Colossal: LIFE at the Birth of the Pentagon The Pentagon — and,
by extension, the U.S. military — has become such a prominent
and obvious symbol of American might over the years that it’s
easy to forget that the world’s largest office building and home
of the Department of Defense is just that, a building, albeit
one with some mighty impressive stats, and some sobering
history, attached to it. — Despite having 3,705,793 square feet
for offices, concessions, and storage and a gross floor area of
6,636,360 square feet, the Pentagon is designed so that,
ideally, it takes at most seven minutes to walk between any two
points in the building. — Five-and-a-half million cubic yards of
earth and 41,492 concrete piles were necessary for the
foundation of the building, as well as 680,000 tons of sand and
gravel from Potomac that were processed into 435,000 cubic yards
of concrete. — Roughly 200,000 telephone calls are made daily
from the Pentagon. (In the pre-cell phone days of the early
1940s, 100,000 miles of telephon