December 10, 2025
All buildings, zero scroll
Map of All the Buildings in the World
The world’s buildings mapped—but users scream about bugs, missing towers, and weird shapes
TLDR: TUM released a global 3D map of 2.75 billion buildings to aid urban, inequality, and climate studies. The community loved the idea but roasted the rollout: a laggy viewer, Firefox scrolling fail, missing coverage, and odd shapes sparked a lively accuracy vs. expectations showdown.
Germany’s TUM dropped the GlobalBuildingAtlas, a 3D world map with a jaw‑dropping 2.75 billion building models, meant to illuminate urbanization, poverty, and even climate risks. It’s slick, it’s science, it’s huge… and the internet immediately went full chaos. Some tried the viewer and found it “hugged to death”—the classic meme for a site overwhelmed by popularity—while others on Firefox couldn’t even scroll. One exasperated user blasted, “How does someone screw up CSS,” referring to the website’s styling code that, you know, makes pages actually move.
Then came the accuracy brawls. A Panama local shouted “not all buildings” after finding no coverage in a high‑rise district, another said the atlas struggles with mega‑tall icons like the Burj Khalifa and Merdeka 118, and a neighbor reported their block as “very weird shapes.” Fans countered that this is a research tool—built from satellite images since 2019 with 30x finer resolution than older datasets, plus special effort to include often‑ignored regions—and you can grab the raw data on GitHub to dig deeper.
Amid the pile‑on, the big picture still glows: agencies want this for disaster planning, and the “building volume per capita” metric could expose inequality. But online, the mood is pure popcorn: Is this the ultimate city map—or Schrödinger’s skyscraper, there and not there?
Key Points
- •TUM released GlobalBuildingAtlas, a 3D global map of 2.75 billion buildings derived from satellite images since 2019.
- •The dataset offers about 30 times finer resolution than comparable databases and surpasses the previous global dataset of ~1.7 billion buildings.
- •A methods paper detailing the map was published on December 1 in Earth System Science Data.
- •The interactive map provides building placement and elevation; data and code are available on GitHub.
- •The dataset supports socioeconomic, environmental, and climate analyses, and agencies like the German Aerospace Center plan to use it for risk assessment.