Pentagon restored, almost as if it never happened
The line of brown doors on the ground floor of the United States military headquarters have been meticulously restored exactly as they were before September 11.
With a black and white terrazzo floor, cream walls and strip lighting, it looks as mundane as the interior of any government building.
Two standard issue fire extinguishers have been carefully fitted for use in case of a small blaze.
Only the smell of fresh paint gives a clue that this building is newly constructed.
Many of the Pentagon staff who managed to escape are already back at their new desks.
Peter Murphy, a US marine lawyer who was one of the first to return, said: "It's just kind of an eerie feeling.
"It's like I'm bringing somebody in and saying 'I want to show you my office that's been destroyed', but it hasn't been. It's just the same as it was on September 10."
It was a very different scene a year ago, when a hijacked American Airlines Boeing 757 ploughed into the building's west side just a few feet above the ground at 9.38am.
Travelling at 400mph, it hit at 45 degrees, ripping through the bottom two floors and into three of the five rings of offices.
The impact caused part of the five-storey outer ring to collapse and set part of the building blazing for days.
The attack killed 125 people in the building and all 64 on the plane.
Mr Murphy said he was standing at his fourth-floor office window when the plane slammed into the building below him.
"The wall moved in, and I got thrown across the room. The ceiling fell down, and the floor started to buckle," he said.
He and several colleagues scrambled into the hall, where they faced a terrifying choice: to their right, fire; to their left, thick smoke.
A voice in the smoke said "follow me" and they did.
As they were escaping they heard what they thought was a second plane hitting the building it was the sound of part of the building, including a portion of Mr Murphy's office, collapsing.
PENTAGON chiefs pledged almost immediately to restore the building within a year.
The $550 million job has required 3,000 contractors removing 50,000 tons of debris from the site.
Some 400,000 square feet of office space had to be demolished and 4,000 pieces of new limestone placed on the face of the building.
From the outside, the rebuilt segment appears to have slotted neatly back into the Pentagon.
The designers ensured that Indiana limestone from the quarry that supplied the original 1941 construction was used.
A single block salvaged from the destroyed section is the only outward indication of what happened.
Blackened from the smoke, it was the last stone to be laid in the construction after being engraved with "September 11, 2001".
There are some slight changes to the inside of the building. Luminescent exit signs are now placed six inches from the floor.
Jean Barnak, deputy project manager of the rebuilding effort, said they were fitted because many survivors had been trapped on the floor in rooms engulfed in thick black smoke, with no idea which way was out.
Many of the workers back in the restored section find the pace of the return to normality hard to deal with. Ms Barnak said: "Some of them are a little freaked-out that it's been literally replicated. Many are sitting in places where offices of people were wiped out. Of course it's difficult."
She said they had made sure corridors were open because many people were still very anxious about having to get out suddenly in an emergency.
But Mr Murphy said: "If there's any message from my coming back, rubbery-kneed as I am, it's that we're going to do what we do and carry on."
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