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.

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.

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.

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.

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.