The Boeing Everett Plant in Washington, USA is the largest building in the world with 282 acres of usable floor space. Other large buildings are related to aircraft or spacecraft assembly, but not all have usable floor space. The Aalsmeer Flower Auction is the largest commercial building, while the Great Wall of China and Three Gorges Dam do not qualify as buildings.
The largest building in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the Boeing Everett Plant, located in Everett, Washington, USA. The famous passenger planes, the 747, 767 and 777 are assembled there. When built in 1968, the Everett plant boasted 200 million cubic feet (5.64 million m³) of usable floor space. Since then, it has been expanded twice, 45 percent in 1980 for the 767 assembly line and another 50 percent in 1993 for 777 assembly. The site’s total footprint is 1,025 acres (415 hectares), with 282 acres (113 hectares) of building area and 215 acres (86 hectares) of paved courtyards and parking lots. This makes the area of the largest building in the world equivalent to just over one square kilometre.
Many of the world’s largest buildings have to do with the assembly of aircraft or spacecraft. For example, the Aerium, in Brandenburg, Germany, about half the size of the Everett factory, was originally built as an assembly area for a giant airship that was never built. NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building in Florida is about one-third the size of the Everett facility, as it was built to assemble space shuttles.
There are several buildings that are a bit larger than the Everett plant, but credit is generally not given because not all of their floor space is usable. For example, the Aalsmeer Flower Auction, in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands, is a bit larger, but not all of its floor space is usable, ranking it below the Everett factory. It still qualifies as the largest commercial (as opposed to industrial) building in the world and by far the largest building in the world dedicated to flower auctions.
The Great Wall of China and the Three Gorges Dam in China are two other structures challenging the Everett factory for the status of the world’s largest building. The Great Wall of China is over 6,500 km long, but it doesn’t qualify as a building because it has no interior and little real usable space. Similarly, the Three Gorges Dam does not qualify as a building per se because the vast majority of its interior is not usable in the way that is usually understood by a “building”.
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