The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest was built in the nineteen-eighties after a design by Anca Petrescu with 700 supporting architects. Petrescu, who at the time was an architecture student, said that she got the commission by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu because her scale model was the largest.

It is the 3rd largest and the heaviest building in the world, and therefore sinks into the ground by 4 cm each year. It has 9 upper floors and 9 floors below ground. Only parts of the first underground floor can be visited, the remaining 8 underground floors are closed to the public. The building features many monumental hallways and ballrooms with designs varying between faux Baroque, neo-historicism and Soviet monumentalism.

Images (C) Mario Gagliardi, 2019