The Largest Footprints in California

In June, Microsoft released a huge database of every building in the United States. They trained a neural network to analyze satellite imagery, and used that to trace the shapes of buildings. This resulted in 125,192,184 computer generated building footprints. This is just the footprint – building heights are not part of the data. Here is a New York Times article that uses this technology to visualize building footprints across the county.

A few days ago I started playing with the California data (a mere 10,988,516 buildings). I’ve come up with several interesting factoids (well, interesting to me at least). I suspect this data will result in more than one blog post, but let’s start with:

The 50 buildings with the largest footprints in California.

1. The Tesla plant in Fremont. 3,371,550 square feet (77.4 acres). No surprise here. According to Wikipedia, this has the 3rd largest footprint of any building in the world.
2. Houwelings Tomatoes, near Camarillo. 2,016,171 square feet (46.3 acres). This is remarkable – basically a giant green house for tomatoes. Their web page has some interesting videos.
3. USS-Posco Industries, Pittsburgh. 1,954,347 square feet (44.9 acres) . A sheet metal products/services plant in the Bay Area.
4. Gallo Winery, Modesto. 1,930,979 square feet (44.3 acres). They may not make the best wine, but they make a whole lot of it.
5. Firestone Industrial Park, Salinas. 1,896,853 square feet (43.5 acres). This was originally a Firestone Tire and Rubber factory. Starting in 1986 it was converted to a multi-tenant warehousing, distribution, and light industrial manufacturing center.
6. Target Distribution Center, Bakersfield. 1,866,999 square feet (42.9 acres). If you’re in SoCal, your Target stuff came through this place.
7. Stater Bros Distribution Center, San Bernardino. 1,855,433 square feet (42.6 acres). Distribution centers are boring, rectangular buildings. They’re ubiquitous, and they all start looking alike. Pull back a bit from the Stater Bros building, and you can see a dozen or so of them.
8. Target Distribution Center, Woodland (near Sacramento). 1,855,294 square feet (42.6 acres). The difference between this one and #7 is only 139 square feet. Told you they were all the same.
9. Ontario Mills Mall, Ontario. 1,766,080 square feet (40.5 acres). The first shopping mall on this list, and it’s a biggie. 200 shops, 20 anchors, all on one level. The AMC has 30 screens. “This place has everything.”

The next several on the list are more distribution centers and malls, so we’ll skip over them (apologies to fans to distribution centers and malls). The next interesting one is:

17. California Statewide Museum Collections Center, McClellan Park (Sacramento). 1423439 square feet (32.7 acres). I did not see this coming. In fact, I didn’t know this existed. From their web page, the Statewide Museum Collections Center (SMCC) “serves as the repository for over 1 million historic objects and artifacts from parks throughout the state. At SMCC, State Park Curators, Archivists, and Collections Managers care for and manage California’s largest collection of artifacts, archival documents, and photographs.” Cool. Actually, inside the warehouse I’m reminded of the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark

Next, additional distribution centers and malls, and the occasional manufacturer:

23. Owens-Brockway Glass Container, Tracy. 1,310,671 square feet (30.1 acres).

28. Northrup-Grumman, El Segundo. 1,293,269 square feet (29.7 acres).

More distribution centers and malls round out the list (starting to see a pattern?), with the exception of…

36. Los Angeles Convention Center. 1,201,863 square feet (27.6 acres). I think San Diego’s convention center is bigger, but it shows up as two parts (separate buildings), even though they are connected on the lower level.

40. John Wayne Airport Terminal, Irvine. 1,174,893 square feet (27.0 acres). 3000 feet long, from one end to the other. Don’t want to have to switch gates!

That’s it for now; more footprint fun to come.

[Note: The sizes here are based strictly on the Microsoft database. I’ve noticed occasional discrepancies between these numbers and other sources. One of the main issues is what constitutes a single building; the Microsoft algorithms have to figure that out without human input. Example: two buildings are connected by a walkway – is that a single building, or two separate ones? The algorithm’s choice may not match a human architect or surveyor.]