Enormous Shanghai shopping mall is now China's largest empty building

Enormous Shanghai shopping mall is now China's largest empty building

It's a pentagon, but much, much larger than the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. According to the story, the designers deliberately copied the Pentagon's design because it offers very quick walking access between even the furthest points of the building. Our Pentagon building was designed to so that it would take no more then seven minutes to walk to anyplace in the building.

Apparently, though, Chinese shoppers found navigation too confusing and so the pentagonal mall is mostly empty.

I was stationed at the Pentagon from 1990-1993. I will attest that navigating around it took quite a bit of getting used to. But once you cracked the code of how rooms and corridors were numbered (which frankly took a lot of walking and no little bit of getting lost!) then you suddenly immediately knew how to get to any place in the building from anywhere in the building.

The Pentagon, Arlington, Va., with my office, 2E641, indicated at top right. The pentagonal design comes from the inability of engineers in the day to cheaply and efficiently build circular mega-structures, which was the first choice. The pentagon shape was adopted as a compromise. The round, then pentagonal, shape was adopted to make best use of the plot of land the government acquired for the building. But use of that land (about a half-mile from the present site) fell through and there was 

no time to redesign because of very tight, wartime deadlines. So a pentagon it remained. The Army engineer officer in charge was Lesley Grove, who went on to command the nation's development of the atomic bombs used against Japan in August 1945.

My office number was 2E641. The leading 2 meant second floor. The E meant the E ring, being the outer of five rings. The 6 meant it was near Corridor 6 (of 10 corridors) and the 41  was, well, the room number.

Once this numbering system got magically baked into my brain, when I was told I had a meeting to attend in, say, room 3B223, I instantly knew exactly how to get there and how long the walk would take.

But it took time to absorb this, and shoppers won't put up with the confusion. Here is the mall: