World’s Largest Periodic Table

Joondalup, Western Australia, Australia

Public art

Current – limited access

Checked by Project Big Things · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is still here, but public access is limited. Check the access notes for details before visiting.

A 662-square-metre periodic-table installation incorporated into Edith Cowan University’s Science building.

Before you stop

Do not treat Building 15 as a vehicle stopping point. Use ECU-designated visitor parking and walk to the building.

Limited access
Check the access notes for details before visiting
Check where to stop
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PLAN YOUR VISIT

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We have researched the approach, but no stopping point is cleared for direct navigation yet.

This takes you to the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

World’s Largest Periodic Table

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Site-level location · 31.7518° S, 115.7753° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

The world's largest periodic table is 662 square metres and it is a building.

Edith Cowan University built it into the facade of its Science building at Joondalup, north of Perth, and the scale is not marginal: at 662 square metres it is more than four times the size of the previous record holder, a 150-square-metre table created at Spain's University of Murcia in 2017.

The timing was deliberate. The periodic table was devised 150 years earlier by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, and 2019 was the International Year of the Periodic Table marking that anniversary – so a university celebrating the sesquicentenary by making the largest one in the world is a rather good piece of institutional showing off.

It also belongs in this catalogue for a reason worth stating. The Big Things tradition is overwhelmingly about physical objects – fruit, animals, tools – enlarged until they become landmarks. A periodic table is not an object at all. It is a diagram: an arrangement of information that exists only as a convention, and which turns out to work extremely well as architecture because it is already a grid.

Mendeleev's arrangement is also one of the genuinely great pieces of scientific thinking, predicting elements that had not yet been discovered by leaving gaps where they should be. Putting it on a wall at building scale is a defensible thing for a science faculty to do.

It is on a working university campus, which is why access is recorded as restricted.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

ECU continues to describe its Joondalup Science building as incorporating the world’s largest periodic table. ABC documented the installation as more than four times larger than the previous record-holder.

ACCESS

The World’s Largest Periodic Table covers the façade of ECU Joondalup Science Building 15. Building 15 is the pedestrian destination; visitors who drive must use ECU-designated visitor parking elsewhere on campus and follow current parking signage. Direct driving directions are withheld until a specific lawful visitor-parking coordinate is independently map-checked.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

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TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

ABC – World’s largest periodic table at WA university

ABC News · recorded 2026-08-22

News

ECU – Our campuses brochure

Edith Cowan University · recorded 2026-08-22

Official

ECU – Visitor parking

Edith Cowan University · recorded 2026-08-23

Current ECU guidance confirms designated public visitor parking across Joondalup campus.

Official

What we're still checking

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

Science Building 15 is verified as the periodic-table site, but a specific ECU visitor-parking coordinate suitable for direct driving directions has not yet been independently map-checked.

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