Some of the largest buildings were surprisingly built to house huge airplanes and NASA spacecraft, but there are some buildings of gigantic size that have broken astounding records for a lot less money.
From the O2 Arena in Great Britain to the largest indoor water park in Germany, these are the largest buildings in the world by volume.
The Palace of Parliament in Bucharest is the largest administrative building for civilian use in the world, beating out the Pentagon in the United States by that mark alone.
First built in 1984 as the seat of the Romanian Parliament, and never fully completed, the palace is a mixture of hall, gallery and office space.
Built of marble, cement, steel, crystal and glass, it is one of the heaviest and most expensive buildings on Earth, weighing in at an incredible 4,098,500,000 kilograms!
It was built under the easily recognizable pre-existing Millennium Dome – the largest dome in the world, designed by architect Sir Richard Rogers which opened in 2000 to celebrate the new millennium.
The goal of large event and exhibition spaces is to be as flexible as possible.
Inex Sipoo is a large logistics center for groceries and consumer goods located on the border of Sipoo and Kerava in Finland.
Built in five different parts between 2016 and 2019, it has the capability to process thousands of consumer goods – from perishables to dry goods – across a series of different warehouses and temperature zones.
With its leading-edge automated technology, the building enables more than 1.4 million units to be sorted daily from trays to storage trolleys and pallets.
7. NASA Vehicle Assembly Building[VIEW MAP]
NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is the fourth largest building in the world by volume.
Built in 1966 to assemble rockets for the Apollo and Saturn space missions – and later, the Space Shuttle – it is the largest single-story building on Earth, and the tallest outside an urban city in the United States.
Rising 160 meters high and spanning 218 meters, the concrete and steel VAB building is more than three times the size of New York’s Empire State Building.
6. Boeing Composite Wing Center[VIEW MAP]photo/Boeing
The Boeing Composite Wing Center in Washington was established as a facility to build the largest composite wing for the 777X jetliner.
Spanning the area of more than 21 football fields, the structure is so massive that it took over four million hours to build and required more than 31,000 tonnes of steel.
The building is huge, in fact it can accommodate three of the world’s largest cylindrical autoclaves (basically pressure ovens for baking composite airplane parts), each of which is large enough to accommodate two Boeing 737 airframes.
As well as the massive space needed to house aircraft parts, the building also incorporates staff offices overseeing the mammoth production process.
5. Meyer Werft Dockhalle 2[VIEW MAP]ChristianSchd / Wikipedia
Meyer Werft Dockhalle 2 in Germany is one of the three largest shipbuilding halls on the planet, used to build the world’s passenger ferries, research vessels, container ships and the most luxurious cruise ships from P&O to Celebrity Cruises.
It is also the largest dry dock in the world and boasts the fifth largest used space of any building on Earth.
The facility includes a large number of interactive exhibits, educational films and even a simulated cruise ship cabin.
Aerium in Germany is the fourth largest building in the world by usable volume.
Located in Krausnick near Berlin, this hangar was once the world’s most massive freestanding aircraft hangar and was originally built with the intention of making airplanes.
A few years later, Aerium was later transformed into a megalithic indoor amusement park known as Tropical Islands Resort, which broke the record for the largest indoor water park in the world.
3. Jean-Luc Lagardere Factory[VIEW MAP]Duch.seb/Wikipedia
The purpose-built Jean-Luc Lagardère factory is a major industrial aviation facility located at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport in France.
It is the second largest building in the world by usable space.
This is where the Airbus A380 – currently the world’s largest aircraft – comes to fruition.
Completed in 2004, it took over 50,000 tons of steel to build this massive facility.
It is so large that the final process of aircraft assembly, as well as the ground testing process, can be carried out within its four walls.
In addition to the vast space required for aircraft production, the facility also includes restaurants, a beauty salon, a congress center and a gas station.
2. The Great Mosque of Mecca[VIEW MAP]
Located in Saudi Arabia, it is the largest mosque in the world, and also one of the oldest.
With the ability to accommodate millions of worshippers at any one time, the mosque itself is unsurprisingly one of the largest buildings in the world.
Having expanded several times over the years, it is now surpassed only in volume by Boeing’s Everett Factory in the United States.
1. Boeing Factory[VIEW MAP]Jetstar Airways / Flickr
Boeing’s Everett factory in Washington, United States, is the largest building in the world when measured by volume and usable space.
Built in 1967 to facilitate the assembly of aircraft, particularly Boeing aircraft from 747 to 787.
It is so large that it uses a million light bulbs but requires no heating system due to the 15,000 employees working here and the very hot machines generate more than enough energy to heat the factory.
Due to its sheer size and the level of hazardous work required, the factory has a number of safety measures in place, such as its own fire station, police station, and medical facility.