Unnecessarily Large Interior

Well, he won't bump his head on the ceiling.

"Isn't space on a space station kind of at a premium? What's the big corridor down the middle of it for?"

— Unskippable, on the opening of Vanquish

A tendency of Speculative Fiction pictures and art direction to have interiors much larger than would be needed in reality. As in what could be a large room becomes huge and cavernous. Sometimes the story tries to justify this, claiming the Phlebotinum needs this much empty space to work, but usually it's just because Bigger Is Better (or because the higher the ceiling, the more stuff there is to drop down on the escaping heroes when the building collapses).

Usually it's so big, that if it was done in live-action, it would be too expensive to do it as a set, or even architecturally impossible. Miniatures, matte backgrounds, or CGI would have to be used.

This can actually happen in nature, as spelunkers can attest, but even in Speculative Fiction art, this can be exaggerated.

Most video games with a Free Rotating Camera will have even supposedly humble cottages and claustrophobic caves that are actually huge so as to avoid the camera hitting things all the time. This is less prevalent in first-person views, much more so in third-person.

Tabletop games, where combat is played out on a grid, tend to feature buildings, furniture, and animals that are bigger than you'd expect, either to enable more different tactical movement options or to round up to the nearest number of units on the grid. This leads to phenomena such as chairs that are always spaced at least 5 feet apart from each other, horses that are 10 foot cubes, and simple peasant shacks that are 100 by 100 feet.

Note that "Unnecessarily" is in the title for a reason. If there is an actual practical need for it to be that large, it doesn't count. The Galactic Senate building, in Star Wars, is not an example, because it's obviously to hold all of the senators from the many sectors of the Republic, sort of like a sports stadium. Neither is the Real Life Vehicle Assembly Building in Florida. It's large enough to have clouds form inside it on humid days, but it does have the purpose of building rockets, which need that much space. More obvious examples can take place inside some kind of ship, where space will be at a premium—compare how even modern naval vessels will often feel cramped to people unused to them, for example.

Often associated with Gothic Cathedrals. May involve a Mile-Long Ship or even a Planet Spaceship.

Compare Absurdly Spacious Sewer. See also Bigger on the Inside.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Blame! is a manga set in a never-ending series of ridiculously large superstructures. The cause is the machines responsible for constructing the City have been doing so unguided for countless millennia. This◊ conversation is held in a "room" that encompasses roughly the entire diameter of Jupiter. Because that's where Jupiter used to be before it was swallowed up by the City, only to be consumed for building material.
• Bleach:
  • Las Noches is large enough to have its own sky, and extremely large towers. It's also literally the only building in that dimension, so it's not like they didn't have the space to do whatever they wanted.
  • Xcution hang out in an apartment building where thirty-six adjacent rooms on six different floors had the walls and ceilings between them torn out to make one giant room ("One of our members is kind of rich."). There's nothing in it except for a bar, some chairs, a couch, and a coffee table. Anything that would actually need that kind of space they do in a Pocket Dimension one of their members accesses.
• Gendo's office in Neon Genesis Evangelion is enormous, and the only thing in it is his desk. There's no practical reason for it to be this big, other than what appears to be a large Kabbalistic/occult diagram on the ceilings or walls; fanon has it that it's mainly his way of showing off.

Fanfiction

• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: When Draco, Harry, and Hermione become generals of the student armies, they are given their own private offices. Draco and Harry find them bizarrely huge, with Draco unable to think of any reason for their size other than to show off the generals' status, and Harry not even thinking of that. It doesn't occur to either of them that they might be meant to use that space to meet with their advisors, because it doesn't occur to them that they might want to have advisors. Hermione, understanding their psychology, had her officers' chairs removed for her meeting with Draco.
• Lampshaded and deconstructed in Uninvited Guests. Hueco Mundo is the size of a city. Hitsugaya points out that while it is easy for invaders to get lost, the security is terrible because there aren't enough Arrancars.
  Hitsugaya: ...has Aizen ever wondered why everyone and their mother can just walk into his fortress? [...] He's got an army the size of a football team trying to defend an area the size of a small country.

Films — Animated

• Monsters vs. Aliens:
  • Gallaxhar's ship is, for no readily apparent reason, sized to fit a nearly 50 foot tall woman. The hangar bays have giant robots that need the room but the rest of the ship has a ridiculously spacious interior despite the fact that the corridors leading to it cannot fit the robots and it's doubtful "rampage by giant woman" was taken into account when the ship was built.
  • A justified example is the monster holding facility in Area 52. It was meant to house thousands of monsters of various sizes. The "unnecessarily" part comes from the fact that it never seems to house more than a handful at any given time. It would be necessary for any time they wanted or needed to move Insectasaurus.
• The vault where the doors are stored in Monsters, Inc., which is larger than the rest of the factory put together (See here◊). Sure, there's a lot of doors, but there's also a lot of empty space. The whole structure could be at least half the size if doors were stored in the middle and not just along the walls.
• This shows up occasionally in the Disney Animated Canon films, specially fairy tale-themed features.
  • Cinderella has the King's Palace with very high ceilings in rooms and corridors. Despite the downgrade in animation, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time still show this.
• Ghost in the Shell (1995): Kim's house in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence includes several large rooms including an enormous music box-style room and a great hall that appears to be outdoors. It's left deliberately ambiguous whether it's a real place or a completely virtual world.

Films — Live-Action

• Niander Wallace's headquarters in Blade Runner 2049 is not only a building that dwarfs the nearby former HQ of the Tyrell Corporation that he bought out but is filled with mostly empty rooms with only a few staff members ever seen. In a place as crowded as future Los Angeles he shows his wealth and power by being able to afford to waste so much space.
• Taken to an extreme with Erebor in The Hobbit, where the interior seems to consist largely of bridges and platforms supported by stone colossi, presumably because there was a whole extra dimension going to waste otherwise. It really benefits Smaug, who can fly inside the dwarf hold despite being twice the size of a Boeing 747.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring:
  • The dwarven city of Khazad-dûm seems to consist of huge empty spaces with free-standing stairs on the edges and straight across. The book has mostly corridors and normal-sized rooms, with a few great halls.
  • The giant halls also prove to be a major issue when the dwarves unleash an Eldritch Abomination: the Balrog. The great halls allow it to move about with relative ease, seeing as how it's twenty times bigger than the whole Fellowship put together. The Literature of J. R. R. Tolkien suggests that the dwarves had trouble with large dragons as well: Smaug from The Hobbit being obvious, but also Scatha the Wyrm, and other cold drakes.
• Some leftovers of the Krell civilization in Forbidden Planet include rooms with empty spaces that dwarf skyscrapers.
• The cavernous catacombs in Hellboy (2004).
• Parts of the Black Fortress in Krull are jus huge empty spaces.
• The sewers in The Matrix are big enough to comfortably fly around in with airships.
• Appears in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow; apparently the director kept requesting that the backgrounds be bigger, and since everything in the background was Chroma Keyed, this was possible.
• Occurs throughout the Star Wars franchise:
  • Huge, tall shafts in both Death Stars in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. They're practically Bottomless Pits. The first film's Novelisation by Alan Dean Foster attempts to Hand Wave them as being part of the Death Star's ventilation system.
  • The cavernous core of Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. Note that if you wanted to have an actual "Cloud City" in a gas giant's (or rather Venus-like) atmosphere, this would be the way to go — basically, you would have the whole city as one huge airship floating far above the surface with little work needed to maintain it (and without explosive decompression/implosive? compression if you get a rupture in the hull, plus not having to use such strong materials in the first place). Obviously though, Cloud City from SW wasn't built like this (open views and active propulsion to maintain altitude) ...
  • The Bridge of the Republic cruisers in the first Clone Wars series.
  • The hangar bay next to the Senate building (Where Anakin and Obi-Wan land after rescuing Palpatine) in Revenge of the Sith.
  • In Rogue One, Darth Vader's fortress on Mustafar has a huge, all-black chamber with a central platform suspended over a Bottomless Pit... where a single guest is entertained for a two-minute conversation. It is justified, considering its Darth Vader. See the Real Life folder. Men with power and wealth build very big things
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture features a massive two-story recreation room, in contrast to the Original Series' tiny rec room (which was a redress of the briefing room set), just so they could fit the entire ship's crew in there (over 400 people) for a mission briefing. Usually, such mission data is provided to the crew over the intraship P.A., though in most cases the ship is already on active duty. (Most of the extras that made up the crew were either fans of the show or family of the cast and crew, and their inclusion in the movie was a big "Thank you" to them.) The middle of the rec room's floor was raised, to represent the curvature of the underside of the saucer section.
  • Starfleet ships in the reboot Star Trek movies. The use of real world locations like the National Ignition Facility as filming sets results in the impression that the ship interiors are mostly empty space. Jefferies Tubes have been replaced by catwalks. The Enterprise even has a huge multi-story atrium that serves no apparent purpose other than Rule of Cool (and a place for people to be tossed around when the ship goes out of control).
• In The Great Dictator Hynkel's office is gigantic. He uses this to his advantage by arranging for Napaloni to cross this massive space as psychological intimidation. Instead Napaloni comes in the room from a door right behind Hynkel's desk.
• KGB General Gogol's office in the James Bond movies.
• The interior of MONARCH's admittedly gigantic flying-wing Airborne Aircraft Carrier in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) was clearly shot inside a regular building set full of lavishly-sized corridors, rooms and ceilings. Its bridge alone is larger than your average apartment. It's unlikely that any Real Life utilitarian aircraft, and military ones in particular, would waste so much space on creature comforts.

Literature

• From Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything has Agrajag's shrine to Arthur Dent, which looks just like it was carved out of the inside of a mountain. Because it was.
• In Mary Gentle's Orthe series, Golden architecture in general seems to have been made of this trope, which is made much more explicit in the second book, Ancient Light. Like H. P. Lovecraft (whom see), Gentle uses 'cyclopean' in reference to this kind of architecture. The Emperor's throne room, seen in flashback, is poorly lit, so that someone standing in it "cannot see how high the walls are, or how far above is the ceiling of this great hall." It contains "great pillars; yards in circumference, vanishing up into darkness".
• Paul's throne room on Arrakis in Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah is unnecessarily large for the sole purpose of intimidating his visitors. The author also describes how the room gradually gets smaller as you approach the throne to create the illusion that Paul is larger than he is.
• Whenever H. P. Lovecraft uses the term 'cyclopean', look out for this trope. Used this in flashback in "The Shadow Out of Time", with bonus Bottomless Pits.
• In GRR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, the Alchemists' Guild has a grand hall filled with green wildfire torches. Tyrion notes that the hall is only used to impress visitors and all the torches will be extinguished as soon as he leaves.
  • Also a staple of Harrenhal's design, a white elephant and the castle version of The Millstone. It was built to be in every way larger and most impressive then all other castles. Its kitchens are said to be as large as Winterfell's great hall, and its great hall large enough to entertain an army. Its justified as the ruins were originally a massive fortress city for the Harren the Black to lord the Riverlands in, and can sustain a large army for years.
• Discworld:
  • In Interesting Times, the throne room of the Agatean emperor is described as indicating to all viewers "look at me, I can afford to waste all this space".
  • This is lampshaded in descriptions of Death's residence, which the Anthropomorphic Personification forgot to make the same size on the inside and the outside. Death made the rooms in his house into mile-long cubes (from the outside it's quite a normal size for a house), but because this is such a mind-boggling size for a room, humans like Albert (Death's housekeeper) mentally blot out the excess space, arranging the necessary furnishings on little patches of floor the size of normal rooms. As Death's residence isn't a part of the real world, this mental block works so well that Albert can step through the door of Death's office and instantly appear on the patch of carpet in the vast chamber's center, never actually setting foot on the intervening half-mile of floor.
  • In Lords and Ladies, it is noted that Lancre Castle, home to a small royal family and handful of servants, is about the same size as Lancre Town, which contains a hundred cottages, and no-one really knows why.
• An Imperial officer in the X-Wing Series meets the current head of the Empire in her quarters and lampshades this when he sees that they are both spacious and quite spartan, not ornate or filled with expensive stuff like he'd have thought. He then realizes that on Coruscant, a densely packed City Planet, having a lot of wasted space is a good way to show off your wealth, power, and prestige.
• Many of the House on Ash Tree Lane's rooms in House of Leaves, notably the Great Hall (of which none the walls except the one with the entrance door in it were ever actually reached) and the Spiral Staircase (which, at its longest, would have burrowed clean through the earth and extended 3,000 feet out the other side had the House not been an Eldritch Location that was Bigger on the Inside). Especially since the rooms are entirely featureless and have no discernible purpose, so even the narrowest corridors are technically unnecessarily large.
• A mild example in Mission of Honor. Manticorians boarding captured Solarian ships are impressed — not favorably — by the size of some interior spaces, which are half again what Manty warship designers provide for the same function. But the Solarians haven't fought a real war for centuries.
  • Note that this mainly applies to larger ships (superdreadnoughts, dreadnoughts, maybe battlecruisers), since the Battle Fleet has a more ceremonial/intimidation role. The Frontier Fleet has engaged in numerous localized conflicts, which is why its (smaller) ships are actually more cutting edge. Still no comparison to Manticore, though.
• In a similar vein, alien characters in Star Trek novels are often struck by how roomy, well-lit, and carpeted Federation vessels are. Reactions vary, but the visitors tend to be either a) amused by the humans wasting their space and power on such things, b) relieved that they're doing that and not putting more guns on the ships instead, or c) worried that they might stop.
• The Alternate History novel Fatherland briefly shows us Berlin as envisaged by Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer, as described in Real Life below. (Apparently they overcame the logistical and engineering issues somehow or other.) The protagonist, a war veteran turned homicide detective who's becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Third Reich, hangs a bitter lampshade on the fact that his government is blatantly Compensating for Something.

Live-Action TV

• The underground chambers on Epsilon III in Babylon 5 were a deliberate homage to the Krell machine in Forbidden Planet.
• The secret underground bunkers of the Genii on Stargate Atlantis.
• In the Doctor Who story The Masque of Mandragora, Sarah Jane stumbles upon the Doctor's "boot cupboard", a massive room which has one pair of boots in it. When Sarah points out how absurdly large it is, the Doctor replies, "I've seen bigger boot cupboards."
  • Various episodes have demonstrated, either in passing or as the focal point of the story, that the TARDIS isn't just (infamously) Bigger on the Inside, but ridiculously, unnecessarily huge on the inside.
• In The X-Files episode "The Walk", a hospitalized soldier attempts to boil himself alive in a hydrotherapy tank to escape an astral projection that's been tormenting him. The hydrotherapy room's cavernous ceiling disappears off into the darkness and the floorspace could have matched off against a small cathedral, even though there's only one hydrotherapy tank (which is essentially a smallish hot tub). The hospital is otherwise completely normal in appearance and the Monster of the Week has neither the means nor motive to distort the room itself, so this can probably be chalked up to Rule of Creepy.

Mythology

• Valhalla, Odin's hall for fallen warriors, has 540 gates, each one big enough for 800 warriors to walk in shoulder to shoulder.

Tabletop Games

• The interior of most Imperial vessels in Warhammer 40,000, or at least the parts where important people are, resemble cathedrals. Really, really big cathedrals, with Gothic Punk skulls and eagles everywhere.
  • On Holy Terra there is the Eternity Gate, a colossal chamber leading to the Sanctum Imperialis, where the Emperor Himself sits atop the Golden Throne. The Gate lies at the end of a mile-long aisle, the gargoyle-covered roof hangs half a mile overhead past clouds of incense and swarms of fluttering Cherubim, and the thousand steps leading to the portal take pilgrims through a forest of banners and standards from warriors over the past ten millennia. The Eternity Gate itself is large enough to accommodate Humongous Mecha, while the Imperial Palace it stands in covers all of the Himalayas.
    • Eternity Gate is guarded by the two Humongous Mecha — two Warlord Titans from the famous Legio Ignatum stand an eternal vigil at its sides. And Adeptus Custodes unit standing guard in the Gate's hallway is said to consist of 10 000 super-supermen. You need all that place to just fit all that forces.
  • Holy Terra as a whole is made of this trope, mostly. The Ecclesiarchal Palace, for example (contextually equivalent to the St Peter's Basilica example above) covers an entire continent (Australasia, to be precise) with a single contiguous structure. It's avoided by a number of other structures, such as the Hall of the Astronomicon, which is what you get when you hollow out and structurally reinforce Mt Everest, then fill it with cells and living quarters for the most powerful telepaths humanity can provide. The actual Hall itself takes most of the available volume inside the mountain, and is a single room stuffed, from top to bottom, with psykers, life-support systems and psychic amplifiers.
  • It's invoked in both fluff and the literature whenever you have the POV of an average human in an Adeptus Astartes vessel/building: everything looks to be oversized, too tall and too wide and just generally too big... Then you remember it was built to scale for a genetically engineered Super-Soldier sub-race who stand 8 or so feet tall before putting on Power Armor that's also about five and a half feet wide at the pauldrons. The oversized nature is one of necessity, and several passages show the opposite end of the spectrum, Space Marines (both in armor and out) struggling with the "cramped" sections that would be minor inconveniences for normal people. Then again, just as often this trope gets shown by having the Space Marines casually navigating places that really shouldn't be designed with them in mind - a recurring joke in the fanbase is that they Can't Use Stairs without jetpacks or teleportation.
• Most of the seat-of-power buildings for the five Great Houses in BattleTech tend to be absurdly large ^note though not all of them — canon illustrations of the chambers of Parliament for the Free Worlds League suggest that it's not all that much bigger than the real-life chambers for the United Kingdom's House of Commons to show the grandeur and massive egos of those five individuals who claim the title of First Lord of the Star League. However, special mention has to be made of the throne room for the Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth. It's big. How big, you ask? big enough to accommodate two Griffin BattleMechs as a permanant bodyguard, one on each side of the Archon's throne. ^note For those not conversant with the BattleTech universe, a Griffin is somewhere around 10 meters (give or take) high, and possessing enough weaponry that just one of those two machines could level the entire throne room in one or two salvoes. The security clearance process for those MechWarriors chosen for guard duty must be brutal. One novel actually features a battle inside the throne room as hostile mechs enter the room and begin shooting it out with the guarding mechs!

Video Games

• Half-Life:
  • The Citadel from Half-Life 2. Although it does hold Striders, Gunships, Razor Trains and other tools of oppression, most of what you see are colossal empty rooms with no discernible purpose.
  • The Black Mesa facility is very overbuilt, and features a wealth of Bottomless Pits and absurdly large rooms of dubious utility, particularly in the places the tram-lines run through, and deserves special mention for its truly gargantuan bio-dome enclosures and numerous cavernous sewers. Black Mesa is a decommissioned ICBM launch facility: it's probable that, similar to the rocket hangars at Cape Canaveral, all the huge amounts of unused space in the building were once used for storing enormous atomic missiles.
  • In Half-Life: Blue Shift the training level for the security guards (apparently one must get used to the body armor) is half a mile long, easy. For as large as Black Mesa is, if you map out the facility◊ (warning: HUGE image), you'll notice some interesting things; for instance, the big sludge pit in "Blast Pit" is mere feet away, on the other side of a wall, from the test chamber where everything goes wrong.
• The Aperture Science Enrichment Centre in Portal. The test chambers are multiple stories tall, and the already unnecessarily large room that houses GLaDOS is in the center of a yet larger room whose dimensions are too great to see to the other side of. Then in Portal 2 it's revealed that's only one part of Aperture Science Facility as a whole. The main testing area is a massive modular series of ever shifting panels connected by catwalks and lifts, containing manufacturing facilities and assembly plants for the testing chambers, as well as a nuclear reactor. The Incinerator, which was just a hole in the ground in the first game, is revealed to be the size of a cathedral. The maintenance tunnels are massive, and the lower portion of the enrichment center is filled with layer upon layer of abandoned "Science Spheres" (the precursors of the modular Test Chambers), stacked one on top of the other in 9 colossal shafts. They even use enormous hatches the size of a small house to block off perfectly ordinary doors (though that last part was just a visual gag).
• Everything the Forerunners ever built in the Halo series.
• The underground lab the "Hollow Bastion" area of Kingdom Hearts II. There are large unfurnished rooms scattered around the hallway which seem to serve no purpose whatsoever. In the same game, Organization XIII's castle in The World that Never Was. Sora does not come across a single room of any practical purpose in his route through the castle, almost all of which have incredibly high ceilings and open areas, and most of them seem to be just places for Nobodies to spawn and attack Sora. Even the elevator is needlessly large, and there is no object in the castle which requires such an elevator to transport. In Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, it is shown that the castle has some practical rooms such as bedrooms for each member as well as a library and computer room, but no explanation was ever given for the large, open rooms otherwise.
• In Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame, level 11, the second temple level, is built around an extremely high room. How high is it? After opening the level exit, to reach it one must make a running jump across the room, sending a loose tile plummeting 21 floors down to weight down a switch. This is after climbing floor by floor up from the bottom and passing over the room's ceiling.
• You see this kind of thing everywhere in Second Life, in part because realistically-scaled rooms and corridors wreak havoc on camera position.
• This happens more than once in the Thief series.
  • In Thief: The Dark Project:
  • In "Lord Bafford's Manor", the two-story high atrium. It gives the archers clear, protected shooting, though.
  • In "Down in the Bonehoard", the Halls of Echoing Repose are built in the shape of huge hexagonal light wells, the walls of which are tombs.
  • In "Assassins", the atrium of Ramirez' mansion is the size of a ballroom.
  • In "The Sword", the light well containing the sword itself. Arguably a Justified Trope, since the whole mission is a test to see if Garrett should be hired to steal the Eye. The area in which the Eye is located ismercury somewhat similar to the area around the sword — a levitating object with enemies guarding it below, but which is accessible from above.
  • The Thief Gold version of "The Sword", the Brobdignag area (doesn't appear in the Dark Project version).
  • In "The Mage Towers", each of the four elemental towers has a ballroom-size or better area on the first floor above ground level. This is particularly noticeable in the Water Tower (in which the space is largely flooded and almost empty) and the Air Tower (which has gigantic air shafts that act as elevators, in addition to the oversized area previously mentioned).
• Frankly, a building's importance in World of Warcraft can be measured by how large its interior is. Of course, even the materials used are larger then life. How were those goblins able to lift that screwdriver?◊
  • Some of the halls in Utgarde Pinnacle, which are about 2 stories tall for no apparent reason, and Naxxramas, which has several unnecessarily huge rooms. While most instances are larger than the space they should be located is, Naxxramas deserves a special mention for completely breaking all semblance of suspicion of disbelief. In order to fit all the 4 wings inside it, it has to be about 10 times bigger on the inside than the outside.
    • The final room in the Spider Wing takes the cake: A massive cylinder several times the height of the exterior building with no exits beyond the hole in the wall you enter it through.
  • Many parts of Icecrown Citadel fall into this category, too, with the Forge of Souls set in a huge cavern that seems to house only a sparse couple of catwalks. Icecrown has the excuse of being built on a giant glacier that the majority of which sits below sea level in a huge rift. Arthas built his entire metal citadel to cover the damn thing. The players won't even truly see a quarter of the citadel's full interior.
  • Shadowfang Keep is almost quaint by how small and cramped it is compared to other examples in the game. It also demonstrates why this trope is employed so much; due to how small some areas are, it's possible for the larger player characters like Tauren and Draenei to get stuck in the level geometry.
• Ragnarok Online has several dungeons whose size feels as if solely so they can be treated as a dungeon, even with Bigger on the Inside being a norm due to the game's artstyle. Examples:
  • Amatsu Dungeon first floor is depicted as a maze of Japanese style tatami rooms, that makes players wonder who ever need that many tatami rooms. How huge is it? Well, there are small rooms and large rooms, and one small room alone is large enough to contain 432 player characters in it (it is 18 x 24 cells wide, and each player occupy 1 cell). The bigger room obviously can contain more. There are 80 rooms in that floor.
  • The Culvert Dungeon is a sewer that's 4 floors deep.
  • Nameless Island is an eerie map full of zombies that features the Cursed Abbey Dungeon, an abandoned abbey that's so big, the abbey has a garden (the farming kind, not the flower kind!) and for a reason probably tied to the curse, a prison, inside it. And it's located in an island far from most civilization areas (in fact, this is considered one of the most remote dungeon in the game) which can make you wonder why would anyone need an abbey this big when there's not many people around.
  • The Clock Tower Dungeon is 4 stories high, and 4 stories deep. While a high clock tower makes sense, no real reason is ever given for why it also has a 4 stories deep underground tunnels and chambers. They're kinda just there.
• Super Robot Wars occasionally will have indoor missions, with fortresses or space stations that have room enough for whole squads of Humongous Mecha to all fly in. A particularly egregious example is in Super Robot Wars Destiny, where the final mission takes place inside, and the game lets you choose as your battleship for the mission the Battle 7 from Macross 7: A transforming Cool Starship that stands 1400 meters tall (about 200 meters short of a mile), and it still has room to either fly or walk.
• The browser-based MMO Travians allows players to buy and furnish houses of ever-increasing size (sometimes at considerable real-money expense). Since the only items of furniture that have a practical effect are beds, Roman baths and seating, most of the available houses are impractically large.
• Bowser's Galaxy Generator in Super Mario Galaxy 2. Okay, galaxies are massive places, but considering the entire final level/galaxy takes place in what's maybe about 1% of the castle space, it's fairly well under this trope. And this backdrop castle is big enough the planets in the level each have their own gravity and orbit.
• Ship and station interiors in Star Trek Online are several times larger than what appeared on any of the shows. The developers claim it's necessary for proper camera control to work.
• Many tombs and dungeons in the Tomb Raider series.
• The interiors of the Collector vessel in Mass Effect 2 seem like they're a lot larger than necessary. Shepard even theorizes the reason for this is the Collectors intend to "collect" every human on Earth.
  • The Collector Base seen at the end of the game makes the vessel look comparatively miniscule, and the final chamber is absolutely massive. Justified: it's where they're making a new Reaper.
• In Dragon Age, the ruins of ancient civilizations like the Tevinter Imperium and pre-Blight dwarves are enormous, with towering spires or soaring vaulted ceilings (Fort Drakon, a former Tevinter outpost, is easily 10 times taller than anything else in Denerim). Fereldan and Orzammar architecture of places people currently live tends to be much smaller, to the point of claustrophobic. It does reinforce the theme of Thedas' past being much more magical and High Fantasy than the present.
  • Most of the old Tevinter buildings in Dragon Age II are also quite massive.
• Touhou Project: Strictly, this is an unnecessarily large exterior, but the garden of Hakugyokurou in the Netherworld is well over 1000 kilometers long. Luckily, the gardener is capable of superhuman speed. The Scarlet Devil Mansion's library is also known to be quite large (and Bigger on the Inside), but whether it actually qualifies as this trope is unclear.
• Dead Space 2: Given that it is based on space station you would think building space would at a premium, not so for the Church Of Unitology, who have large richly decorated rooms that hardly anyone would ever see. It does show how much power the Church has to have a place of worship bigger than an entire street of houses.
• Tristram Cathedral was dark and claustrophobic in Diablo. In Diablo III, it looks like one giant cavern, with the player running around on rooftops.
• Played for laughs in The Fancy Pants Adventure: World 3, where the king's bathtub is ridiculously enormous (king-sized, of course), being tall as the entire stage you're in.
• Many locations in Star Wars: The Old Republic are guilty of this trope.
• Most rooms in P.N.03.
• In Saints Row IV, Zinyak's flagship has interior passages big enough for the Saints' own decently-sized spaceship to fly around in with room to spare.
• In Warframe, both Corpus and Grinner starships have absurdly large interior passageways, though part of that comes from them being at least a kilometer long. Even the smallest corridor in a Corpus vessel is large enough to drive a small truck through, and seemingly Bottomless Pits are common. Gameplay wise, the hugeness is justified to prevent the third person camera from freaking out and to allow Le Parkour.
• Vanquish takes place aboard a giant space station, and the middle has a corridor so big that shuttles the size of battleships barely fill up half the diameter.
• The airplane from the third case in Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. The passenger seating is incredibly roomy, even given that it's first class, with a wide aisle and high ceiling. Then there is a lounge below, also spacious and high-ceilinged with a separate inflight shop. Below that is a cargo hold, and the distance from the top of the stairs to the floor is enough to kill a man.
• In Sierra Ops Episode 2, the interior of the Neo Hampshire space station is enormous. Its maintenance corridors are spacious enough to be patrolled by squadrons of Exoframes, and its cavernous main hanger can hold a 1,200-meter dreadnought with plenty of room to spare.

Webcomics

• Gunnerkrigg Court:
  • The dormitory buildings for Year 8 students are reasonably-sized — but they are located inside another building, so much larger that the floor, ceiling, and walls are all shrouded in darkness.
  • The room Antimony moves into after her father returns is huge enough that four panels are devoted to Kat growing from a tiny speck as she travels the length of the unadorned corridor-like room to the tiny portion at the end that's actually being used. Although it's speculated that there is a practical reason for this: that her father chose it to psychologically isolate her and discourage visitors or her from leaving. Kat's first words on reaching her?
  Kat: Why is this stupid room so big?!
• The Hall of Dworin from Irregular Webcomic!
• DM of the Rings : I'm going to need a lot more graph paper
• Schlock Mercenary has a story arc where the current employer of Tagon's Toughs is the Oafan ambassador, whose current space station is as large as a planet, is big enough to stuff the planet Mars, and has a docking area big enough to dock battleplates, the largest spaceships the U.N. has. How many battleplates could dock inside? "All of them."
  • The can-shaped habitat has 2 sideways hurricanes powered by Coriolis forces.
• Goblins likes this trope very much. Huge interiors can be found in basically any dungeon.

Real Life

• Gothic cathedrals in general. Many cathedrals and indeed many old-world religious structures have this characteristic as the sponsors, architects and craftsmen, seeing their work as personal sacrifice or symbols of God's vast power, tended to go all-out. Some rulers also built these structures as a show of wealth, and would also be motivated to make them as big as possible.
  • The Seville Cathedral; built as a monument to Seville's wealth (read: for no other purpose other than showing off), its central nave is somewhere around the 115 meters x 76 meters x 42 meters tall!
  • St. Peter's Basilica in Rome has a dome that's 42 meters in diameter. The rest of the church is... larger. It is the largest Christian church in the world and it's said that if its roof were to be removed, the second-largest church could be lowered inside, and the roof put back in place. The main reason for its size was to surpass the Pantheon (see below).
• The Roman Empire positively adored this trope. As the first hardcore users of the monumental arch, the dome, concrete and other innovations that allowed for construction of mega-structures, they loved to show off their power by building structures with massively spacious interiors. Buildings like the Baths of Caracalla, the Pantheon and Hagia Sophia were designed specifically to awe people with vast, open, interior spaces. The Gothic Cathedral architecture mentioned above was itself inspired by Roman architecture.
• Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had his visitors cross an excessively-large room to meet him as a psychological intimidation tactic a la Gendo's office.
  • So did Adolf Hitler. In fact, if we mentioned all the dictators, kings, and Corrupt Corporate Executives who use or used the tactic, we'd seriously be here all day.
• Among the structures planned for Hitler's new German capital (a completely rebuilt Berlin to be named "World Capital Germania") included a dome many times larger than any ever built. How it would be built was never fully engineered. The central dome of the Volkshalle was theorized to produce acoustics that would either render any speech unintelligible or magnify a speaker's voice to deafening levels, and would have been large enough to produce its own weather systems and indoor rain as the breathing and perspiration of its occupants precipitated. Since Berlin was built on swampland, the whole building would have sunk and/or collapsed under its own weight, but Hitler, being Hitler, decided to ignore this fact.^note Hitler's chief architect Albert Speer, as a test of the Berlin soil's ability to hold large structures, had a nearly 13,000 ton concrete cylinder built called the "Schwerbelastungskörper" (heavy load-bearing body) in 1942, to measure how far it would sink into the ground. If it sank less than 6cm, the ground would be suitable for the gigantic buildings Hitler wanted. By the time measurements were stopped in 1944, it had sunk 19cm. After the war, the Allies wanted to destroy the cylinder so the ground could be used for new buildings, but it was too big to destroy without use of explosives and that would've damaged the nearby railroad tracks, so the Schwerbelastungskörper remains to this day. Similarly, the new Reich Chancellery was built to almost comical dimensions, intended to impress visitors in the way parodied in The Great Dictator. Also planned was a ridiculously huge triumphal arch, more than triple the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris...with dwarfing the French arch being the sole purpose for its size.
• The Leipzig Market Hall has two giant 68-meter diameter domes on top of an otherwise very basic, albeit large, hangar. Apparently they constituted a novel solution to the architectural problem of holding up such a large roof.
• Not to be outdone, Stalin planned the Palace of the Soviets to have a domed audience chamber of similar scale to the Volkshalle, but the exterior structure was to be even larger, with the dome surmounted by a skyscraper as big as the Empire State Building, with that topped by a statue of Lenin as big as the Statue of Liberty. This project never got further than a huge hole in Moscow before defeating the Wehrmacht became a greater priority, and the project died with Stalin. Also like the Volkshalle, such a structure was pretty much impossible to construct, especially on Stalin's chosen site, the bank of the Moskva River.
• Chuggaaconroy's closet is as big as the ones from numerous celebrities. Stephen Georg was utterly shocked when he saw it for the first time.
• On a smaller scale, some of the critics of McMansions point out the penchant of their builders for this trope, and the impracticality of it.
• The Museum Universum Bremen has an oversized chair and table. They are upscaled to show adults how toddlers perceive regular furniture.

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