Palace of the ParliamentPalatul Parlamentului

History

Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered construction to begin on 25 June 1984, razing a historic quarter of Bucharest — including churches and thousands of homes — to clear the site, and put 28-year-old Anca Petrescu in charge of a design team of some 700 architects. Thirteen years and an estimated one million cubic meters of Romanian marble and wood later, the building was still unfinished when the regime fell in the 1989 revolution, and much of it remains so today: of its 1,100 rooms, only around 400 have ever been completed. At 365,000 square meters it's the second-largest administrative building on Earth after the Pentagon, and by weight — roughly 4.1 billion kilograms — the heaviest building of any kind in the world. It now houses both chambers of Romania's Parliament, a constitutional court, and several museums, alongside vast stretches of empty, half-finished hallway.