Pentagon's 80 years of dominance is over! Surat now home to the world's biggest office building

For the last 80 years, the United States Department of Defense headquarters Pentagon proudly held the world's largest office building title.

Recently, a newly-developed office building in Surat, Gujarat, has broken the eight-decade-long record of the Pentagon to claim the title.

The all-new Surat Diamond Bourse, situated in the diamond capital of India, spreads across more than 7.1 million square feet of floor space and 35.5 acres of land in the city. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is said to inaugurate the complex later this year, according to a report by news outlet CNN.


Beautified with marble floors and a brightly-lit central area, the sprawling 15-story property consists of 4,500 office spaces made in sizes (from 28 square metres to 7000 square metres) as workshops for cutting and polishing diamonds for the merchants. It also boasts 131 elevators, as well as dining, retail, wellness, and conference facilities to cater to the needs of its occupants.

The design of the Surat Diamond Bourse was masterminded by the Indian architecture firm Morphogenesis. However, surpassing the Pentagon in size was not an intentional move, the project's CEO Mahesh Gadhavi told CNN.

According to the US Department of Defense, Pentagon has 6,500,000 square feet of office space, which is three times the floor space in the Empire State Building. It has 7,754 windows and the corridors spread over 28 kilometres. It is said to easily fit the US Capitol building inside any of the building's five wedges. "Its spoke-and-ring design means it takes only about 7 minutes to walk between the furthest two points in the building," the US Defense website claims.

The CNN report suggested that the project costs around $388 million (around Rs 3,200 crore). Despite being affected by the Covid pandemic for two years, the first set of occupants will come in November after a total of four years of construction.

Sustainability is also at the core of the diamond bourse's design with energy-efficient features such as natural ventilation for approximately half of the structure and solar-powered common areas.

Meanwhile, Surat's 'Dream City' project - which aims to transform the city across approximately 1,730 acres of the area - is also being planned.