Karl-Marx-Hof: The Longest Building In The World?

Hello! It's the 29th of March 2018, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the world's tallest building. But where is the world's longest building? I've come to Not Dubai to try and answer this important question. This is the Karl Marx Hof in the western suburbs of Vienna. It's seven storeys high, which is not very high. In fact, it's fair to say that height is not what this building does best. It also has its own hardware store, a chemist's, and some mildly interesting architectural features, such as these tasteful blue arches containing ample parking for the residents. But that's not what this building does best either. I've come down to number one Geistenergasse at the bottom end of the building to see the real party trick. From here, we're simply going to turn the corner and then walk to the other end of the building. No big deal, right? Except that here, the other end of the building is over one kilometre away. So we're going to need to speed up the film. Now, to give a bit of context, the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, is 830 metres tall. The Karl Marx Hof is 1,100 metres long. If you could stand this building on its end, you would annoy a lot of residents. So why did 1920s Vienna build such an enormous building? Well, at the end of the First World War, the Habsburg Empire was dismantled, Austria lost a lot of territory, and the economy suffered a huge downturn. Mass unemployment and poverty led to the rise of the Socialists, who came to power in 1919. They launched a programme of social reform, including the rehousing of the working population in nearly 400 new apartment complexes. This place, with its self-contained shops, schools and 1,382 apartments, was the flagship. It was politically symbolic right from the start, but by the 1930s it became pretty much literally a bastion of socialism. In 1934, during the Austrian Civil War, insurgents engaged in the revolt barricaded themselves inside the building and only surrendered after the Austrian army, the police and the Austro-fascist paramilitary Heimwehr bombarded the site with light artillery. Four years later, after the annexation of Austria, the Nazis renamed the building a Heiligenstädterhof because for some reason they weren't too keen on the original name. Luckily, it survived the war and still stands today. Spanning four separate tram stops, this must be the longest building on earth, right? Well, not quite. Some of you may have heard of a wall in a place called China, which is 8,800 kilometres long. Or, if you prefer to measure these things in terms of Austrian residential blocks, that's 8,000 Karl-Marx-Hofs. And there are other walls and fortifications around the world which are nowhere near as long as that, but are still longer than this. The US has a couple of scientific buildings which are longer because they need to do fun things like accelerating particles down a perfectly straight three-kilometre tube. And there are other structures like dams, bridges and airport terminals which are longer. But what if you wanted a building you could actually live in? What if you're looking to move home and the only thing you care about is finding the longest possible building to move into? It's with these questions in mind that I've done some extensive research. This is the Wikipedia list of the world's longest buildings. Not only did it give me almost all of the information that I've just given you, but it also lists buildings by category. And right here is what it lists as the longest residential building in the world. The apartment house on Sobonosti Avenue and Molody Street in Lutsk, Ukraine. So I went to Lutsk, Ukraine on Google Maps for budget reasons. And here's what I found. The apartment building is 1,750 metres long, but that's only if you add together both the north-south and east-west axes. And that doesn't seem quite right, because if you measure a straight line along the longest side, like we've done at the Karl Marxhof, it only comes to 850 metres. So what about the next one on the Wikipedia list? The apartment house on Kolsky Avenue and Beringer Street in Murmansk, Russia. Right, well, I'm not having that, because they've obviously measured all the way around the building in a loop, and if you were going to do the same thing at the Karl Marxhof, it would be two and a half kilometres long. In fact, the more I looked at these so-called longer buildings, the more buildings I found that weren't longer. It got to the point where I started measuring some shorter buildings as well, just in case, only to discover that they too weren't longer. In the end, I could only come to one conclusion. If you want to see the world's longest residential building, you need to come right here, to Heiligenstadt in Vienna and the Karl Marxhof. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, do let me know in the comments. Stay subscribed to the channel for more travel, transport and trekking, and I will see you soon.