Today, I walked through the corridors of the Pentagon.
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington. It is the second-largest office building in the world, built in the shape of a pentagon.
There will be no photos because they asked to leave phones and even Apple Watches at the entrance. But honestly, there’s not much to capture. It’s not that the spectacle is utterly dreary, but overall, 90% of the corridors (and there are 28 kilometers of them) look almost the same as 90% of the corridors in any American university. That is, everything is clean, bright, tidy, and that’s it. The only difference is that at a university, you find bulletin boards with interesting things on the walls, but in the Pentagon, there are no boards in the corridors, everything is hidden. Everything else is the same. Endless doors of heightened dreariness with numbers and code locks, some corridors adorned with patriotic installations. I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting stuff behind many of these doors, but to enter many of them, you need to leave your phone out in the corridor (and I remind you, I left mine at the entrance).
About 26,000 people work in the building. About a third of them are civilians, the rest are military. Although the Pentagon is located in Arlington, Virginia, it has a Washington address — 1400 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301-1400. It’s said that the Pentagon has six Washington ZIP codes, and that the US Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and each of the four branches of the armed forces have their own ZIP code (like 20301, 20318, 20310, 20330, 20350, and 20380).
The building was constructed in 1943, so at that time they built separate restrooms for blacks and whites due to segregation. Of course, it’s not like this anymore.
Since 26,000 people work in the building — that’s essentially the population of a small town, and parking there is quite limited (large, but still insufficient), there’s a metro station serving the Pentagon that’s practically unnecessary for anything else. Inside the perimeter, there’s everything needed to last until the end of the workday — Subway, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Panda Express, Starbucks, Sbarro, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, pharmacies, even a Best Buy.
From an architectural perspective, it’s a very interesting project. Look, with such a number of people and such expanses, you can get from any point to any point in no more than 10 minutes. No elevators, just wide corridors and stairs. Even in some emergency evacuations, rescuing people would be much easier. Although, of course, there was a sad experience in 2001 — remember, the plane hijacked by terrorists crashed into the building. Then, a hundred and fifty Pentagon employees died, and of course, everyone on board that plane.
Around the Pentagon is Crystal City — a typical city with shopping centers and multi-story residential complexes of varying degrees of luxury, and on the other side is Arlington National Cemetery, where 400,000 people are buried.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 