Giant German Airship Hangar Transformed into Tropical Resort

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Berliners depressed by the city’s notoriously cold and gray winters need to travel mere minutes in order to escape to a lush tropical paradise where the sun always shines, the air is a balmy 77 degrees, and orchids bloom beside a wide expanse of crystal-blue water. But the coolest thing about Tropical Islands, an artificial tropical resort in the German countryside, is the fact that it was built in a repurposed airship hangar.
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The 194-million-cubic-foot structure – one of the world’s biggest buildings by volume – was originally commissioned by CargoLifter AG as a hangar for a prototype airship. When the company went bankrupt in 2002, it sold the 351-foot-high hangar to a Malaysian company called Tanjong, which repurposed the massive structure into a reproduction of a seaside village complete with a water park and the world’s largest indoor pool.

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Nearly a million visitors take advantage of a 600-foot sandy beach and careen down a nine-story waterslide that sends sliders into the pool at speeds of up to 44mph. The record-breaking resort also contains the world’s largest artificial rainforest, which is packed with over 50,000 trees in 600 varieties.

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Of course, as Inhabitat points out, maintaining all of this tropical artificiality in the middle of snowy Germany is not exactly eco-friendly – imagine the water and power bills. But it’s certainly a novel re-use for a structure that is so large as to be impractical for nearly any other purpose, and if the project does well in the long-term, other disused airship hangars around the world may follow suit.