Though the towers and all decorative elements are of stone masonry, attracting the attention of visitors, most of the walls, including the façades of the nave and choir, actually consist of visible brick.

As such, it lays claim to the rank of second- to fourth-largest, after San Petronio Basilica in Bologna and together with Frauenkirche in Munich and St. Mary's Church in Gdańsk.

At 143 m (469 ft) it gives a panoramic view of Ulm in Baden-Württemberg and Neu-Ulm in Bavaria and, in clear weather, a vista of the Alps from Säntis to the Zugspitze.

[citation needed] The women of the Ulmer Assemblage would also make their contributions to the foundation works, something memorialized by 17th and 18th century composer Barbara Kluntz.

It was Parler's plan to construct the Ulm Minster's 150 meters (490 ft) spire, the highest of any church.

Himself dying in 1471, he completed the vaulting over the nave and constructed the sacrament house, finally making the church a basilica according to Ulrich's plan.

In 1477, Matthäus Böblinger took over and made changes to the plans of the church but especially to the main tower and in doing so caused the church's first major structural threat: the heavy vaults of the wide aisles and high nave burdened the columns with too much lateral force at different heights.

A new master builder, Burkhart Engelberg of Augsburg, tackled the structural damage by reinforcing the foundation of the west tower and demolishing the heavy aisle vaults and replacing them with vaults of half widths, which afforded rows of additional columns dividing each of the aisles in two.

The suspension of the building process was due to a variety of factors which were political and religious, like the Reformation, as well as economic, since the discovery of the Americas during the voyages of Christopher Columbus 1492–1504, the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to India in 1497–99, and Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe led to an epochal shift in trade routes and commodities.

At last, the main steeple was completed, changing the available medieval plan in making it about ten metres taller.

(kg) While the walls of the choir, the side aisles and the tower were constructed of brick, the upper levels of the nave are ashlar, using sandstone from Isny im Allgäu.