Hotelul National — the National Hotel — is a Soviet-era hotel on one of Chisinau's main avenues, a tall modernist slab whose facade reads as a straightforward grid of windows and balconies in the standard idiom of late Soviet hotel construction. It belongs to the generation of Soviet hospitality architecture that sought to project competence and modernity to foreign visitors while serving the practical requirements of a command economy's internal travel infrastructure.
In the post-Soviet period, hotels of this type across the former republics have had mixed fates — some privatised and renovated beyond recognition, others left to age in their original form. The National occupies the middle ground: recognisable as a Soviet structure in every material detail, operating in a changed city and economy. Its grid of identical rooms behind an identical grid of windows is a kind of architectural honesty that more self-conscious buildings rarely achieve.