The Grand Hotel Bucharest — built as the Hotel Intercontinental and operating under that name until 2019 — is the tallest building in central Bucharest and among the most elegant modernist towers built in communist Romania. Designed by architects Dinu Hariton and Romeo Belea and completed in 1971, the 25-storey tower rises 84 metres above Piata Universitatii in a composition that is genuinely international in its sophistication: the curved top floors, the regular grid of the facade, and the proportioning of the whole speak the same architectural language as contemporary hotel towers in Western Europe.
Its construction was possible because Romania's communist leadership in the late 1960s actively sought foreign currency and Western business connections, making international hotel standards a state priority. The building sits at what became one of the most politically charged intersections in Romanian history: Piata Universitatii was the centre of the student and intellectual protests of 1990, the occupation of the square that followed the revolution, and the violent suppression that came with the miners' march. The hotel's upper floors looked down on all of it.