The Palace of the Parliament — known during construction as Casa Poporului, the House of the People — is the largest administrative building in the world and the heaviest building on Earth. At 270 metres wide, 240 metres deep, and 86 metres tall above ground, with a further eight basement floors extending another 92 metres below, it contains 1,100 rooms, 480 chandeliers, and 35 million cubic feet of marble. It took 700 architects, 20,000 construction workers operating around the clock in shifts, and thirteen years to build.
Nicolae Ceausescu commissioned it in 1984 as the centrepiece of his grand urban replanning of Bucharest — a project that required the demolition of a fifth of the historic city centre, including churches, synagogues, and neighbourhoods that had stood for centuries. The building faces down the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism (now Bulevardul Unirii), an axis 3.5 kilometres long and 90 metres wide designed to be wider than the Champs-Elysees. Ceausescu never saw it finished: he was executed on Christmas Day 1989, eight years before the building was completed.