The Government House — Casa Guvernului — is the seat of the Government of Moldova, occupying the central position on the Great National Assembly Square, the vast open plaza at the heart of Chisinau. The building was completed in 1964 as the administrative headquarters of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, a confident Soviet modernist block whose horizontal mass and regular grid of windows projects the authority of the state with characteristic restraint.
The square in front of it holds the weight of Moldovan post-Soviet history: it was here that the massive protests of 1989-1991 took place, drawing hundreds of thousands of people to demand independence from the Soviet Union. The building looks out over the same square where the flag of the Moldavian SSR was replaced and where a new republic was declared. For a structure built to house Soviet administration, it has had to absorb considerable historical irony in the decades since.