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The BIG Reason

Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.

The Target Distribution Center in Woodland, CA is HUGE!

I was looking up some directions the other day and couldn’t help but notice the footprint of our local Target Distribution Center. It’s HUGE! After a quick scan of the surrounding area, I determined that not only is it the largest building in town, but the largest in the county, and the greater Sacramento area as a whole.

Arial photo of the Target Distribution Center in Woodland, CA. with the building perimeter highlighted in red

Arial photo of the Target Distribution Center in Woodland, CA highlighted in red to show the perimeter.

I wasn’t able to find another building in the area that came close, save for the behemoth Amazon warehouse next to Sacramento International Airport, but even that building has a smaller footprint. Footprints are what I’m interested in here. I haven’t been able to track down the square footage or volume of this building, but its footprint is what caught my eye, and I wanted to find out where it fit in on the scale of buildings that cover up large areas of our planet.

The first building that came to mind was the Mall of America. Wow! It’s hard to tell if the Target DC has it beat, but they are pretty close.

Arial shot of the Mall of America in Bloomington, MN highlighted in read to emphasize the perimeter

Arial photo of the Mall of America in Bloomington, MN highlighted in red to show the perimeter.

Digging a little deeper, I found a List of largest buildings on Wikipedia. Listed as number 1 in the world by floor area is the Tesla Gigafactory near Austin, TX. Unfortunately, there isn’t an arial view available for this building in Apple Maps yet, and getting Google Maps to scale consistently is not easy, so I went with the second largest building by floor area: the Boeing Factory in Everett, WA.

Arial photo of the Boeing Factory in Everett, WA with the building perimeter highlighted in red

Arial photo of the Boeing Factory in Everett, WA highlighted in red to show the perimeter.

The Wikipedia page doesn’t list actual footprint area of the buildings, so I just kind of poked around and looked up a few of the large buildings on the list. The Tesla Factory in Fremont, CA actually seems to cover more of the Earth than the Boeing factory.

Arial photo of the Tesla Factory in Fremont, CA. with the building perimeter highlighted in red

Arial photo of the the Tesla Factory in Fremont, CA highlighted in red to show the perimeter.

All of the above photos are to scale with each other, but it’s still difficult to tell how the buildings stack up, so I made this graphic from the perimeter overlays I drew on them.

An illustration of the perimeters of four large buildings

A scale illustration of the four building perimeters for comparison.

While the footprints of the two factories are obviously larger than the Woodland Target DC, it is still up there on the scale of famously large buildings. I mean, the Mall of America is a ridiculously huge building! I certainly never expected to accidentally find something like this in my home town.