The World’s Heaviest Building
Tags: Cold War, History, Romania, Architecture, Construction

The story of how a Soviet satellite state undertook one of the most ambitious construction projects of the 20th century

The Romanian Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest. Source: Wikicommons

Countries have always used grand building projects to showcase their power. Throughout history, and even today, initiating and completing a grand project is one of the biggest shows of power a country could perform. The completion of such a project successfully proves two things to the world. Firstly, that the country is prosperous and it could afford such a project, and secondly, that it has the appropriate resources and technology to complete such a task.

In the case we will discuss today, it is up for debate if those two criteria were met as, in a search to show the world the greatness of his nation, Nicolae Ceaucescu, leader of the Socialist Republic of Romania, strained the nation’s resources in order to complete one of the most ambitious building projects ever. Building a palace fit for a king-like figure, a hallmark of administrative socialist buildings.

North Korea

Surprisingly enough, our story starts on the other side of the globe in the small communist nation of North Korea. During his trip into the east in 1971, Nicolae Ceaucescu met with the then-leader of North Korea, 김일성 (Anglicised: Kim Il-sung). During his visit to the country, Ceaucescu became infatuated with the nation’s architecture and decided that he wanted to mimic the style back home.

The opportunity to implement this style in the capital came about in 1977, after the powerful Vrancea earthquake. As a result of this earthquake, a lot of the capital’s buildings were damaged or destroyed. Ceaucescu decided to rebuild these buildings in the new, totalitarian, building style he saw in North Korea.

Ceaucescu and Kim Il-sung dancing during Ceaucescu’s visit to Pyongyang. Source: Youtube

Although “Project Bucharest” was expansive it was missing something. During his visit to North Korea, Ceaucescu was awestruck by the grandeur of some of the buildings. It wasn’t enough to imitate their style, he wanted to one-up it. As a result, he planned to build a gigantic building for his leadership. One that would make the people of Bucharest feel small and portray the power of the Romanian Communist Party.

Only Romanian materials

After clearing out the local area by demolishing buildings and relocating around 40,000 residents of Bucharest the area was ready for the buildings to be started, in 1984. Assigned to the planning of the behemoth was Romanian architect Anca Petrescu, helped by another 700 junior architects she designed the ‘palace’.

During the building process, only materials and objects manufactured in Romania were used. These are but a few of the items from the extensive list of materials used to construct the building:

2,000,000 tons of sand 700,000 tons of steel 500,000 tons of cement 3,500 tons of crystal

The building was initially meant to be finished in two years, through the use of ‘voluntary’ work from the Romanian populace as well as forced labour from the troops of the Romanian army, as to keep the already costly building costs a little bit cheaper. It is estimated that between 20,000 to 100,000 workers ended up working on the ‘palace’ leading to the building costs reaching just $3 billion (adjusted for inflation).

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