Problem: The Merchandise Mart (or the Merch Mart, or the Mart) is a commercial building located in the downtown Loop, of Chicago, Illinois, United States. When it opened in 1930, it was the largest building in the world, with 4,000,000 square feet (372,000 m2) of floor space. The art deco landmark is located at the junction of the Chicago River's branches. The building is a leading retailing and wholesale destination, hosting 20,000 visitors and tenants per day as of the late 2000s.

Wholesale showrooms occupy 50% of the usable floor space, and the Sultan of Brunei once spent $1.6 million at the Mart to furnish his entire palace, claiming the location was the only place where the task could be completed in one week. Select showrooms are open only to wholesalers, with others accessible to the general public. Unlike stores with traditional shelf and rack displays, entire usable rooms are created, providing consumers an opportunity to compare form and function between applications and manufacturers. A portion of the stores offer items for purchase singly or as a collection, while others offer design services, preservation, renovation, or installation. In addition to being a resource for architects and decorators, the Mart also has featured award-winning designs as selected by the American Institute of Architects. Catering to suppliers, on-site firms specialize in providing professional services for market research projects.  In 1931, Marshall Field and Company lost five million dollars, followed by eight million in 1932. The wholesale division was greatly reduced and Field's reduced its space in the Mart from four floors to one and half. The Mart continued to display the latest trends in home furnishings within the showrooms and trade shows. The company recovered late in the decade, but did not return to all previously occupied space.  In 1942, L. L. Skaggs formed a partnership with three other men and named the partnership the Owners Service Company, hence Osco. The headquarters moved from Waterloo, Iowa, to the Merchandise Mart.  A retail shopping area, named The Shops at the Mart, opened in 1991 and includes apparel shops, beauty services, bookstores and newsstands, financial services, telecommunication services, travel services, specialty food and wine stores, photo services, a dry cleaner, shoe shine stand, and a food court. A U.S. Post Office is located on the first floor and a FedEx location is on the second floor.  The Apparel Center houses the 521-room Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza River North hotel, the offices of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Art - Chicago, as well as the Chicago office of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency. GoHealth occupies 93,000 square feet (8,600 m2) on the 5th floor of Merchandise Mart, the Potbelly Sandwich Works' corporate offices are located in the tower. Motorola Mobility moved its headquarters to the Merchandise Mart in 2014.

How big is the building space?

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Problem: Extras is a British sitcom about extras working in television, film, and theatre. The series was co-produced by the BBC and HBO and was created, written, and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, both of whom also starred in it. Extras follows the lives of Andy Millman (Gervais), his platonic friend Maggie Jacobs (Ashley Jensen), and Andy's substandard agent and part-time retail employee Darren Lamb (Merchant) as Millman muddles through life as an anonymous "background performer" who eventually finds success as a B-level sitcom star. Extras has two series of six episodes each as well as a Christmas Special.

When the Whistle Blows is the show-within-a-show sitcom created, co-written by and starring Andy Millman. It was first mentioned in episode 1.3, as a script that Millman had written and given to Darren, who neglected to read it (in a recurring joke, he would frequently forget the name of the show, often calling it Where the Wind Blows and even confusing it with The Wind in the Willows). The script was turned into a sitcom on BBC One in the first season finale, after Millman gave the script to Patrick Stewart. Excerpts from the sitcom are featured in the second season, and many of the Extras second season plotlines revolve around Millman's experiences on and around the show.  When the Whistle Blows is set in a Wigan factory canteen. The humour is broad and lowbrow in the manner of many catchphrase-based sitcoms. The main catchphrase of the show, "Are you 'avin' a laugh?," is spoken by Millman. The show is unpopular with critics but popular with the public. It does receive a BAFTA nomination, although Millman suspects it is there simply to make up the numbers, and in the end it loses to an unspecified programme by Stephen Fry.  Millman is deeply unhappy with the show, feeling that too many people have interfered with his original ideas in the hunt for ratings. It appears that Millman originally set out to do a comedy similar to The Office, with true-to-life characters in a realistic work environment, without a studio audience or canned laughter. After being forced to collaborate and compromise many of his ideas with producers at the BBC, the show is transformed into lowest common denominator fare with each character having his/her own catchphrase which are repeated ad nauseam to the delight of its 6 million viewers. The show is further debased by the unexplained guest appearance of Coldplay's Chris Martin, in episode 2.4, which bears no relation to the plot and which Millman openly opposes, going so far as to utter the on-camera line, "Chris Martin, what are you doing in a factory in Wigan? It's mental!"  The presence of studio audiences/canned laughter, and the reliance on funny wigs, costumes and catchphrases for humour is a comment on British comedy hits such as Little Britain and The League of Gentlemen. Many people that Millman sees at the recording of the pilot wear T-shirts displaying comedy catchphrases, such as "Wassup", "It's Chico Time", "I'm a lady!", "Am I bovvered?" and "Garlic bread?." (These shirts are not shown in the US version of Extras.) Some of the reviews that the show gets refer to it as a "time warp comedy", and Millman's character talks about 1970s catchphrases such as Mr Humphreys' "I'm Free" (from Are You Being Served?) and Frank Spencer's "Ooh Betty" (from Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em), suggesting that it is also partly sending up 1970s British comedy. In episode 2.5, Germaine Greer suggests that When the Whistle Blows is "sub Carry On".

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Millman is deeply unhappy with the show, feeling that too many people have interfered with his original ideas in the hunt for ratings.