Core77

One of SoHo's first stores (back in the '80s, when it was still filled with artist's lofts) was a store called Think Big! where you could buy novelty items like six-foot pencils and tennis balls bigger than your torso. Since then we've always wondered what people's fascination with BIG is, and we've not yet figured it out.

The obsession with the gi-normous, of course, is only growing. So here's our look (with pictures) at three BIG things:

First up is the Russian Antonov An-225, the world's biggest cargo plane. How big? Loosely speaking, it's bigger than an Airbus A380 (see diagram); if you broke the wings off of a Boeing 737, you could fit the whole darn thing into the cargo hold. (We were going to make a joke about Russian nesting dolls, but that's, you know, low-hanging fruit.) More info here.

(diagram from Wikipedia)

Secondly we have another object with an enormous wingspan, but which doesn't actually fly: the largest-ever piece of origami made from a single (industrial-sized) sheet of paper, Jim Mockford's 215-foot, 1,750-pound origami crane, made back in the '90s. More info here.

Last but certainly not least, Hyder Consulting has announced a Cobra-Commander-like plan to build the world's biggest building; the patently absurd plan would top out at nearly four times the height of the Sears Tower in Chicago. That's right, 1600 meters, or 5,250 feet. (That last statistic is rather weird--an even mile is 5,280 feet, so why stop 30 feet short? Humility?) More info here.