburbs, with 21 overpasses and bridges built around it. The Pentagon has 67 acres of car parking space, 131 staircases, 19 escalators and a main entrance for visitors on the second floor at ground level called The Concourse, where there's also a mini-shopping mall.

Inside the building, there are five ring corridors on each of the seven floors, so the floor space of the corridors totals an impressive 28.2km! There's also a 20,000-square metre central plaza in a pentagon shape - an area informally called Ground Zero. It received its nickname during the Cold War, as the US Department of Defence presumed it would be targeted immediately by the Soviet Union, should a nuclear war break out.

The Pentagon has more than 20 fast food stores including McDonald's, Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell, as well as the Center Courtyard Café, which opened in 2008. It also has its own gym, the Pentagon Athletic Center, which is open to military and civilian employees. The Pentagon's grounds host the annual Marine Corps Marathon and the Army 10-Miler running events.

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