Palace of the Parliament

The Palace of the Parliament (Romanian: Palatul Parlamentului), initially designed during Communist times as the People's House (Casa Poporului) or (less frequently used) the House of the Republic (Casa Republicii), is the seat of the Parliament of Romania, located atop Dealul Spirii in Bucharest, the national capital. The Palace reaches a height of 84 m (276 ft), is 92 m (302 ft) deep underground, has a floor area of 365,000 m (3,930,000 sq ft) and a volume of 2,550,000 m (90,000,000 cu ft). The Palace of the Parliament is the heaviest building in the world, weighing about 4,098,500 tonnes (9.04 billion pounds), and is the largest civilian administrative building in the world, the largest military administrative building being the yet larger US Pentagon (cf. List of largest buildings). The Independent described it as the third best building in the world, "hideous but also sort of impressive."

The building was designed and supervised by chief architect Anca Petrescu, with a team of approximately 700 architects, and constructed over a period of 13 years (1984–1997) in modernist Neoclassical architectural forms and styles, with socialist realism in mind. The Palace was ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989), the president of Communist Romania.